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Precursor

blog.cloudflare.com

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21–30 of 170 posts

Re: Precursor

#21

Post by freedomben »

As a real user who uses an Ultimate Hacking Keyboard with the mouse layer, this frustrates me immensely. Yes I'm a corner case, but this is likely to make certain website not work for me because my lines are perfectly straight and my arcs zig-zag much like a bot might.

Considering the keyboard/mouse layer feels like an advancement to me, this feels like tech that will lock in the "old" way of doing things.

I really detest how adversarial the web is getting. I'm not a cloudflare hater but please, please consider people like me when rolling out stuff that affects millions or maybe even hundreds of millions or billions of people.

Re: Precursor

#22

Post by akersten »

control+F accessibility no results

Yeah so this mouse movement astrology is going to completely lock non-sighted/keyboard only users out of large swaths of the Internet isn't it.

Re: Precursor

#23

Post by fwlr »

reluctant_dev wrote: post #8

What prevents bots/agents from just adding "jitter" to their movements that mimics how humans move their cursor? I know there are other signals being used but this one in particular seems like it wouldn't be hard to beat with a small amount of sophistication from the bot.

The jitter you add has to specifically be “jitter that mimics human cursor movement”, which is extraordinarily non-trivial to synthesise.

Re: Precursor

#24

Post by ianm218 »

Havoc wrote: post #12

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing. Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole

For any one of their product there is a good opportunity to build an open source alternative or something like it! Can be hard to work around they have the benefit of being able to have negative unit economics on lots of infra products... But people succesfully built tons of alternatives to google analytics and similar.

Re: Precursor

#25

Post by skybrian »

Havoc wrote: post #12

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing. Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole

Yes, but it’s up to their competitors to build competing services.

Re: Precursor

#26

Post by pryelluw »

skybrian wrote: post #13
sudb wrote: post #5

Cool product launch, though it feels a little weird to me that Cloudflare sells agentic products alongside this new service that seems designed to block agentic usage of the web? I expect there's much more going on than just mouse path detection but I can imagine that this is already tricky for touchscreens and for people using non-traditional mouse inputs (the thinkpad nub comes to mind - but it would also be bad op…

It’s less weird if you think there’s a difference between good bots and bad bots. They can provide services for good bots to use while helping people keep out the bad ones. If a bot is simulating mouse movement but doing it badly then that’s a strong signal of shenanigans. A good bot will obey robots.txt and do nothing to hide that it’s a bot.

Who gets to decide what is a good bot?

Re: Precursor

#27

Post by zdc1 »

stogot wrote: post #17
reluctant_dev wrote: post #8

What prevents bots/agents from just adding "jitter" to their movements that mimics how humans move their cursor? I know there are other signals being used but this one in particular seems like it wouldn't be hard to beat with a small amount of sophistication from the bot.

In 2027 how many tokens will we spend to create the jitter, pre-jitter planning, post-jitter verification, and then cloudflare’s inevtiable counter-jitter

Someone needs to vibecode a "virtual mouse" tool for the agents to steer instead (semi /s)

Re: Precursor

#28

Post by Maxion »

Havoc wrote: post #12

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing. Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole

To be frank, their products do work and are sorely needed.

Re: Precursor

#29

Post by esseph »

ianm218 wrote: post #24
Havoc wrote: post #12

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing. Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole

For any one of their product there is a good opportunity to build an open source alternative or something like it! Can be hard to work around they have the benefit of being able to have negative unit economics on lots of infra products... But people succesfully built tons of alternatives to google analytics and similar.

What they are doing requires both physical and digital infrastructure spread throughout the globe. It's not a cheap task.

Re: Precursor

#30

Post by baq »

Havoc wrote: post #12

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing. Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole

...but very bullish NET. who wouldn't want to be the toll booth where you collect money both ways
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