How “open” a website is, is up to the owner, and that’s all.

As someone who registered this account on this platform in response to Reddit's API restrictions, it would be hypocritical of me to accept such a belief.

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.

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.

Well, until we abolish capitalism, that's the state of things. Unless you feel like Nazis MUST be freely given access to everything too?

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

Using archive.org as a CDN at the scale of Cloudflare would be an immediate death sentence for archive.org.

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

they're good at protecting websites but damn, having a company being MITM feels so wrong

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.

Well, until we abolish capitalism, that’s the state of things.

I can see that things are the way things are. Accepting it is a different matter.

Unless you feel like Nazis MUST be freely given access to everything too?

To me, the "access" that I am referring to (the interface with which you gain access to a service) and that "access" (your behavior once you have gained access to a service) are different topics. The same distinction can be made with the concern over DoS attacks mentioned earlier in the thread. The user's behavior of overwhelming a site's traffic is the root concern, not the interface that the user is connecting with.

just take a snapshot of your website...
then make all links to your website link to that snapshot, and turn your server off.

well I'm doing my part: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bcma/
sorry archive.org, I promise I'll donate ️

That all sounds very vague to me, and I don't expect it to be captured properly by law any time soon. Being accessed for LLM? What does it mean for you and how is it different from being accessed by a user? Imagine you host a weather forecast. If that information is public, what kind of compensation do you expect from anyone or anything who accesses that data?

Is it okay for a person to access your site? Is it okay for a script written by that person to fetch data every day automatically? Would it be okay for a user to dump a page of your site with a headless browser? Would it be okay to let an LLM take a look at it to extract info required by a user? Have you heard about changedetection.io project? If some of these sound unfair to you, you might want to put a DRM on your data or something.

Would you expect a compensation from me after reading your comment?

Oh, well, it's okay if it suits for you. Just not at all an alternative to cloudflare.

The shit they know. Plus their support for non-JS users or For are pure shite