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ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

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Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#231

Post by monista »

traceroute66 wrote: post #92
whatisthiseven wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which VPNs are people using that actually care about the user's privacy? Most of them don't, sell their home IP to buyers, sell their DNS history to others, etc. Worse, some of them could require invasive MITM cert stuff most users will just click yes through. I have yet to see a use case for VPNs for the casual internet audience, and for a tech savvy user, their better off renting through some datacenter or somethin…

> Which VPNs are people using that actually care about the user's privacy? Mullvad. It has been proven in a court of law that when Mullvad says "no logging", they mean it. They also regularly have security audits and publish the results[2][3] [1] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-a-sea... [2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/new-security-audit-of-account-an... [3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/successfu…

I don't use the VPN, but I still happily use their privacy-oriented (Firefox-based) Mullvad browser.

https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser/

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#232

Post by Aurornis »

Imnimo wrote: post #149
MyNameIsNickT wrote: post #49

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform. A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users. We also keep a very close…

It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.

I interpreted scraping to mean in the context of this:

> we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users

I have no doubt that many people see the free ChatGPT access as a convenient target for browser automation to get their own free ChatGPT pseudo-API.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#233

Post by bloomca »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #189
DenisM wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the good old days Netflix had "Dynamic HTML" code that would take a DOM element which scrolled out of view port and move it to the position where it was about to be scrolled in from the other end. Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate. They did it because a lot of devices running Netflix (TVs, DVD players, etc) were underpower…

This is how every scrolling list has been implemented since the 80s. We actually lost knowledge about how to build UI in the move to web

The biggest issue is that there is no native component support for that. So everyone implements their own and it is both brittle and introduces some issues like:

- "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected - the scrollbar has wrong dimensions - sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall)

The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to optimize the same way it is possible in native apps (they are much less flexible overall).

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#234

Post by segmondy »

lxgr wrote: post #14

It's absurd how unusable Cloudflare is making the web when using a browser or IP address they consider "suspicious". I've lately been drowning in captchas for the crime of using Firefox. All in the interest of "bot protection", of course.

trying using firefox and then using a cellphone network for internet. sometimes i can't access a site, because i get infinite captcha. i know what a damn bus, stairwell, stop light or motorcycle looks like.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#235

Post by dotancohen »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #211
dotancohen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet ChatGPT does not use it. GP was mentioning that a solution to the problem exists, not that Netflix specifically invented it. Your quip that the technique is not specific to Netflix bolsters the argument that OpenAI should code that in.

I'm ignorant of the tech here. But I have noticed that ctrl-F search doesn't work for me on these longer chats. Which is what made me think they were doing something like virtual scrolling. I can't understand how the UI can get so slow if a bunch of the page is being swapped out.

Ctrl-A for select all doesn't work either. I actually wondered how they broke that.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#236

Post by xmcp123 »

huertouisj wrote: post #120
londons_explore wrote: post #12

I just don't understand why bot owners can't just run a complete windows 11 VM running Google Chrome complete with graphics acceleration. You can probably run 50 of those simultaneously if you use memory page deduplication, and with a decent CPU+GPU you ought to be able to render 50 pages a second. That's 1 cent per thousand page loads on AWS. Damn cheap.

there are scraping subreddits. if you browse them you will see that bot writers are very annoyed if they can't scrape a site with a headless browser. you can do what you suggested, but with Linux VMs/containers. windows is too heavy, each VM will cost you 4 GB of RAM

I’m in those. xvfb and headless=false still works great

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#237

Post by zamadatix »

pixl97 wrote: post #181
salawat wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like "We want your money, but don't want to provide service." Are you sure OpenAI isn't morphing into a finance/insurance company?

While OAI is one of the more hypocritical of the bunch, it is not uncommon for paid services to have some limitations in their terms of service. Like going in a store and buying stuff, it doesn't me a free for all doing whatever you want.

Limitations on the ChatGPT subscription should have to do with the usage limits of the tier you paid for (and I don't think anyone has a problem with that). If I'm in the limits of requests I paid for then it's usage rather than abuse.

"Abuse" checks should only come into play when someone tries to leverage the free tier. It reminds me of those cable companies that try to sell "unlimited" plans and then try to say customers who use more than x GB/month are abusing the service rather than just say what the real limits are because "unlimited" sounds better in marketing.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#238

Post by Aurornis »

lucasfin000 wrote: post #32
lxgr wrote: post #14

It's absurd how unusable Cloudflare is making the web when using a browser or IP address they consider "suspicious". I've lately been drowning in captchas for the crime of using Firefox. All in the interest of "bot protection", of course.

The real frustrating part is that Cloudflare's "definition" of suspicious keeps changing and expanding. VPN users, privacy-first browsers, uncommon IP ranges, they all get flagged. The people most likely to get caught by these systems are exactly the ones who care most about their privacy, and not the bots that they are apparently targeting.

> The people most likely to get caught by these systems are exactly the ones who care most about their privacy, and not the bots that they are apparently targeting.

In my brief experience with abuse mitigation, connections coming from VPNs or unusual IP ranges were very significantly more likely to be associated with abuse.

It depends on your users. VPNs aren’t common at all, even though you hear about them a lot on Hacker News. For types of social sites where people got banned for abuse (forums) the first step to getting back on the forum was always to sign up for a VPN and try to reconnect. It got so bad that almost every new account connecting via VPN would reveal itself as a spammer, a banned member trying to return, or someone trying to sock puppet alternate accounts for some reason.

The worst offenders are Tor IP addresses. Anyone connecting from Tor was basically guaranteed to have bad intentions.

I heard from someone who dealt with a lot of e-mail abuse that the death threats, extortion, and other serious abuse almost always came from Protonmail or one of the other privacy-first providers that I can’t remember right now. He half-jokingly said they could likely block Protonmail entirely without impacting any real users.

It’s tough for people who want these things for privacy, but the sad reality is that these same privacy protections are favored by people who are trying to abuse services.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#239

Post by monocularvision »

toss1 wrote: post #184
magicseth wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If apple approves it, ive got a solution: A keyboardthat attests to your humanity https://typed.by/magicseth/2451#2NyGLfAQxmqRiAOTlaX7ma3G4d1o...

Oh Gawd, not this idea again! This idea of capturing the timing of people's keystrokes to identify them, ensure it is them typing their passwords, or even using the timing itself as a password has been recurring every few years for at least three decades. It is always just as bad. Because there are so many cases where it completely fails. The first case is a minor injury to either hand — just put a fat bandage on one…

You might want to check out “How it Works” on the site as none of what you said applies: https://typed.by/how

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#240

Post by vscode-rest »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #13
simonw wrote: post #6

Presumably this is all because OpenAI offers free ChatGPT to logged out users and don't want that being abused as a free API endpoint.

Yup. Coincidentally about an hour ago, I wanted to look something up in ChatGPT and I happened to be in a browser window I don’t normally use, with no logged in accounts. I assumed it wouldn’t work, but to my surprise with no account, no cookies of any kind it took my query and gave me an answer.

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