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The AI company Perplexity is complaining their bots can't bypass Cloudflare's firewall
(www.searchenginejournal.com)
This is a nice CloudFlare ad
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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yeah. still not worth dealing with fucking cloudflare. fuck cloudflare.
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(9 replies)
Perplexity argues that a platform’s inability to differentiate between helpful AI assistants and harmful bots causes misclassification of legitimate web traffic.
So, I assume Perplexity uses appropriate identifiable user-agent headers, to allow hosters to decide whether to serve them one way or another?
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(4 replies)
You could say they are... Perplexed.
Here comes the ridiculous offer to buy Google chrome with money they don't have: easy delicious scraping directly from the user source
When a firm outright admits to bypassing or trying to bypass measures taken to keep them out, you think that would be a slam dunk case of unauthorized access under the CFAA with felony enhancements.
Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.
That logic would not extend to ad blockers, as the point of concern is gaining unauthorized access to a computer system or asset. Blocking ads would not be considered gaining unauthorized access to anything. In fact it would be the opposite of that.
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(25 replies)
They already prosecute people under the unauthorized access provision. They just don’t prosecute rich people under it.
They prosecuted and convicted a guy under the CFAA for figuring out the URL schema for an AT&T website designed to be accessed by the iPad when it first launched, and then just visiting that site by trying every URL in a script. And then his lawyer (the foremost expert on the CFAA) got his conviction overturned:
https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-auernheimer
We have to maintain that fight, to make sure that the legal system doesn't criminalize normal computer tinkering, like using scripts or even browser settings in ways that site owners don't approve of.
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(2 replies)
It's difficult to be a shittier company than OpenAI, but Perplexity seems to be trying hard.
Step 1, SOMEHOW find a more punchable face than Altman
Altman’s face looks like it’s already been punched
That’s the entire point, dipshit. I wish we got one of the cool techno dystopias rather than this boring corporate idiot one.
I'm still holding out for Stephen Hawking to mail out Demon Summoning programs.
Traveling snake oil salesman complains he can't pick people's locks.
They do have a point though. It would be great to let per-prompt searches go through, but not mass scrapping
I believe a lot of websites don't want both though
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(2 replies)
rare cloudflare w
As far as security is concerned, their w's are pretty common tbh. It's just the whole centralization issue.
Uh.. good?
Good. I went through my CF panel, and blocked some of those "AI Assistants" that by default were open, including Perplexity's.
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(2 replies)
Well... Good.
good, that means it’s working
I’m gonna be frustrated (though not surprised) if the response is anything other than this.
It seems like it's some kind of distraction to make people think things aren't as bad as they really are, it just sounds too far-fetched to me.
It's like a bear that has eaten too much and starts whining because a small rabbit is running away from him, even though the bear has already eaten almost all the rabbits and is clearly full.
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(2 replies)
You'd think that a competent technology company, with their own AI would be able to figure out a way to spoof Cloudflare's checks. I'd still think that.
Or find a more efficient way to manage data, since their current approach is basically DDOSing the internet for training data and also for responding to user interactions.
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This is why companies like Perplexity and OpenAI are creating browsers.