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But you know the website might have sooper sekret information they want to protect, which is why it's been published on a public website. Speaking of bullshit

But you know the website might have sooper sekret information they want to protect, which is why it's been published on a public website. Speaking of bullshit restrictions designed to encourage compliance with surveillance, have imgur links just straight up stopped working for anyone else recently? I'm coming from a datacenter IP. I assume it's just some heavy handed part of the cost cutting push they announced.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
CloudFlare is usually there to mitigate bots attacking. Without which, the site wouldn't be available to view in the first place. CloudFlare is merely the symptom of a greater set of problems, which it attempts to mitigate. If you want to be angry about something, be angry that bruteforce attacks are common, guzzle resources and usually yield zero legal repercussions in most cases.
- slig 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Perhaps. Ask your government about it if you genuinely don't think the alternative is going to be far worse. People demand x solutions for y technologies like crypto or AI. Demand solutions for the problem. The centralized solution is going to be a government-owned/controlled MITM service like CloudFlare. No doubt with actual ID for verification. I don't see the decentralized solution happening any time soon. Massive attacks existed long before CloudFlare ever did. If you're implying there's a conspiracy that CloudFlare is attacking others directly or indirectly to sell their solutions, I'd be extremely careful as that's defamatory and almost certainly false. Furthermore, most CloudFlare users only use the free plan and thus cost CloudFlare money. Isn't that curious?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- statquontrarian 4y ago
  Personally, I have no problem with CloudFlare's bot protection. My problem is with CloudFlare's lack of diagnostics and community involvement to resolve/explain false positives. I have no idea what obscure default setting to change in Firefox to make it work.
Alupis 4y ago
Verification isn't about keeping secrets, obviously, it's about restricting the velocity of bots and their ability (intentional or not) to degrade your site's performance/availability. There are too many bots out there that are very inconsiderate and do not limit or throttle themselves. We have one right now that crawls every single webpage (and we have 10's of thousands) every couple days, without any throttle or limit. It's likely somebody's toy scraper, and currently it's doing no harm, but not everyone has the server resources we have. The point is - if you are dealing with inconsiderate bots, a captcha of some type is pretty nearly a bullet proof way to stop them. With that said, Cloudflare usually is smart enough to detect unusual patterns, and present a challenge to only those who they believe are bots or up to no good. If every person gets a challenge, then the website operator is either experiencing an active attack, or has accidentally set their security configuration too high.
- Hizonner 4y ago
  > The point is - if you are dealing with inconsiderate bots, a captcha of some type is pretty nearly a bullet proof way to stop them. Not any more.
  - Alupis 4y ago
    Most bots do not handle javascript, still to this day. They want to scrape HTML and catalog prices, etc. At least in our experience.
    - Hizonner 4y ago
      OK, fair enough. Not in about six months to a year. Because publicly available ML can now solve pretty much any CAPTCHA a human can solve, there's now an incentive to start deploying and improving the already existing JavaScript-capable bot frameworks.
      - Alupis 4y ago
        Most bots are either search engines (of all kinds, not just your google's and bing's), competitors, or academic/fun projects. Of the three common types, only one has a serious interest in breaking captcha's - but they also have a serious interest in not getting too much attention by abusing your services deliberately. ie. if a bot is misbehaving, it's going to get our attention, and we're going to look into what it's doing, where it came from, who operates it, etc, and possibly take some action if appropriate or available. Those actions may not necessarily be limited to the technical space either... This is just our experience. Other industries will have their own sets of challenges to deal with.
halfjoking 4y ago
Imgur links haven't worked on my VPN for a long time. Even if they did, I'd still avoid imgur since they censor even worse than reddit.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

CloudFlare is usually there to mitigate bots attacking. Without which, the site wouldn't be available to view in the first place. CloudFlare is merely the symptom of a greater set of problems, which it attempts to mitigate. If you want to be angry about something, be angry that bruteforce attacks are common, guzzle resources and usually yield zero legal repercussions in most cases.

slig 4y ago
[deleted]
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Perhaps. Ask your government about it if you genuinely don't think the alternative is going to be far worse. People demand x solutions for y technologies like crypto or AI. Demand solutions for the problem. The centralized solution is going to be a government-owned/controlled MITM service like CloudFlare. No doubt with actual ID for verification. I don't see the decentralized solution happening any time soon. Massive attacks existed long before CloudFlare ever did. If you're implying there's a conspiracy that CloudFlare is attacking others directly or indirectly to sell their solutions, I'd be extremely careful as that's defamatory and almost certainly false. Furthermore, most CloudFlare users only use the free plan and thus cost CloudFlare money. Isn't that curious?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
statquontrarian 4y ago
Personally, I have no problem with CloudFlare's bot protection. My problem is with CloudFlare's lack of diagnostics and community involvement to resolve/explain false positives. I have no idea what obscure default setting to change in Firefox to make it work.

Alupis 4y ago

Verification isn't about keeping secrets, obviously, it's about restricting the velocity of bots and their ability (intentional or not) to degrade your site's performance/availability. There are too many bots out there that are very inconsiderate and do not limit or throttle themselves. We have one right now that crawls every single webpage (and we have 10's of thousands) every couple days, without any throttle or limit. It's likely somebody's toy scraper, and currently it's doing no harm, but not everyone has the server resources we have. The point is - if you are dealing with inconsiderate bots, a captcha of some type is pretty nearly a bullet proof way to stop them. With that said, Cloudflare usually is smart enough to detect unusual patterns, and present a challenge to only those who they believe are bots or up to no good. If every person gets a challenge, then the website operator is either experiencing an active attack, or has accidentally set their security configuration too high.

Hizonner 4y ago
> The point is - if you are dealing with inconsiderate bots, a captcha of some type is pretty nearly a bullet proof way to stop them. Not any more.
- Alupis 4y ago
  Most bots do not handle javascript, still to this day. They want to scrape HTML and catalog prices, etc. At least in our experience.
  - Hizonner 4y ago
    OK, fair enough. Not in about six months to a year. Because publicly available ML can now solve pretty much any CAPTCHA a human can solve, there's now an incentive to start deploying and improving the already existing JavaScript-capable bot frameworks.
    - Alupis 4y ago
      Most bots are either search engines (of all kinds, not just your google's and bing's), competitors, or academic/fun projects. Of the three common types, only one has a serious interest in breaking captcha's - but they also have a serious interest in not getting too much attention by abusing your services deliberately. ie. if a bot is misbehaving, it's going to get our attention, and we're going to look into what it's doing, where it came from, who operates it, etc, and possibly take some action if appropriate or available. Those actions may not necessarily be limited to the technical space either... This is just our experience. Other industries will have their own sets of challenges to deal with.

halfjoking 4y ago

Imgur links haven't worked on my VPN for a long time. Even if they did, I'd still avoid imgur since they censor even worse than reddit.