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.
Worth it.
The Internet was already ruined, cloudflare is just bandaids on top of band aids.
This is a nice CloudFlare ad
yeah. still not worth dealing with fucking cloudflare. fuck cloudflare.
DEATH TO CLOUDFLARE!
That would be terrible for a lot of people as they are the only company providing such services that doesn’t charge for traffic.
They can use web.archive.org as a cdn(I do that to cloudflare websites). But honestly, cloudflare or not, the internet is broken.
Using archive.org as a CDN at the scale of Cloudflare would be an immediate death sentence for archive.org.
well I’m doing my part: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bcma/ sorry archive.org, I promise I’ll donate ❤️
Can you explain please? How can I use archive.org as a cdn for my website?
just take a snapshot of your website… then make all links to your website link to that snapshot, and turn your server off.
Oh, well, it’s okay if it suits for you. Just not at all an alternative to cloudflare.
I’m out of the loop, what’s wrong with cloud flare?
Centralization, mostly, but also their hands-off approach to most fascist content.
They kind of have to be hands off or risk losing safe harbor protections.
I get the centralization concerns, but I would think that’s on the consumer since there are other options. As for the fascist content, as another commenter said, they could risk their safe harbor if they started stated regulating content that they weren’t legally required to regulate.
Just my thoughts.
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?
yeah it’s almost like there as already a system for this in place
THE CAKE DAY IS NOW. (i dont have an image at hand)
i really wish we wouldn’t do those. feels too reddity.
but thanks.
as you wish
*monkeys paw curls and i turn into cake*
And I’m assuming if the robots.txt state their UserAgent isn’t allowed to crawl, it obeys it, right? :P
No, as per the article, their argumentation is that they are not web crawlers generating an index, they are user-action-triggered agents working live for the user.
Except, it’s not a live user hitting 10 sights all the same time, trying to crawl the entire site… Live users cannot do that.
That said, if my robots.txt forbids them from hitting my site, as a proxy, they obey that, right?
Its not up to the hoster to decide whom to serve content. Web is intended to be user agent agnostic.
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.
You could say they are… Perplexed.
Traveling snake oil salesman complains he can’t pick people’s locks.
Can’t believe I’ve lived to see Cloudflare be the good guys
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.
Lesser of two bad guys maybe?
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.
Good. I went through my CF panel, and blocked some of those “AI Assistants” that by default were open, including Perplexity’s.
CF panel? Your light bulb??
CF == Cloudflare :)
Well… Good.
This is why companies like Perplexity and OpenAI are creating browsers.
good, that means it’s working
I’m gonna be frustrated (though not surprised) if the response is anything other than this.
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.
Recaptcha v2 does way more than check if the box was checked.
you’re not wrong, but it also allows more than 99.8% of the bot traffic through too on text challenges. Its like the TSA of website security. Its mostly there to keep the user busy while cloudflare places itself in a man in the middle of your encrypted connection to a third party. The only difference between cloudflare and a malicious attacker is cloudflares stated intention not to be evil. With that and 3 dollars I can buy myself a single hard shell taco from tacobell.
