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Cloudflare, Google, Bing Destroying the Infrastructure of the Free Web
- brlewis 6y agoIs there no link to the post apart from the top-level link to the blog?
- edoceo 6y agoThat's how this one is, the post in question is just the first post on that page, appears to be the full content.
- shakna 6y agoThe post has a name attribute (cloudflaredestroy), so you can generate a link (a href='cloudflaredestroy'), but you can't have a direct URL to it, as it doesn't have an id.
- validuser 6y agohttps://gigablast.com/blog.html#cloudflaredestroy https://gigablast.com/blog.html#cloudflaredestroy
- joeraut 6y ago> You have to be a non-blind person to pass the Turing test, as Cloudflare does not offer a handicap option. (Edit: not sure if the above is true.) I was quite surprised to see this. Much effort has been put into making the web more accessible; it’s a shame if an otherwise accessible site is blocked behind a non-accessible captcha wall.
- calmworm 6y agoI don’t even think this part of the article/blurb is true. Edit: I stand corrected, looks like Cloudflare recently moved to hCaptcha, which does not offer an “a11y” option.
- h3h3 6y ago"How it works: first, an accessibility user signs up at this URL, which is linked in the hCaptcha widget info page. They are given an encrypted cookie that can be used several times per day, but must be refreshed every 24 hours via login." https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility
- MattGaiser 6y agoCaptchas have long been hated in the accessibility community though, so even if inaccurate, it seems to be a common sentiment.
- abiogenesis 6y agohttps://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch... > [...] it has a robust solution for visually impaired and other users with accessibility challenges [...]
- anjel 6y agoThe way that works is the now 30 year old Americans with Disability Act understandably never contemplated captchas. So legal enforcement can be pursued in the courts only employing the weaker "violates the spirit of the law" legal argument..[1] And so it goes.[2] [1] https://captcha.com/accessibility/ada-captcha.html https://captcha.com/accessibility/ada-captcha.html [2] Linda Ellerbee
- polyomino 6y agoVery click-baity title IMO. I think they're right about Cloudflare making legitimate scraping more difficult. There's little reason to believe that it's to protect the big players in search though.
- calmworm 6y agoThe article has no substance at all. It’s like 150 words and just describes Cloudflare a bit and explains how captcha works. Not what I’m used to seeing on HN frontpage.
- EE84M3i 6y agoCloudflare is not unique in this regard. Other CDNs and just normal libraries offer anti-scraping capabilities.
- johnklos 6y agoYet you respond in the fashion of a typical fan without any substance at all. It's a legitimate complaint about a company that doesn't care about the negative impacts of their decisions. Do you disagree with the facts of the complaint?
- calmworm 6y agoThe facts of the complaint are that Google, Bing, and Baidu are secretly running or maybe influencing Cloudflare and they purposely implemented a non-accessible captcha to inhibit the smaller crawlers ability to build their index ... no, I don’t agree. Not based on a blurb that contains zero evidence or sources.
- MauranKilom 6y ago> Now, if you don't retain that cookie for each subsequent access to that same website from that same IP address the delay is repeatedly increases until like around 30 seconds at which point you will be presented with a Turing test. So retain the cookie they give you? Is that a problem? (Honest question, I have not dabbled in writing crawlers...)
- zerotolerance 6y agoBeing a well-behaved crawler and using cookies the way a browser would is simple. Especially if they're crawling from a single IP address (as described).
- MattGaiser 6y agoOne possible problem with this is if one crawler gets a link to the website and then a parallel crawler gets a link to the website as well. Enough parallel crawlers and you hit the captcha. So the crawlers would need to be maintaining a record of sites and associated cookies. I don’t see why it couldn’t be done, but definitely adds to complexity.
- core-questions 6y ago> So retain the cookie they give you? Ahh, but the cookie is created client-side using some Javascript which does some computationally intensive stuff for a second. Doesn't bother you as an end-user, but if you're writing a crawler and you're not driving a headless browser (expensive) then you probably don't trivially have the ability to run arbitrary Javascript code (or else, you have the work of integrating Deno or something to do that part for you). Either way it means you can't just curl the webpage and get it. That's obviously the point when defeating DDOS attacks is the use case, but it doesn't work for crawlers, many of which are legitimate "users" like in the article. These services should offer some other easier proof-of-work mechanism.
- cnst 6y ago> computationally intensive stuff for a second. Doesn't bother you as an end-user Actually, it does. They waste the CPU cycles of my devices for absolutely no good reason. It's very environmentally unfriendly as well. It shifts the cost onto the end user, not a very nice way to go about it. They probably don't describe the drawbacks to their own customers, either, so, everyone simply opts-in thinking there's no drawbacks; but the end result in a diminished user experience and tonnes of extra CO2 emissions throughout the world.
- mmaunder 6y agoSure the author may not win a Pulitzer, but the point re accessibility, and the big SEs being stakeholders, creating a moat for any new crawlers, is valid.
- bxwalters 6y agoGoogle seems to be destroying itself, fortunately. The search results got so bad after the recent changes that for the first time duckduckgo is superior, even for technical searches. I'm slowly making the switch now.
- vikramkr 6y agoThis is a weird article - it looks like its pushing a conspiracy that cloud flare is secretly an agent for Google bing and Baidu simultaneously?
- kgraves 6y agoWhat is it with this pseudo-doomsday clickbait "the free and open web is dead" type posts I keep seeing? Is the web really dying or being destroyed? I don't get how it is and this article doesn't explain this either.
- greatjack613 6y agoThe solution is simple. Can some cloudflare engineers here grant this search engine the same access it gives the chinese ones?
- zerotolerance 6y agoThey failed to present data that exceptions are made for other search engines.
- greatjack613 6y agoValid point, but I do not think they are lying, I am sure they can present it to cloudflare if required.
- joshuamorton 6y agoIt's quite likely that Baidu is doing the reasonable thing and using a more sophisticated crawling mechanism to cache the cookies. You have to do this anyway to be able to crawl much of the web which is highly js-dependent.
- cnst 6y agoSo, the solution is to complain on social media to right the wrongdoing? Shouldn't there be a better way for the shareholders at stake to have a voice?!
- judge2020 6y agohCaptcha (the service CF switched to after Google decided to start charging for reCAPTCHA for large-volume customers[0]) has an accessibility option that bypasses their captchas, and it's available at: https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility 0: https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22812509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22812509 )
- dudus 6y agoWhat large players did Google charge for recaptcha other than cloudflare?
- judge2020 6y agoI don't know of any specifics, however the pricing change is public: https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha-enterprise https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha-enterprise https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/ https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/ > Free up to 1 million Assessments / Month
- jyrkesh 6y agoAs others have said, this article is mostly nasty rhetoric with very little substance. I'm surprised that the CAPTCHA isn't accessible, but that's about it. Websites opt-in to CloudFlare DDoS protection. If you want to be crawled, you don't have to use it. But it's very difficult to expose yourself to the open internet nowadays unless you're hosted in a cloud or have something like CloudFlare. I have stuff I don't want crawled at all, I use CloudFlare, and it's an awesome (free!) service that helps me maintain HTTPS certs and keep Chinese and Russian IPs from hammering my server.
- johnklos 6y agoNasty? Methinks your reaction shows you to be a fanboi who doesn't like someone speaking truths about the object of your fandom.
- mcdoogal 6y agoNot a very effective retort when GP lays out their thoughts and justifies their position...
- Eduard 6y ago> But it's very difficult to expose yourself to the open internet nowadays unless you're hosted in a cloud or have something like CloudFlare. Yet, millions of websites are working fine without cloud and without CloudFlare.
- johnklos 6y agoAs others constantly show us, illegal is only illegal when someone actually enforces the law. Even if it weren't illegal, if it only impedes a small subset of people, or if it impedes people without money / resources, then Cloudflare won't give the tiniest of a damn. Their record is clear on this. They only care about those who give them money. Any attempts to give you things for free is to bait you in to becoming dependent on their platform.
- monkin 6y agoSo some bizarre and absolutely insignificant search engine is ranting about being irrelevant? Good for them.