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 ecolog…
> but unless you do PoW (which is also ecologically a nightmare) Can you expand? I don't see a problem with some napkin math. 5W load for 2 seconds is 0.002Wh (we have to let smartphones pass and not by doing PoW for 10s of seconds). 8 billion checks a day for a year = 8GWh.
In any case, according to some napkin math done by Kimi 2.6 (which by itself is probably already consuming more than all of my PoW challenges for the upcoming 5 years) - the situation looks incredibly in favor of PoW: https://www.kimi.com/share/19e7ef40-a432-8912-8000-0000b4a71...
Which makes me wonder why CloudFlare isn't switching to this already