Comment by cpncrunch
2 months ago
I've noticed that in recent months, even apart from these outages, cloudflare has been contributing to a general degradation and shittification of the internet. I'm seeing a lot more "prove you're human", "checking to make sure you're human", and there is normally at the very least a delay of a few seconds before the site loads.
I don't think this is really helping the site owners. I suspect it's mainly about AI extortion:
You call it extortion of the AI companies, but isn’t stealing/crawling/hammering a site to scrape their content to resell just as nefarious? I would say Cloudflare is giving these site owners an option to protect their content and as a byproduct, reduce their own costs of subsidizing their thieves. They can choose to turn off the crawl protection. If they aren't, that tells you that they want it, doesn’t it?
>You call it extortion of the AI companies, but isn’t stealing/crawling/hammering a site to scrape their content to resell just as nefarious?
You can easily block ChatGPT and most other AI scrapers if you want:
https://habeasdata.neocities.org/ai-bots
This is just using robots.txt and asking "pretty please, don’t scrape me".
Here is an article (from TODAY) about the case where Perplexity is being accused of ignoring robots.txt: https://www.theverge.com/news/839006/new-york-times-perplexi...
If you think a robots.txt is the answer to stopping the billion-dollar AI machine from scraping you, I don’t know what to say.
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I'm guessing you don't manage any production web servers?
robots.txt isn't even respected by all of the American companies. Chinese ones (which often also use what are essentially botnets in Latin American and the rest of the world to evade detection) certainly don't care about anything short of dropping their packets.
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No you cannot! I blocked all of the user agents on a community wiki I run, and the traffic came back hours later masquerading as Firefox and Chrome. They just fucking lie to you and continue vacuuming your CPU.
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How are you this naive? Do you really think scrapers give a damn about your robots.txt?
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this is the equivalent of asking people not to speed on your street.
Tell me you don't run a site without telling me you don't run a site
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Ive been seeing more of those prove your human pages as well, but I generally assume they are there to combat a DDOS or other type of attack (or maybe ai/bot). I remember how annoying it was combating DDOS attacks, or hacked sites before Cloudflare existed. I also remember how annoying capcha s were, everywhere. Cloudflare is not perfect but net, I think it’s been a great improvement.
Ovh provides ddos protection without that nonsense, for free. Aws does it too, for a fee.
More and more sites I can't even visit because of this "prove you're human" because it's not compatible with older web browsers, even though the website it's blocking is.
the two things are unrelated...
The pay-per-crawl thing, is about them thinking ahead about post-AI business/revenue models.
The way AI happened, it removed a big chunk of revenue from news companies, blogs, etc. Because lots of people go to AI instead of reaching the actual 3rd party website.
AI currently gets the content for free from the 3rd party websites, but they have revenue from their users.
So Cloudflare is proposing that AI companies should be paying for their crawling. Cloudflare's solution would give the lost revenue back where it belongs, just through a different mechanism.
The ugly side of the story is that this was already an existing solution, and open source, called L402.org.
Cloudflare wants to be the first to take a piece of the pie, but also instead of using the open source version, they forked it internally and published it as their own service, which is cloudflare specific.
To be completely fair, the l402 requires you to solve the payment mechanism itself, which for Cloudflare is easy because they already deal with payments.
> I've noticed that in recent months, even apart from these outages, cloudflare has been contributing to a general degradation and shittification of the internet. I'm seeing a lot more "prove you're human", "checking to make sure you're human", and there is normally at the very least a delay of a few seconds before the site loads.
Good to know I'm not the only one
Feel like that’s the fault of LLMs, not cloudflare
Looking into this more, it does indeed seem to be a cloudflare problem. It looks like cloudflare made a significant error in their bot fingerprinting, and Perplexity wasn't actually bypassing robots.txt.
https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/agents-or-bots-making-sen...
To be honest I find cloudflare a much more scammy company than Perplexity. I had a DDoS attack a few years ago which originated from their network, and they had zero interest in it.
In my experience it's been in recent years, not months.
it can't even spy on us silently, damn