Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a planet-scale MITM?
So you're against all CDNs?
A CDN doesn't necessarily have to perform a MitM. We really need more nuanced terminology to distinguish the various approaches.
Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
21–30 of 169 posts
Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're against all CDNs?
A CDN doesn't necessarily have to perform a MitM. We really need more nuanced terminology to distinguish the various approaches.
Right, but practically speaking all CDNs are MITMs. If you're against cloudflare you should be against cloudfront, akamai, etc. as well.
Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#23Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#24Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#25Please consider installing one of the many PoW schemes such as anubis rather than use these cloudflare "features". I increasingly encounter outright blocks rather than any sort of captcha when visiting cloudflare "protected" sites. Each individual site isn't particularly important to me but it's depressing to watch the process unfold like this. You really are choosing to erode the core basis of the internet if you go…
>I increasingly encounter outright blocks rather than any sort of captcha when visiting cloudflare "protected" sites.
???
Unless you're browsing around with the googlebot user agent string, you should be getting turnstile challanges at most, not blocks. And if you're getting a turnstile challenge it's unclear how it's different than an anubis challenge. If you're outright blocked, it's probably a site decision (eg. block all VPNs or block everyone not from a given country) rather than cloudflare's.
Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#26What’s the end goal for Cloudflare and the web here? I don’t think ADOG (anthropic, deepmind, openai, google) is going to pay to crawl.
What would force their hand?
It’s more likely they’ll strike undisclosed agreements with major sources of discussion like reddit etc.
That’s not to say getting new information as a way of context-providing is not going to happen but that’s not scraping.
Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're against all CDNs?
A CDN doesn't necessarily have to perform a MitM. We really need more nuanced terminology to distinguish the various approaches.
Ideally yes, the TLS termination does not need to happen for caching purposes. Challenge is that in practice every business wants to be sticky and try to provide more functionalities which do require TLS termination. Most people either trust CDN's or they do not understand MitM so it does not concerns them. Plus they are getting certificate management and DDOS prevention capabilities.
Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#28[dead]
Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#29Please consider installing one of the many PoW schemes such as anubis rather than use these cloudflare "features". I increasingly encounter outright blocks rather than any sort of captcha when visiting cloudflare "protected" sites. Each individual site isn't particularly important to me but it's depressing to watch the process unfold like this. You really are choosing to erode the core basis of the internet if you go…
>I increasingly encounter outright blocks rather than any sort of captcha when visiting cloudflare "protected" sites. ??? Unless you're browsing around with the googlebot user agent string, you should be getting turnstile challanges at most, not blocks. And if you're getting a turnstile challenge it's unclear how it's different than an anubis challenge. If you're outright blocked, it's probably a site decision (eg. b…
> And if you're getting a turnstile challenge it's unclear how it's different than an anubis challenge.
You are guaranteed to pass an Anubis challenge eventually [0], whereas it's possible to get stuck forever in an infinitely-looping Turnstile challenge.
> If you're outright blocked, it's probably a site decision (eg. block all VPNs or block everyone not from a given country) rather than cloudflare's.
Cloudflare blocks legitimate users itself sometimes [1].
[0]: Unless you run into a bug, but Anubis is open source, so you can always submit a patch upstream. I've done this myself, and I can confirm that it's relatively straightforward.
Re: Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
#30What’s the end goal for Cloudflare and the web here? I don’t think ADOG (anthropic, deepmind, openai, google) is going to pay to crawl. What would force their hand? It’s more likely they’ll strike undisclosed agreements with major sources of discussion like reddit etc. That’s not to say getting new information as a way of context-providing is not going to happen but that’s not scraping.
I get a mixed feeling about all this. Cloudflare is unilaterally making all these decisions which impact the whole internet traffic flow. Taking the lead is one thing, however decisions like this should have the direct involvement of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to account for all stakeholders, otherwise we run into the situation of a fragmented internet