The AI company Perplexity is complaining their bots can't bypass Cloudflare's firewall
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I don't like cloudflare but it's nice that they allow people to stop AI scrapping if they want to
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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
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And I'm assuming if the robots.txt state their UserAgent isn't allowed to crawl, it obeys it, right?
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.
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Gee that's a real removed it ain't it perplexity?
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Step 1, SOMEHOW find a more punchable face than Altman
Altman’s face looks like it’s already been punched
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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
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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.
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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?
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put META android zuckerberg on or mechahitler musk.
they are busy sucking orange fascist balls.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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No-no, see. When an AI-first company does it, it's actually called courageous innovation. Crimes are for poor people
See: Facebook/Meta
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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.
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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
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How "open" a website is, is up to the owner, and that's all. Unless we're talking about de-privatizing the internet as a whole, here.
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.
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CloudFlare has become an Internet protection racket and I'm not happy about it.
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.
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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.
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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.
Well, until we abolish capitalism, that's the state of things. Unless you feel like Nazis MUST be freely given access to everything too?
