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This feels like email all over again. In the early days of email, everyone had their own IMAP server, and it was good. Then spam happened. Slowly it got harder

This feels like email all over again. In the early days of email, everyone had their own IMAP server, and it was good. Then spam happened. Slowly it got harder and harder to jump through all the hoops needed to ensure your email was delivered to users of gmail and other large email hosts. Even if you were willing to filter all the spam out from your own inbox, it became practically impossible to get delivered to most other users. I wonder if we will see something similar happen with browsers now. Cloudflare and other proxies will rely on increasing levels of fingerprinting to sift out scrapers and bots. Already it's not uncommon to get false positives on Linux+Firefox. Maybe if our overlords are feeling particularly benevolent, Firefox might make the cut for browsers allowed to access the vast majority of sites behind CF, but anything smaller will be blocked. Effectively this will kill rolling your own browser.

mmarian 2y ago
Interesting analogy. But in the email world, smaller clients are allowed. The banning happens on IP/domain level. So I'm guessing that's where we're going to head towards on the browser side?
superkuh 2y ago
The entire premise that "bots" need to be blocked is, in most contexts, just a social hysteria and not coming from actual technical or economic requirements. "Bot" blocking causes far more harm to human persons than would occur if we just lets all agents access public web sites.
- janc_ 2y ago
  There are bots that hurt the expected operation of your server, of course: - those that cause far too much traffic - (comment) spam bots - (for some companies) bots from companies that steal data & resell it verbatim - …? Whether CloudFlare is actually the best (or even a good) tool to fight all those, I have some doubts…
  - superkuh 2y ago
    - If you don't want traffic don't put up a website on the public web. - If you don't want comments don't have comments. - If you don't want your website to be public then don't put it on the public web. And companies are getting just that from Cloudflare. They are no longer on the public internet. They're putting themselves on the modern AOL: Cloudflare.

mmarian 2y ago

Interesting analogy. But in the email world, smaller clients are allowed. The banning happens on IP/domain level. So I'm guessing that's where we're going to head towards on the browser side?

superkuh 2y ago

The entire premise that "bots" need to be blocked is, in most contexts, just a social hysteria and not coming from actual technical or economic requirements. "Bot" blocking causes far more harm to human persons than would occur if we just lets all agents access public web sites.

janc_ 2y ago
There are bots that hurt the expected operation of your server, of course: - those that cause far too much traffic - (comment) spam bots - (for some companies) bots from companies that steal data & resell it verbatim - …? Whether CloudFlare is actually the best (or even a good) tool to fight all those, I have some doubts…
- superkuh 2y ago
  - If you don't want traffic don't put up a website on the public web. - If you don't want comments don't have comments. - If you don't want your website to be public then don't put it on the public web. And companies are getting just that from Cloudflare. They are no longer on the public internet. They're putting themselves on the modern AOL: Cloudflare.