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Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

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Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either that or Anubis ( https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs ), yes.

So these companies broke the internet

Which companies?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google? No, their bots are pretty well behaved.

The smaller AI companies deploying bots that don't respect any reasonable rate limits and are scraping the same static pages thousands of times an hour? Yup

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#112

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop. It might be too little, too late, at this juncture, and this particular solution doesn't seem too innovative. However, it is directionally 100% correct, and let's hope for massively more innovation in defendin…

It's cloudflare and parasites like them that will make the internet un-free. It's already happening, I'm either blocked or back to 1998 load times be cause of "checking your browser". They are destroying the internet and will make it so only people who do approved things on approved browsers (meaning let advertising companies monetize their online activity) will get real access.

Cloudflare isn't solving a problem, they are just inserting themselves as an intermediary to extract a profit, and making everything worse.

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#113
post #32

I've heard lots of people on HN complaining about bot traffic bogging down their websites, and as a website operator myself I'm honestly puzzled. If you're already using Cloudflare, some basic cache configuration should guarantee that most bot traffic hits the cache and doesn't bog down your servers. And even if you don't want to do that, bandwidth and CPU are so cheap these days that it shouldn't make a difference.…

I too am a bit confused / mystified at the strong reaction. But I do expect a lot of badly optimized sites that just want out.

I struggle to think of a web related library that has spread faster than Anubis checker. It's everywhere now! https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

I'm surprised we don't see more efforts to rate limit. I assume many of these are distributed crawlers, but it feels like there's got to be pools of activity spinning up, on a handful of IPs. And that they would be time correlated together pretty clearly. Maybe that's not true. But it feels like the web, more than anything else, needs some open source software to add a lot more 420 Enhance Your Calm responses, as it feels like. https://http.dev/420

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#114

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop. It might be too little, too late, at this juncture, and this particular solution doesn't seem too innovative. However, it is directionally 100% correct, and let's hope for massively more innovation in defendin…

Isn't there a possibility that model makers retaliate by erasing them and their frameworks from memory, hurting CF adoption by devs?

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#115

I turned this on and it adjusts the robots.txt automatically; not sure what else it is doing. # NOTICE: The collection of content and other data on this # site through automated means, including any device, tool, # or process designed to data mine or scrape content, is # prohibited except (1) for the purpose of search engine indexing or # artificial intelligence retrieval augmented generation or (2) with express # wr…

For my silly hobby sites I just return status 444 close the connection for anything that has case-insentive "bot" in the UA requesting anything other than robots.txt, humans.txt, favicon.ico, etc... This would also drop search engines but I blackhole route most of their CIDR blocks. I'm probably the only one here that would do this.

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#116

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop. It might be too little, too late, at this juncture, and this particular solution doesn't seem too innovative. However, it is directionally 100% correct, and let's hope for massively more innovation in defendin…

Cutting humans out of what loop? What jobs or opportunities were people posting Reddit comments or whatever getting that are now going to AI?

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#117
post #76

Sounds very basic, sadly. Anybody know why these web crawling/bot standards are not evolving ? I believe robots.txt was invented in 1994(thx chatgpt). People have tried with sitemaps, RSS and IndexNow, but its like huge$$ organizations are depending on HelloWorld.bas tech to control their entire platform. I want to spin up endpoints/mcp/etc. and let intelligent bots communicate with my services. Let them ask for acce…

> I believe robots.txt was invented in 1994(thx chatgpt).

Not to pick on you, but I find it quicker to open new tab and do "!w robots.txt" (for search engines supporting the bang notation) or "wiki robots.txt" (for Google I guess). The answer is right there, no need to explain to LLM what I want or verify [1].

[1] Ok, Wikipedia can be wrong, but at least it is a commonly accessible source of wrong I can point people to if they call me out. Plus my predictive model of Wikipedia wrongness gives me pretty low likelihood for something like this, while for ChatGPT it is more random.

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#118
post #112

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop. It might be too little, too late, at this juncture, and this particular solution doesn't seem too innovative. However, it is directionally 100% correct, and let's hope for massively more innovation in defendin…

It's cloudflare and parasites like them that will make the internet un-free. It's already happening, I'm either blocked or back to 1998 load times be cause of "checking your browser". They are destroying the internet and will make it so only people who do approved things on approved browsers (meaning let advertising companies monetize their online activity) will get real access. Cloudflare isn't solving a problem, th…

I use Firefox with adblocking and some fingerprinting anti-measurements and I rarely hit their challenges. Your IP reputation must be bad.

They have an addon [1] that helps you bypass Cloudflare challenges anonymously somehow, but it feels wrong to install a plugin to your browser from the ones who make your web experience worse

1: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#119
post #112

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop. It might be too little, too late, at this juncture, and this particular solution doesn't seem too innovative. However, it is directionally 100% correct, and let's hope for massively more innovation in defendin…

It's cloudflare and parasites like them that will make the internet un-free. It's already happening, I'm either blocked or back to 1998 load times be cause of "checking your browser". They are destroying the internet and will make it so only people who do approved things on approved browsers (meaning let advertising companies monetize their online activity) will get real access. Cloudflare isn't solving a problem, th…

If your on ipv6, I think they have to for ipv6 addresses… there’s just way too many bots and way too many addresses to feasibly do anything more precise.

If your on ipv4 you should check whether your behind a NAT otherwise you may have gotten an address that was previously used by a bot network.

Re: Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

#120
post #112

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop. It might be too little, too late, at this juncture, and this particular solution doesn't seem too innovative. However, it is directionally 100% correct, and let's hope for massively more innovation in defendin…

It's cloudflare and parasites like them that will make the internet un-free. It's already happening, I'm either blocked or back to 1998 load times be cause of "checking your browser". They are destroying the internet and will make it so only people who do approved things on approved browsers (meaning let advertising companies monetize their online activity) will get real access. Cloudflare isn't solving a problem, th…

How is Cloudflare a parasite? I can use Cloudflare, and get their AI protection, for free. I have dozens of domains I have used with Cloudflare at one point and I haven't paid them a dime.
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