Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

hacktivis.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 508 posts

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#171

Post by leonidasrup »

denysvitali wrote: post #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 ecolog…

Fingerprinting for "bot protection" is indistinguishable from fingerprinting for mass surveillance.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#172

Post by ethin »

jwr wrote: post #165
ethin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is what is the alternative? I'm (not) defending them or this practice by any measure, but we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system. I've hated CAPTCHAs ever since I first encountered them and I can't wait for them to just finally die a permanent death, but I also don't know how we solve the…

> we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system No, we don't know. I honestly do not understand the problem. I run websites, both static and non-static. Granted, my sites aren't exactly the most popular internet go-to destinations, but I should be seeing this DDoS too, right? I do see lots of requests. Nothi…

Has anyone pointed an AI scraper at your server at all? Unless your website appears in search engine listings I don't think the AI scrapers will slam it. My server has never been hit by them but my server is also practically unknown. All of this said, I'm not going to claim that server loads can handle it because many sysadmins have claimed otherwise, and I would like to think that their claims are reliable.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#173

Post by hack1312 »

Animats wrote: post #129

Is there a deal between Google and Cloudflare to make non-Chrome browsers harder to use? The pressure to use Chrome keeps increasing, and the amount of ad filtering you can do in Chrome keeps decreasing.

only chrome was approved for use internally at cf 5 years ago when i left

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#174

Post by mixologic »

Privacy and Bot defense are opposite ends of the same fulcrum. If you permit privacy, the site/service has to trust users to behave and follow the rules. If you track users, then the users have to trust the site/service owners not to abuse that trust. There isn't really an in between.

So if you want privacy, you have to accept poor and sometimes insecure services.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#175

Post by userbinator »

"If they know you're spoofing, you're not spoofing hard enough."

This stupid "war against bots" is going to lead to the downfall of the Internet and effectively turn it into another walled garden where only "approved" (anti-)user agents are allowed. Don't fall for the nonsense about "AI scrapers" --- it's just a way to manufacture consent.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#176

Post by redox99 »

jwr wrote: post #165
ethin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is what is the alternative? I'm (not) defending them or this practice by any measure, but we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system. I've hated CAPTCHAs ever since I first encountered them and I can't wait for them to just finally die a permanent death, but I also don't know how we solve the…

> we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system No, we don't know. I honestly do not understand the problem. I run websites, both static and non-static. Granted, my sites aren't exactly the most popular internet go-to destinations, but I should be seeing this DDoS too, right? I do see lots of requests. Nothi…

You get downvoted for these opinions but I agree. Most people that complain that their servers get hammered by AI bots are those that run very unoptimized servers that can only handle like 100 rps. I've never had any issues with any of my moderately optimized websites. A $10 VPS can handle sooo much traffic.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#179

Post by redox99 »

ethin wrote: post #172
jwr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system No, we don't know. I honestly do not understand the problem. I run websites, both static and non-static. Granted, my sites aren't exactly the most popular internet go-to destinations, but I should be seeing this DDoS too, right? I do see lots of requests. Nothi…

Has anyone pointed an AI scraper at your server at all? Unless your website appears in search engine listings I don't think the AI scrapers will slam it. My server has never been hit by them but my server is also practically unknown. All of this said, I'm not going to claim that server loads can handle it because many sysadmins have claimed otherwise, and I would like to think that their claims are reliable.

As soon as you get your TLS certificate you get bombarded with scraping. You don't need someone to "point a scraper at you".

What matters most is usually how much there is to scrape. If you have like 5 pages that's nothing. For forum like websites where each thread, each user profile, etc. gets scraped that's when traffic increases. I just let them have at it with no issues though, computers are fast.

Re: Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

#180

Post by userbinator »

ethin wrote: post #172
jwr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system No, we don't know. I honestly do not understand the problem. I run websites, both static and non-static. Granted, my sites aren't exactly the most popular internet go-to destinations, but I should be seeing this DDoS too, right? I do see lots of requests. Nothi…

Has anyone pointed an AI scraper at your server at all? Unless your website appears in search engine listings I don't think the AI scrapers will slam it. My server has never been hit by them but my server is also practically unknown. All of this said, I'm not going to claim that server loads can handle it because many sysadmins have claimed otherwise, and I would like to think that their claims are reliable.

Also, how do we even know they're really "AI scrapers", or just a deliberate DDoS to push sites into using CF or other "anti-bot" providers?
Post reply on HN