I don’t like cloudflare but it’s nice that they allow people to stop AI scrapping if they want to
CloudFlare has become an Internet protection racket and I’m not happy about it.
they’re good at protecting websites but damn, having a company being MITM feels so wrong
It’s been this from the very beginning. But they don’t fit the definition of a protection racket as they’re not the ones attacking you if you don’t pay up. So they’re more like a security company that has no competitors due to the needed investment to operate.
Uh, are they admitting they are trying to circumvent technological protections setup to restrict access to a system?
Isn’t that a literal computer crime?
No-no, see. When an AI-first company does it, it’s actually called courageous innovation. Crimes are for poor people
See: Facebook/Meta
puts on evil hat CloudFlare should DRM their protection then DMCA Perplexity and other US based “AI” companies to oblivion. Side effect, might break the Internet.
Worth it.
Gee that’s a real removed it ain’t it perplexity?
They do have a point though. It would be great to let per-prompt searches go through, but not mass scrapping
I believe a lot of websites don’t want both though
Does it not need to be scraped to be indexed, assuming it’s semi-typical RAG stuff?
I assume their script does some search engine stuff like query google or bing and then “scrap” the links they go on
Some selenium stuff
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Can’t believe I’ve lived to see Cloudflare be the good guys
They’re not. They’re using this as an excuse to become paid gatekeepers of the internet as we know it. All that’s happening is that Cloudflare is using this to menuever into position where they can say “nice traffic you’ve got there - would be a shame if something happened to it”.
AI companies are crap.
What Cloudflare is doing here is also crap.
And we’re cheering it on.
they cant get their ai to check a box that says “I am not a robot”? I’d think thatd be a first year comp sci student level task. And robots.txt files were basically always voluntary compliance anyway.
Cloudflare actually fully fingerprints your browser and even sells that data. Thats your IP, TLS, operating system, full browser environment, installed extensions, GPU capabilities etc. It’s all tracked before the box even shows up, in fact the box is there to give the runtime more time to fingerprint you.
Yeah and the worst part is it doesn’t fucking work for the one thing it’s supposed to do.
The only thing it does is stop the stupidest low effort scrapers and forces the good ones to use a browser.
Recaptcha v2 does way more than check if the box was checked.
Here comes the ridiculous offer to buy Google chrome with money they don’t have: easy delicious scraping directly from the user source
You could say they are… Perplexed.
It’s insane that anyone would side with Cloudflare here. To this day I cant visit many websites like nexusmods just because I run Firefox on Linux. The Cloudflare turnstile just refreshes infinitely and has been for months now.
Cloudflare is the biggest cancer on the web, fucking burn it.
It happened to me before until I did a Google search. It was my VPN web protection. It was too " over protective".
Check your security settings, antivirus and VPN
Linux and Firefox here. No problem at all with Cloudflare, despite having more or less as much privacy preserving add-on as possible. I even spoof my user agent to the latest Firefox ESR on Linux.
Something’s muat be wrong with your setup.
I suspect a lot of it comes down to your ISP. Like the original commentor I also frequently can’t pass CloudFlare turnstile when on Wifi, although refreshing the page a few times usually gets me through. Worst case on my phone’s hotspot I can much more consistently pass. It’s super annoying and combined with their recent DNS outage has totally ruined any respect I had for CloudFlare.
Interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/SasXJwyKkMI
Thats not how it works. Cf uses thousands of variables to estimate a trust score and block people so just because it works for you doesn’t mean it works.
Same goes the other way. It’s not because it doesn’t work for you that it should go away.
That technology has its uses, and Cloudflare is probably aware that there are still some false positive, and probably is working on it as we write.
The decision is for the website owner to take, taking into consideration the advantages of filtering out a majority of bots and the disadvantages of loosing some legitimate traffic because of false positives. If you get Cloudflare challenge, chances are that he chosed that the former vastly outclass the later.
Now there are some self-hosted alternatives, like Anubis, but business clients prefer SaaS like Cloudflare to having to maintain their own software. Once again it is their choices and liberty to do so.
lmao imagine shilling for corporate Cloudflare like this. Also false positive vs false negative are fundamentally not equal.
Cloudflare is probably aware that there are still some false positive, and probably is working on it as we write.
The main issue with Cloudflare is that it’s mostly bullshit. It does not report any stats to the admins on how many users were rejected or any false positive rates and happily put’s everyone under “evil bot” umbrella. So people from low trust score environments like Linux or IPs from poorer countries are under significant disadvantage and left without a voice.
I’m literally a security dev working with Cloudflare anti-bot myself (not by choice). It’s a useful tool for corporate but a really fucking bad one for the health of the web, much worse than any LLM agent or crawler, period.
So people from low trust score environments like Linux
Linux user here, Cloudflare hasn’t blocked access to a single page for me unless I use a VPN, which then can trigger it.
I’m on Linux with Firefox and have never had that issue before (particularly nexusmods which I use regularly). Something else is probably wrong with your setup.
Thirded. All three (Linux, FF, nexus)
ZERO ISSUES.
In my case, it’s usually the VPN.
“Wrong with my setup” - thats not how internet works.
I’m based in south east asia and often work on the road so IP rating probably is the final crutch in my fingerprint score.
Either way this should be no way acceptible.
That is exactly how the internet works. That’s always how the internet has worked.
omg ur a hacker
Did you mean Edge on Windows? 'Cause if so, welcome in!
Perplexity argues that a platform’s inability to differentiate between helpful AI assistants and harmful bots causes misclassification of legitimate web traffic.
So, I assume Perplexity uses appropriate identifiable user-agent headers, to allow hosters to decide whether to serve them one way or another?
And I’m assuming if the robots.txt state their UserAgent isn’t allowed to crawl, it obeys it, right? :P
No, as per the article, their argumentation is that they are not web crawlers generating an index, they are user-action-triggered agents working live for the user.
Except, it’s not a live user hitting 10 sights all the same time, trying to crawl the entire site… Live users cannot do that.
That said, if my robots.txt forbids them from hitting my site, as a proxy, they obey that, right?
Its not up to the hoster to decide whom to serve content. Web is intended to be user agent agnostic.
yeah it’s almost like there as already a system for this in place
This is a nice CloudFlare ad
yeah. still not worth dealing with fucking cloudflare. fuck cloudflare.
I’m out of the loop, what’s wrong with cloud flare?
Centralization, mostly, but also their hands-off approach to most fascist content.
They kind of have to be hands off or risk losing safe harbor protections.
DEATH TO CLOUDFLARE!
That would be terrible for a lot of people as they are the only company providing such services that doesn’t charge for traffic.
They can use web.archive.org as a cdn(I do that to cloudflare websites). But honestly, cloudflare or not, the internet is broken.
Using archive.org as a CDN at the scale of Cloudflare would be an immediate death sentence for archive.org.
well I’m doing my part: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bcma/ sorry archive.org, I promise I’ll donate ❤️
Can you explain please? How can I use archive.org as a cdn for my website?
just take a snapshot of your website… then make all links to your website link to that snapshot, and turn your server off.
That’s the entire point, dipshit. I wish we got one of the cool techno dystopias rather than this boring corporate idiot one.
I’m still holding out for Stephen Hawking to mail out Demon Summoning programs.
Traveling snake oil salesman complains he can’t pick people’s locks.
