I implemented all of this in hCaptcha 6 years ago, not just to distinguish bot from human but also to recognize the keyboard/mouse behavior of the same person signing up for many accounts or testing multiple credit cards. This kind of abuse detection was a part of Cloudflare when they switched to hCaptcha in 2020 and I had thought they already implemented all this themselves four years ago when they transitioned away from hCaptcha in 2022.
Precursor
81–90 of 170 posts
Re: Precursor
#82It’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
Gonna zag here. If you take a step back, cloudflare has been paving the path for pay for crawl. I think it's a noble and ambitious goal.
While I can understand why you would be alarmed, I can point to almost two decades of lamenting on this forum about how we need better ways of rewarding content creators than ads. Well, this is it.
Moreover, these products weren't built in a vacuum. Most threads about Anthropic and OpenAI have complaints about how these companies were built on stolen content. There's a reality we have to face here and we can't have it both ways.
Re: Precursor
#83I dislike bots as much as anyone else... when weird inquiries come through my company's lead form, it costs some time and attention to sort them.
But what makes Cloudflare so confident that automation always equates to "fraud and abuse?" If I send my agent to go retrieve some information, do they consider that fraud?
If I block various ad trackers does that trigger their "bot detection" incorrectly? Do I have any recourse? Or is Cloudflare appointing themselves judge, jury and executioner?
And let's not forget this little chestnut: > 4. Privacy by design. Precursor was designed to collect signals that help to distinguish human patterns from automated and abusive patterns.
Ahh, so to "protect" against bots they're standing up a whole new regime of user surveillance and session-level monitoring. And they definitely won't be selling that, they promise. Got it.
This crap should be illegal. In the real world, I can authorize others to act on my behalf. The same should be true with software agents.
Re: Precursor
#84It’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.
Open source for bot protection specifically would be difficult. If I as a bot developer can see the tests you run I can just modify my bot to pass them (either trivially or by brute force).
Re: Precursor
#85Yawn. Train a domain-specific model on human inputs and then run inference against that. At integration, you change what, one line of code with another? You at best raise the expense to bot, but in today's world, this isn't much compute expense. You can do it on 10-year-old Xenon processors, the same ones used by companies promoted on LowEndBox.
Skids already fall into the trap of using open source automation like playwright-extra-stealth.
Re: Precursor
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really need Cloudflare's services to run your business?
Are you genuinely asking "does anybody even need any of their services"?
You said "a similar range of services". Basic DDoS protection is probably important, and there are other companies doing that. Beyond that, it's less obvious.
Re: Precursor
#87Your keyboard and mouse rhythm and timings are probably so unique that they can be considered PII. Wonder how that works out legally.
Re: Precursor
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
that's actually how you do it. adversarial systems like those are prime candidates. one agent develops detection mechanisms and the other agent defeats them. progression signal is easy to get.
and you bootstrap with existing javascript detection engines.
the challenge is usually the human input data, your objective is to be clustered among the humans and for that you need to know what humans look like.
this is not an open ended arms race, it will end once the bots approximate humans to a sufficient degree - false positive rate for detection will become unacceptable even if the detection system is slightly ahead.
Re: Precursor
#89What 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…
> It is super difficult to mimic all of these signals in a way that would cluster the same as typical humans.
Not really, beat ML with ML. I won't disclose how to do it, because who knows who might read this, but you can easily do it with a model trained for that purpose.
Re: Precursor
#90It’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
Unfortunately a common occurrence in the world. Not really a fan of cloudflare selling to both sides.