Comment by dogtimeimmortal
12 hours ago
> blog.adafruit.com Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly. Click here for more information
if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error
(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article.
the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.
the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?
if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.
we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.
Cloudflare is ridiculous. I can't even open it using Cromite (privacy enhanced, but not over the top, android browser).
I get:
blog.adafruit.com Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.
blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
And this hangs forever. What difference does it make if I access this site using a browser (blocked anyway) or I asked my LLM to fetch the content? I bet my LLM coukd get it anyway as I'm using basic local scraping with firecrawl for backup. So my LLM if it fails to retrieve using my basic local crawl4ai will use my paid firecrawl api and those guys can scrape EVERYTHING.
I do not understand why do you (as a site owner) care? Are these bots generating so much traffic? Can you set it up to serve text only version to them then?
this isn’t an adafruit-specific stance, it’s a web-wide problem. automated scraping and bot traffic is enough to take independent sites offline, and cloudflare is a tool we use to keep the site available at all. we publish full-text rss with no blockers here: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss . if cloudflare trips on your browser and you want an article, email me and i’ll send it in whatever format you want, we're always working to make it easier, it's hard, would rather have help than snarks and dunks.
My office uses ZScalar and lots of sites automatically block that because the company running the product make the product seem like an "open anonymous proxy".
Is the scraping protection the only thing relying on cloudflare? If it is then there are solutions like anubis that work pretty well
AI scrapers can beat Anubis now if I recall.
So, is cloudflare just becoming proof of bloat?
Forget it. Every thread has these who people complain when some website doesn't open in Lynx or Amaya with Javascript disabled. Ignore them.
Didn't know there were proponents of Cloudflare's enshittification and centralization of the Internet.
What's your email address?
Just get the damn RSS
When companies that earn their money by selling things deliberately make their website hard to access (especially for scrapers -- of any sort), then they're making a choice to abandon their customers.
It seems ruthlessly disappointing to consider, but maybe Adafruit isn't cut out for this whole Internet thing.
Can you elaborate on the logic that makes preventing scrapers (note, you didn't mention actually hindering accessibility technologies) customer antagonistic?
1 reply →
(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article. the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.
the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?
if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.
we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.
1 reply →
[flagged]
Oh look - HN fortune cookies
Yeah you can't predict anything with 100% certainty either
By repeating propaganda at you though desperate financiers can hack your brains innate prediction loop to convince you you're knocking on the door of infamy.
Look, I get you. You're trying to fill the hole created when father never came back with cigarettes. Mom always blamed you for his leaving. But little Warboy screaming "Witness me make line go up !" everyone else is a self selecting meat suit too working unintentionally (simply distracted by their own lives needs they never encounter your pitch) and in some instances intentionally (fomenting economic and political instability) against you to support themselves.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Webdev new hotness monkey poo flinging software development is not these people's schtick. Hardware is.
God forbid whatever library they use to make their website "easy" and detract less labor from their endeavors not have default settings in perfect accordance with their politics.
I bet they don't compile their OS from source either.
The "new hotness" in webdev is what causes these errors. Plain old HTML pretty much never has these issues. Clearly they are into the new hotness in webdev.
Exactly. Unless they want to make a project out of their website they're at the mercy of the packages and frameworks they depend upon, who are run by people who generally like webdev stuff and have no qualms about the new hotness.
If you're using a browser more than a year old it's also much more likely you're vulnerable to zero-day exploits. Browser tech is a lot different than it was 10 years ago.
That error message almost always means someone is using an extremely obscure browser that doesn't pass Cloudflare's not-a-bot-check.
Either the browser has Javascript disabled (Tor), or its Javascript engine is very outdated/broken (a couple of old Firefox forks) or doesn't support Javascript at all.
It doesn't necessarily mean the browser is vulnerable to anything, just that it's not a browser normal websites would expect to encounter so the bot check fails.
Did you consider clicking the "Click here for more information" to learn what the reason was?