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by snorlaxle 2626 days ago
Do you have a source for that claim? How does sharing IP's with 'like factories' and thousands of other legitimate users justifies getting captcha-blocked by Cloudflare without explicit instructions from the website owners?
1 comments
lucb1e 2625 days ago
Note that you're asking the question as if the statement is true and you just inviting an opinionated justification. The answer to "how does sharing IPs with like factories justify blocking others" is easy to give an opinion on. Proving this is the real cause, that the local ISPs are not doing anything against it, etc. is what I think we should be asking.
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snorlaxle 2625 days ago
Social media like factories are usually targeting websites that are not hosted by Cloudflare (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Youtube etc.)

If the like factories are using 3rd world IP's they are probably real human ( https://www.rt.com/viral/388169-smartphones-factory-generate... ) because bots can be run cheaper on a 1st world server because bandwidth, IP, and power usually cost less there. Captcha is an anti-bot measure and is not (or at least shouldn't be but I'm finding it hard to pass CF's captcha as human) very effective against actual humans.

I don't even think CF considers(or even aware of) the existence of a like factory on the same network for displaying the captcha and I am pretty sure they don't justify their captcha blocking with it. It's more likely that they just see a bunch of connections coming from the same IP and naively concludes that it must be a bot.

I'm sure it's easy to make "excuses"(vs justification) but given the real harm it does to actual human users and questionable effectiveness against the doubtful ill-effects of the existence of like factories against CF-hosted websites; I'd like to hear that "justification."

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blfr 2625 days ago
bots can be run cheaper on a 1st world server because bandwidth, IP, and power usually cost less there

First world server IP ranges are treated just as poorly for this exact reason. Try browsing the web through a VPN/proxy on an OVH (French) server. I get captcha requests on Youtube videos and Google searches.

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