51–60 of 149 posts
Cloudflare bot detection has taught me a reflex to close the tab every time I see its logo.
I kind of do the same, not every time, but sometimes if I keep getting it on the same site, I seriously question how accurate their stats are without deep diving them more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they inserted themselves into almost everything we do online and basically managed to take control over it. Cloudflare should never have been allowed to man in the middle the entire internet, but now that they have they're the only man on earth with a dataset that size.
(I'm ex CF) This is backwards. Nobody "allowed" anyting. CF serves a customers need. You can argue with the solution but you can't argue with the core problem. It's more healthy to start the conversation of _why_ CF services are valuable.
That is something that should not be allowed to exist. It's one of the reasons monopolies (or even majority-opolies) are bad. It's a weapon hanging on the wall, waiting to be used.
I confess a sad assumption that bot traffic is far higher than we have admitted for a long time. Though, maybe we would see different stats specifically to social media sights to astroturf like counts? Certainly feels that we have known for a long time that bots were larger in ad viewing than ad companies wanted to admit.
Well the fun things is that no one knows how much traffic of what kind they are getting when they use Cloudflare. You get the numbers that Cloudflare tells you, but who knows if you can trust their stats after their CEO is apparently cherry-picking data to shape their product narrative?
I wouldn't trust a single thing coming out of his mouth.
Cloudflare is junk. Their entire billion dollar service can't distinguish my (DAILY) GET request to mainstream news sites from bot traffic, nothing they say or do is of any value. I've had the same IP for decades.
Have you checked your IP address's reputation with a service such as ipqualityscore.com? If cloudflare thinks your traffic is bot traffic, it's likely that there is bot traffic you don't know about coming from your IP, either from a compromised device on your network or a sketchy VPN product.
So many people have sketchy TV boxes or whatever other sketchy IOT decice that is a larp for using your network to sell bandwidth to proxy networks.
However, CF is unnecessarily making people on 5G connections from desktops do turnstiles as it looks like a scraper using a mobile proxy. This will become more and more of an issue as more laptops have 5G modems in them. Not sute how this WAF IP fingerprinting model survives widesprear CGNAT. I guess it will be an excuse to more intensly fingerprint us.
Cloudflare bot detection has taught me a reflex to close the tab every time I see its logo.
There is a unfortunate incentive created when a "business" (MiTM) depends on "bot traffic", i.e., the continued nuisance of bot traffic, to make money If the "bot traffic" declines, then the "bot protection business" goes down with it Cloudflare communication are sometimes careful to refer to traffic _labeled as_ bot traffic versus actual bot traffic Because the "business" relies on the existance of "bot traffic", th…
>Certainly the problem is not the individual www user who doesnt use an "approved" graphical, Javascript-enabled browser who gets blocked or fingerprinted trying to make a single request
The alternatives to javascript fingerprinting are either ineffective (TLS fingerprinting and/or IP rate limits), or even worse for privacy (eg. attestation).
>If residential proxies are the problem then why not go after the companies that provide them
Why did we start treating Cloudflare (a public, for-profit company) as the undisputed authority on anything related to the network layer of the internet in the first place?
Because they inserted themselves into almost everything we do online and basically managed to take control over it. Cloudflare should never have been allowed to man in the middle the entire internet, but now that they have they're the only man on earth with a dataset that size.
I’d blame the bad actors, rather than service providers that alleviate the problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they inserted themselves into almost everything we do online and basically managed to take control over it. Cloudflare should never have been allowed to man in the middle the entire internet, but now that they have they're the only man on earth with a dataset that size.
(I'm ex CF) This is backwards. Nobody "allowed" anyting. CF serves a customers need. You can argue with the solution but you can't argue with the core problem. It's more healthy to start the conversation of _why_ CF services are valuable.
Cloudflare is junk. Their entire billion dollar service can't distinguish my (DAILY) GET request to mainstream news sites from bot traffic, nothing they say or do is of any value. I've had the same IP for decades.
Have you checked your IP address's reputation with a service such as ipqualityscore.com? If cloudflare thinks your traffic is bot traffic, it's likely that there is bot traffic you don't know about coming from your IP, either from a compromised device on your network or a sketchy VPN product.
Maybe from your IP block even. More common since you don't control that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they inserted themselves into almost everything we do online and basically managed to take control over it. Cloudflare should never have been allowed to man in the middle the entire internet, but now that they have they're the only man on earth with a dataset that size.
(I'm ex CF) This is backwards. Nobody "allowed" anyting. CF serves a customers need. You can argue with the solution but you can't argue with the core problem. It's more healthy to start the conversation of _why_ CF services are valuable.
CF serves something it convinced customers they need.
Static blogs hiding behind bot protection (in some cases blocking legit users from GrapheneOS because it's difficult to fingerprint them) because someone convinced them they'll be DDoSed by bots otherwise is a loss to the Internet.
A lot of self-hosters running CF tunnels because they don't know better also contributes.
> It's more healthy to start the conversation of _why_ CF services are valuable.
Begging the question. It's what TFA is about - telling people they need CF.