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Precursor

blog.cloudflare.com

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61–70 of 170 posts

Re: Precursor

#61

Post by eth0up »

pests wrote: post #20
eth0up wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, but I struggle with skepticism for anyone who blocks archive.today, which cloudflare does, along with nextdns and others. Being blocked by such a large... apologies in advance for 'lack of better word' vernacular, cartel, is a near death sentence. Not a fan

archive.today was running a DDOS through their CAPTCHA page

Although the blocking of archive.today goes back years, as can be verified through forum searches and archives with nextdns and others, I was not aware of this and have no excuse to dispute it. But for the record, the blocking predates 2026 by many years -- and my own records also verify this. That said, I think I need to learn more.

Re: Precursor

#62

Post by DrammBA »

akersten wrote: post #22

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.

cmd+F mouse movement 3 result, 3/3: "Mouse movement is just one example of the signals Precursor evaluates"

Re: Precursor

#63

Post by [deleted] »

cryo32 wrote: post #56
Catloafdev wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you genuinely asking "does anybody even need any of their services"?

Yes. I am asking exactly that objective question. They are advantageous to leverage in certain situations but essential they are not. We're used to, in the technology industry, looking for or creating problems to solve with services we are aware of. Moving back to necessity and need, do we really? Are we being objective? Most of the time, no.

[deleted]

Re: Precursor

#64

Post by SoftTalker »

nerdsniper wrote: post #50
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.

Beating this would require a large amount of sophistication, not a small amount. Basic machine learning clustering will expose bots mouse+keyboard+touch behavior and discriminate them from humans. It will also likely discriminate against anyone with a disability and therefore using affordances like eye tracking. Just imagine how different a person with only one hand would look compared to a “typical” user!! This shou…

We used to say the same sorts of things about LLM prose, music, and image generation. Now just a few years later it can be very difficult to know for sure if something is made by AI or a human. There are still tells, but they are much more subtle and harder to spot, and models are still improving. Mimicing human mouse movement won't be any more of a challenge.

Re: Precursor

#65

Post by dubcanada »

There is nothing stopping a bot from moving their cursor like a human. This is basically just putting up a door with zero walls and telling people to stay out of your house.

All of these things are completely abusable/bypass-able and just annoying for actual humans who trigger flags.

Re: Precursor

#66

Post by [deleted] »

dubcanada wrote: post #65

There is nothing stopping a bot from moving their cursor like a human. This is basically just putting up a door with zero walls and telling people to stay out of your house. All of these things are completely abusable/bypass-able and just annoying for actual humans who trigger flags.

[deleted]

Re: Precursor

#67

Post by dzonga »

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

have you considered the alternative ?

where bots run rampant ?

trust me as an operator - I'm grateful Cloudflare exists.

Re: Precursor

#68

Post by justinhj »

fwlr wrote: post #23
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.

are you sure it's non trivial? they posted a 2d image of what it looks like. a fairly simple model of the users wrist and mouse position doesn't seem crazy hard but the devil is in the details

Re: Precursor

#69

Post by sbarre »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #48
fwlr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, it's "jitter that mimics human cursor movements detected by Cloudflare's Precursor script". It'll just be another arms race.

Like any other detection system you will always have determined adversaries that put in the work to bypass it.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't still try to block the much larger number of less sophisticated/resourced adversaries that are using OOTB libraries and low-effort setups.

Re: Precursor

#70

Post by tavavex »

It's a bleak world in terms of bots flooding the web, but out of all possible solutions, this seems to be preferable over invasive and identifying fingerprinting that everyone wants to roll out. Here's hoping that mouse movements aren't sufficiently unique as to be fingerprintable too.
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