Comment by Hizonner

> It definitely is.

Is an independent indicator, or is statistically correlated?

> And there are even bot detection services that can detect puppeted Chrome installs pretty reliably (I ran into that when I tried to scrape some data about the housing market).

Interesting. The arms race continues...

> Blink, WebKit, and Gecko are the only common browsers and the rest is a long tail. If you pick an uncommon browser (Lynx, Ladybird) you're an outlier in most automated scans but still end up with a smaller total browser market share than even the small bots

The post I was responding to was calling Firefox an "uncommon browser".

> If you're being extorted by someone who paid $50 to DDoS your business for a month, you're going to turn up the DDoS protection knobs. The annoying tracking, cyberstalking and CAPTCHA services are mere symptoms of the underlying problem.

Wouldn't most Cloudflare users prefer that Cloudflare notice that attack, adjust the settings by itself, and send them an email saying "You appear to be under attack; we've enabled X, and lowered the thresholds for Y and Z"? And then notice when the attack seemed to be slowing down, and put things back the way they were?

I'm normally not a fan of machines acting like they know better than I do... but the machines probably do know better than Cloudflare's average customer.

At the very least, they could probably find ways to discourage people from messing with knobs they don't understand, and more ways to make the specific costs obvious, even if those knobs ultimately stayed available.