There’s no difference in server load between a user looking at a page and a user using an AI tool to summarize the page.

The AI companies already overwhelmed sites to get training data and are repeating their shitty scraping practices when users interact with their AI. It’s the same fucking thing.

You either didn’t read the article or are deliberately making bad faith arguments. The entire point of the article is that the traffic that they’re referring to is initiated by a user, just like when you type an address into your browser’s address bar.

This traffic, initiated by a user, creates the same server load as that same user loading the page in a browser.

Yes, mass scraping of web pages creates a bunch of server load. This was the case before AI was even a thing.

This situation is like Cloudflare presenting was a captcha in order to load each individual image, css or JavaScript asset into a web browser because bot traffic pretends to be a browser.

I don’t think it’s too hard to understand that a bot pretending to be a browser and a human operated browser are two completely different things and classifying them as the same (and captchaing them) would be a classification error.

This is exactly the same kind of error. Even if you personally believe that users using AI tools should be blocked, not everyone has the same opinion. If Cloudflare can’t distinguish between bot requests and human requests then their customers can’t opt out and allow their users to use AI tools even if they want to.

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.

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?

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.

I hate to break it to you but not only does Cloudflare do this sort of thing, but so does Akamai, AWS, and virtually every other CDN provider out there. And far from being awful, it’s actually protecting the web.

We use Akamai where I work, and they inform us in real time when a request comes from a bot, and they further classify it as one of a dozen or so bots (search engine crawlers, analytics bots, advertising bots, social networks, AI bots, etc). It also informs us if it’s somebody impersonating a well known bot like Google, etc. So we can easily allow search engines to crawl our site while blocking AI bots, bots impersonating Google, and so on.

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 may be wrong with your setup.

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.

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.

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.

And I'm assuming if the robots.txt state their UserAgent isn't allowed to crawl, it obeys it, right?

Step 1, SOMEHOW find a more punchable face than Altman

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?

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.

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.

put META android zuckerberg on or mechahitler musk.

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