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ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

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Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#431

Post by lukewarm707 »

everdrive wrote: post #69
MyNameIsNickT wrote: post #49

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform. A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users. We also keep a very close…

It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web. Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and function…

i am increasingly moving towards a model of 'no browser'.

search for me is now a proprietary index (like exa) that filters rubbish, with a zero data retention sla. so we don't need google profiling.

the content is distilled into markdown pulled from cloudflare's browser rendering api.

i let cloudflare absorb the torrent of trackers and robot checks, i just get md from the api with nothing else. cloudflare is poacher and gamekeeper.

an alternative is groq compound which can call browsers in parallel.

for interactive sites, or local ai browsing, i sometimes run a browser in a photon os docker with vnc, which gives you the same browser window but it runs code not on your pc.

that said little of my use is now interacting with websites, its all agentic search and websets so i don't have to spend mental energy on it myself

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#432

Post by netdevphoenix »

tedsanders wrote: post #377
littlestymaar wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they know it's bad, they just don't think the rules apply to them.

For what it's worth, the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search. OpenAI documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots Anthropic documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropi... I'm not sure if Gemini lets you opt out without also delisting you from Google search rankings.

Performing an automated action on a website that has not consented is the problem. OpenAI showing you how to opt-opt is backwards. Consent comes first.

Bit concerning that some professional engineers don't understand this given the sensitive systems they interact with.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#433

Post by mort96 »

p-e-w wrote: post #346
vlovich123 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn’t explain why you can’t even start typing until that check proceeds. You could condition the outbound request from being processed until that’s the case. But preventing from typing seems like it’s just worse UX and the problem will fail to appear in any metrics you can track because you have no way of measuring “how quickly would the user have submitted their request without all this other stuff in t…

Many cloud products now continuously send themselves the input you type while you are typing it, to squeeze the maximum possible amount of data from your interactions. I don’t know whether ChatGPT is one of those products, but if it is, that behavior might be a side effect of blocking the input pipeline until verification completes. It might be that they want to get every single one of your keystrokes, but only after…

I just checked the network inspector, the only thing it does per key press is to generate an autocomplete list. It doesn't seem too hard to wait with the autocomplete generation until after whichever checks you run pass.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#434

Post by gib444 »

Imnimo wrote: post #149
MyNameIsNickT wrote: post #49

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform. A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users. We also keep a very close…

It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.

And have absolutely no reservations about making such an obvious statement on a public forum

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#435

Post by lukewarm707 »

lxgr wrote: post #14

It's absurd how unusable Cloudflare is making the web when using a browser or IP address they consider "suspicious". I've lately been drowning in captchas for the crime of using Firefox. All in the interest of "bot protection", of course.

sometimes when there is mafia you get no option but pay pizzo

hence i am just using cloudflare remote browser rendering.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#436

Post by keybored »

tedsanders wrote: post #377
littlestymaar wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they know it's bad, they just don't think the rules apply to them.

For what it's worth, the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search. OpenAI documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots Anthropic documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropi... I'm not sure if Gemini lets you opt out without also delisting you from Google search rankings.

Death by a thousand opt-outs.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#437

Post by mike_hearn »

vlovich123 wrote: post #295
MyNameIsNickT wrote: post #49

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform. A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users. We also keep a very close…

That still doesn’t explain why you can’t even start typing until that check proceeds. You could condition the outbound request from being processed until that’s the case. But preventing from typing seems like it’s just worse UX and the problem will fail to appear in any metrics you can track because you have no way of measuring “how quickly would the user have submitted their request without all this other stuff in t…

I developed the first version of Google's equivalent of this (albeit theirs actually computes a constantly rotating key from the environment, it doesn't just hard-code it in the program!).

The reason it has to block until it's loaded is that otherwise the signal being missing doesn't imply automation. The user might have just typed before it loaded. If you know a legit user will always deliver the data, you can use the absence of it to infer something about what's happening on the client. You can obviously track metrics like "key event occurred before bot detection script did" without using it as an automation signal, just for monitoring.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#438

Post by mike_hearn »

magicseth wrote: post #205
scoofy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere there is someone 3D printing a keyboard cover that an llm can type with.

I'm actually building a physical keyboard for those people who don't have iphones! Though given the reaction I'm seeing here, I probably won't share it with this audience :-P it has capacitive keys, a secure enclave, and a fingerprint sensor.

Please do share. This sort of tech is necessary, for better or worse, and I'd have a bunch of use cases in mind for it!

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#439

Post by wongarsu »

lazycouchpotato wrote: post #380
lxgr wrote: post #14

It's absurd how unusable Cloudflare is making the web when using a browser or IP address they consider "suspicious". I've lately been drowning in captchas for the crime of using Firefox. All in the interest of "bot protection", of course.

At times I'm completely locked out of a website and Cloudflare asks me to email the website owner to get the issue resolved. .. how do they expect me to find the website owner's email if I can't access said website?

Once upon a time we had whois lookup for exactly that usecase (finding a domain's owner without visiting the site). Of course now nearly everyone has meaningless entries from some domain privacy service

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#440

Post by raincole »

Chance-Device wrote: post #430
raincole wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does every article need a 'punchline'? It's a technical analysis. Do you expect punchlines when you read recipes or source code?

Where did I say “every article”? This is AI slop that’s set up like it’s some investigative expose of something scandalous and then shows us nothing interesting. A competent human writer would have reframed the whole thing or just not published it.

Do you think

1. Every person is born with the knowledge of how ChatGPT uses Cloudflare Turnstile?

2. This article contains factual mistakes? If so, what are they?

If neither of these is true, then this article strictly provides information and educational value for some readers. The writing style, AI-like or not, doesn't change that.

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