Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall

• drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Thats not how it works. Cf uses thousands of variables to estimate a trust score and block people so just because it works for you doesn’t mean it works.

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  • Dremor@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Same goes the other way. It 's not because it doesn’t work for you that it should go away.

    That technology has its uses, and Cloudflare is probably aware that there are still some false positive, and probably is working on it as we write.

    The decision is for the website owner to take, taking into consideration the advantages of filtering out a majority of bots and the disadvantages of loosing some legitimate traffic because of false positives. If you get Cloudflare challenge, chances are that he chosed that the former vastly outclass the later.

    Now there are some self-hosted alternatives, like Anubis, but business clients prefer SaaS like Cloudflare to having to maintain their own software. Once again it is their choices and liberty to do so.

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    • drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      lmao imagine shilling for corporate Cloudflare like this. Also false positive vs false negative are fundamentally not equal.

      Cloudflare is probably aware that there are still some false positive, and probably is working on it as we write.

      The main issue with Cloudflare is that it’s mostly bullshit. It does not report any stats to the admins on how many users were rejected or any false positive rates and happily put’s everyone under “evil bot” umbrella. So people from low trust score environments like Linux or IPs from poorer countries are under significant disadvantage and left without a voice.

      I’m literally a security dev working with Cloudflare anti-bot myself (not by choice). It’s a useful tool for corporate but a really fucking bad one for the health of the web, much worse than any LLM agent or crawler, period.

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      • Laser@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        So people from low trust score environments like Linux

        Linux user here, Cloudflare hasn’t blocked access to a single page for me unless I use a VPN, which then can trigger it.

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      • Dremor@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Ah, the good old “you dont agree with me so you must be shilling for X” argument. I suppose you are shilling for the bots then, am I right ?

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• COASTER1921@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I suspect a lot of it comes down to your ISP. Like the original commentor I also frequently can’t pass CloudFlare turnstile when on Wifi, although refreshing the page a few times usually gets me through. Worst case on my phone’s hotspot I can much more consistently pass. It’s super annoying and combined with their recent DNS outage has totally ruined any respect I had for CloudFlare.

  Interesting video on the subject: youtu.be/SasXJwyKkMI

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