[dlcarrier]

Inevitably the internet will have two types of users:

    1. The anti-bot bots that must stop you from proceeding, because they aren't entirely sure you aren't a bot

and

    2. The bots that can get past them, which we all must eventually deploy, if we want a chance to visit a web page

[ACCount37]

Why would anyone ever want to solve 99 Cloudflare captchas a day if you can get a bot to do it instead?

[iso1631]

Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree".

Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it.

[pocksuppet]

Cloudflare just started blocking Googlebot, so maybe we'll see an exodus away from Cloudflare by people who want their sites indexed? Hopefully?

[warkdarrior]

I thought Google Search is dead, everyone is using ChatGPT now to find information.

[fl4regun]

but how does chatGPT find information?

[tempodox]

With bots that break through cloudflare captchas. As a human, I immediately close the browser tab when I see one. If you make your site inaccessible for humans, only the bots remain.

[dormento]

Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. It is akin to a disease.

The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort?

[iugtmkbdfil834]

Not any kind of original work.

But

The llm thing started to change me in a sense that I no longer really feel obligated to use everybody else's solutions. It may be harder and harder to get onto the 'old web', but my new small project put a website from cellphone and is available for as long as I need it to be available.

The short answer to what we can do is 'adjust accordingly'.

[eqvinox]

> Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things.

How about an internet where we don't need CloudFlare?

One without zillions of AI crawlers and script kiddies with Terabit DDoS capability… (the latter being the harder problem)

[theendisney]

Bittorent grinds on undisturbed.

Imagine archives with static content and user friendly file selection. Like those old world printed product catalogs mixed with content more like books and magazine. One can still have interactive headless websites/api and checkout pages.(Updated) torrents can share folder and file names but you have to force re-check. Could automate that too.

They can be many TBs large, no need to download the entite thing.

[ACCount37]

It's like the good old joke about a bear-proof trash can.

There is now a considerable overlap between the capabilities of the dumbest users and the smartest AIs.

[ivanjermakov]

> but HN loves it

There is popular sentiment on HN that CF is making internet worse by being a core infrastructure element most websites use.

[tempodox]

It’s not the core infrastructure part that makes the internet worse.

[thenthenthen]

Early 2000’s they turned of PUBLIC tv here. To receive public funded TV you now need a digital subscription. I never thought this would happen to the internet, as in… its becoming more of an intranet everyday.

[livingsoft]

yes, but it can be not so grim - we just need to equip everyone with the means to grow their own local webs, and find a way to connect them by p2p. call it Mycelial Web: federation of local webs that grows by processing the dead material of the open web into personal http worlds grown in containers.