[zackmorris]

Boy I'm sick of clicking "Verify you are human" on everything from GitLab to banking apps running Cloudflare.

Sick enough that I hope someone prominent at the EFF or similar takes Cloudflare to court over it.

One company shouldn't be allowed to police access to the internet. And certainly shouldn't be allowed to start gatekeeping what is viewable by discriminating against the person or software doing the viewing.

I worry that Cloudflare will keep escalating this unless they're sent a strong signal that it's not supported by the tech community. If you work there, it might be time to consider getting a different job. If you own stock, maybe divest. If you're connected, perhaps your associates can buy from competitors. That's probably the only way to get the board and CEO replaced these days.

[gruez]

>Sick enough that I hope someone prominent at the EFF or similar takes Cloudflare to court over it.

On what basis? It sucks that you can't visit those sites without going through an interstitial, but at the end of the day, those sites are essentially private property and the owners can impose whatever requirements they want on visitors. It's not any different than sites that have registration walls, for instance.

[Maxion]

Cloudflare is more of a symptom of underlying problems. I for sure don't use cloudflare because I love what they do.

[jeroenhd]

Cloudflare is just one of many products blocking unwanted network traffic. They're the biggest, for sure, but hardly the only one. If Cloudflare disappeared tomorrow, another would pop up instantly.

The problem isn't Cloudflare, it's that the internet is filled with ill-willed bots, and those bots seem to have infected your network or your ISPs network as well.

If ISPs did a better job taking action against infected IoT crap and spam farms, you wouldn't need to click so many CAPTCHAs.

Without Cloudflare, you'd just see a page saying "blocked because of supicious network activity" or nothing at all or a redirect shock site if the site admin is feeling particularly spicy. If anything, Cloudflare CAPTCHAs are doing you a service by being a cheap and effective alternative to mass IP range blocks.

[laserbeam]

Something I never considered, I wonder how clicking to be a human works for people with disabilities. There’s gotta be accessibility features there, and I bet bots are abusing them.

[gruez]

At least for cloudflare "captchas", you don't have no solve anything, only click a button. Therefore it's pretty accessible. My guess is that they care less about whether you're a human or not, and more about imposing resource costs on any attacker, because solving those challenges requires a full browser runtime (ie. hundreds of megs of memory + some non-trivial amount of CPU time). That's significantly more expensive than you spamming requests.post() with on a thousand threads.

[Wingman4l7]

Or, the company leaves the accessibility alternative broken, and shrugs.

[Icathian]

Do you also get mad at companies that make locks when people install them on their front doors?

[sensanaty]

> I worry that Cloudflare will keep escalating this unless they're sent a strong signal that it's not supported by the tech community.

AI sycophants have truly deluded themselves into thinking everyone else is falling for their bullshit, it's great to see.

This feature wouldn't exist if "the tech community" didn't support it. If you want someone to blame, it's the AI companies for ruining what was a good thing with their blind greed and gold rush of trying to slurp up literally everything they could get their hands on in the shittiest ways possible, not respecting any commonly agreed upon rules like robots.txt

[shadowgovt]

> I worry that Cloudflare will keep escalating this unless they're sent a strong signal that it's not supported by the tech community.

I don't think that it's not supported by the tech community. Much of that community is on the receiving end of the bad actors. I know that depending on the day I, for one, have muttered under my breath "This would be much easier if everyone were using the same damn web browser."