Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

hacktivis.me

11–20 of 508 posts

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#11
Cloudflare is known to use fingerprinting to detect scrapers For example, they use JA3 fingerprints and match them against the UA to block stuff like cURL while allowing OkHttp (Android clients) - but this can be easily be spoofed with packages such as CycleTLS [1].

I don't want to defend them, because they gate away a good chunk of the internet with their "bot protection", but unless you do PoW (which is also ecologically a nightmare), probably fingerprinting is the way to go - completely destroying the privacy of everyone involved.

Cromite, a privacy conscious fork of Chromium for Android, has constantly issues with CloudFlare Turnstile [2] because they (Cloudflare) try to fingerprint it in multiple ways in order to pass the challenge. The only way to get it to work would be to join the CloudFlare Browser Developer program - which requires signing an NDA. Rightfully so, the project maintainer didn't want to do it.

If you want to see the extent of what CloudFlare does to fingerprint the browsers, just have a look in the issue [2] and see which flags need to be disabled in order to allow CloudFlare to pass the challenge.

I understand both sides, but at least CloudFlare could be flexible enough to fall back to PoW instead of just blocking people from sending forms or accessing websites...

[1]: https://github.com/Danny-Dasilva/CycleTLS

[2]: https://github.com/uazo/cromite/issues/2365

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#13
post #5

Please, anyone from EU (US is doomed rofl) create a petition to ban browser-fingerprinting in EU, across all existing browsers. I'm not good at creating petitions but can happily sign it. Also with stop killing games and anti-chat control. I can imagine this can get a traction, if it's explained in youtube video to "normal" people.

a. Accept All

b. Accept Only Necessary Fingerprinting

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#14

...in the age of AI, does anyone have an actual solution for keeping out bots while preserving the privacy of humans? Obviously this is terrible, but I think there's a possibility it's the least terrible option? Another option is IP reputation, which I think is worse. Or scanning a code with a non-rooted phone, which I think is even worse than that!

> ...in the age of AI, does anyone have an actual solution for keeping out bots while preserving the privacy of humans?

There isn't one, and pretending otherwise is nonsense because humans will always provide their credentials to something to act on their behalf.

In the limit you end up with Chinese phone farms.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#15

...in the age of AI, does anyone have an actual solution for keeping out bots while preserving the privacy of humans? Obviously this is terrible, but I think there's a possibility it's the least terrible option? Another option is IP reputation, which I think is worse. Or scanning a code with a non-rooted phone, which I think is even worse than that!

> keeping out bot

You can forget about it. It is not possible. Simple as that.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#16
post #5

Please, anyone from EU (US is doomed rofl) create a petition to ban browser-fingerprinting in EU, across all existing browsers. I'm not good at creating petitions but can happily sign it. Also with stop killing games and anti-chat control. I can imagine this can get a traction, if it's explained in youtube video to "normal" people.

A better solution would be to make webgl, webgpu and (especially) webrtc have some sort of prompt before they can be in any way used in that fashion, but this will absolutely destroy web ux Windows Vista style.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#17

...in the age of AI, does anyone have an actual solution for keeping out bots while preserving the privacy of humans? Obviously this is terrible, but I think there's a possibility it's the least terrible option? Another option is IP reputation, which I think is worse. Or scanning a code with a non-rooted phone, which I think is even worse than that!

> keeping out bot You can forget about it. It is not possible. Simple as that.

Let's say I'm selling concert tickets. How do I prevent bots from buying up all the tickets and scalping them?

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> keeping out bot You can forget about it. It is not possible. Simple as that.

Let's say I'm selling concert tickets. How do I prevent bots from buying up all the tickets and scalping them?

Tie them to the buyer's identity, offer at-value buy-backs until X weeks before event, disallow resale.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#20

...in the age of AI, does anyone have an actual solution for keeping out bots while preserving the privacy of humans? Obviously this is terrible, but I think there's a possibility it's the least terrible option? Another option is IP reputation, which I think is worse. Or scanning a code with a non-rooted phone, which I think is even worse than that!

And identifying a bot that is acting on my behalf. Claude go search this topic is basically the same as Googling something and clicking on the results. Human driven AI searching needs to be in a different box than AI scraping for training data.

Which sounds extremely difficult to differentiate

Post reply on HN