This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don't like cloudflare but it's nice that they allow people to stop AI scrapping if they want to
CloudFlare has become an Internet protection racket and I'm not happy about it.
It's been this from the very beginning. But they don't fit the definition of a protection racket as they're not the ones attacking you if you don't pay up. So they're more like a security company that has no competitors due to the needed investment to operate.
Cloudflare are notorious for shielding cybercrime sites. You can't even complain about abuse of Cloudflare about them, they'll just forward on your abuse complaint to the likely dodgy host of the cybercrime site. They don't even have a channel to complain to them about network abuse of their DNS services.
So they certainly are an enabler of the cybercriminals they purport to protect people from.
Any internet service provider needs to be completely neutral. Not only in their actions, but also in their liability.
Same goes for other services like payment processors.
If companies that provide content-agnostic services are allowed to policy the content, that opens the door to really nasty stuff.
You can't chop everyone's arms to stop a few people from stealing.
If they think their services are being used in a reprehensible manner, what they need to do is alert the authorities, not act like vigilantes.
If they acted differently, they'd probably be liable for illegal activity that they proxy for (this is for example relevant for the DMCA safe harbor).
Anyhow, when on their abuse page, I have an option for "Registrar", which is used for "DNS abuse", among others.
they're good at protecting websites but damn, having a company being MITM feels so wrong
The shit they know. Plus their support for non-JS users or For are pure shite
Yeah, a few sites outright refuse to work because cloudflare just poops. EDIT: It was supposed to say "loops", but I'm keeping it.
Uh, are they admitting they are trying to circumvent technological protections setup to restrict access to a system?
Isn’t that a literal computer crime?
No-no, see. When an AI-first company does it, it's actually called courageous innovation. Crimes are for poor people
See: Facebook/Meta
puts on evil hat CloudFlare should DRM their protection then DMCA Perplexity and other US based "AI" companies to oblivion. Side effect, might break the Internet.
The Internet was already ruined, cloudflare is just bandaids on top of band aids.
Worth it.
Can't believe I've lived to see Cloudflare be the good guys
Lesser of two bad guys maybe?
They’re not. They’re using this as an excuse to become paid gatekeepers of the internet as we know it. All that’s happening is that Cloudflare is using this to menuever into position where they can say “nice traffic you’ve got there - would be a shame if something happened to it”.
AI companies are crap.
What Cloudflare is doing here is also crap.
And we’re cheering it on.
Gee that's a real removed it ain't it perplexity?
they cant get their ai to check a box that says "I am not a robot"? I'd think thatd be a first year comp sci student level task. And robots.txt files were basically always voluntary compliance anyway.
Cloudflare actually fully fingerprints your browser and even sells that data. Thats your IP, TLS, operating system, full browser environment, installed extensions, GPU capabilities etc. It's all tracked before the box even shows up, in fact the box is there to give the runtime more time to fingerprint you.
Yeah and the worst part is it doesn't fucking work for the one thing it's supposed to do.
The only thing it does is stop the stupidest low effort scrapers and forces the good ones to use a browser.
