Refuse to be Human — !Mediengruppe Bitnik

Refuse to be Human is a simple web extension which changes your browser’s user agent to that of the Yandex bot. Yandex bot is a web crawler which surfs the web extensively to build a searchable index for the Yandex search engine (making it - together with Google bot - one of the most influential Internet users. Only what it sees is indexed and can later be found by other users through Yandex search, the most popular search engine in Russia). By changing your settings to match those of Yandex bot, you become one of thousands of Yandex web crawlers browsing the web to index its contents.

Surfing the web as Yandex bot gives you access to what is referred to as the grey web, a layer of content only visible to bots. In some cases it might give you access to websites and archives that are usually hidden behind a paywall. Because while the website owner will present the regular user with a login page, they will give web crawlers access to their full archive in order for it to be represented in Yandex’s search results.

Step 1:
💻 Install the web extension

Step 2:
📡 To start surfing as Yandex bot, click on the new icon in the browser toolbar

Step 3:
🏄🏾‍♀️ Surf your favourite websites

Step 4:
🌐 Check RYBN's Double Negative Captchas to see if you pass the bot test.
https://1000scores.com/portfolio-items/rybn-double-negative-captchas/
(You might have to take the test twice until it works.)

Step 5:
🖱 Also download 1000 Bots, the addon that enables you to surf the webs as Googlebot
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/1000-bots/
You can compare the two bot-experiences

Refuse to be human is an art piece by !Mediengruppe Bitnik commissioned by Transmediale Berlin.

The source code [1] for refuse to be human is free software and published under the GNU GPLv3.

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[1] source code: https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/data/code/1000_bots_webextension.zip