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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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But scraping isn't abuse. Seems a bit different?

Given that the scraping doesn't do any rate limiting and pisses on robots.txt, yes it is abuse

Is there any evidence OpenAI has been ignoring robots.txt for scraping purposes? AFAIK the main sources of that traffic are still unknown.

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

#282
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. They allowed anonymous requests for months now, maybe even a year.

Yeah, additionally gemini.google.com is also free unauthenticated, which I've been using for a very long time (a year?). Why this is being treated as news is confusing.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things. The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less. It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity…

> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things. I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

I miss the www where the .html was written in vim or notepad.

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

#284
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web. Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and function…

>It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web. What are you talking about? It works fine with firefox with RFP and VPN enabled, which is already more paranoid than the average configuration. There are definitely sites where this configuration…

Is your interlocutor barking up the wrong tree, or are you missing the forest for the trees?

According to the OP:

> The program checks 55 properties spanning three layers: your browser (GPU, screen, fonts), the Cloudflare network (your city, your IP, your region from edge headers), and the ChatGPT React application itself (__reactRouterContext, loaderData, clientBootstrap).

I guess Firefox VPN will hide the IP at least. But what about the other data, is it faked by RFP? Because if not, the so-called privacy offered by this configuration is outdated.

You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.

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

#285
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all situationally-valid criticisms, but I've long thought the ability to have smartphones' cameras cryptographically sign photos is good when available. The use case is demonstrating a photo wasn't doctored, and that it came from a device associated with e.g. a journalist, who maintains a public key. Of course, it should be optional.

Yes! That's what I'm getting at. This protocol optionally allows you to sign with your private key, but you don't have to for the protocol to provide utility. It could just be enough to say "if you trust magicseth's binary and apple, then this was typed one letter at a time" There's nothing stopping folks from typing a message an LLM wrote one at a time, but the idea of increasing the human cost of sending messages i…

The problem is that it's not optional to end-users if sites enforce its use.

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

#286
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why OpenAI is trying to reduce its costs, but it simply isn't true that AI crawlers aren't creating very significant load, especially those crawlers that ignore robots.txt and hide their identities. This is direct financial damage and it's particularly hard on nonprofit sites that have been around a long time.

These are ChatGPT and Claude Desktop crawlers we’re talking about? Or what is it exactly? Are these really creating significant load while not honoring robots.txt? Genuinely interested.

I bet dollars to doughnuts that 95% of the traffic is from Claude and ChatGPT desktop / mobile and not literal content scraping for training.

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

#287

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 getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web. Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and function…

There is also the browser I use to get Claude to route around people blocking its webfetch. Both Playwright and chrome-mcp.

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

#288
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things. The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less. It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity…

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

#290
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things. I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

I miss the www where the .html was written in vim or notepad.

ahh yes, fresh off reading "Html For Dummies" I made my first tripod.com site
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