Posted by HypnoticOcelot 5 hours ago
Yeah, this needs to be burned to the ground.
Cloudflare's demo page still treats that as a pass, but complains about it. As is often the case with Cloudflare, I expect that they'll then take no responsibility for sites that use more aggressive settings.
Obviously this is terrible, but I think there's a possibility it's the least terrible option? Another option is IP reputation, which I think is worse. Or scanning a code with a non-rooted phone, which I think is even worse than that!
There isn't one, and pretending otherwise is nonsense because humans will always provide their credentials to something to act on their behalf.
In the limit you end up with Chinese phone farms.
Cloudflare, Google Captcha, HCaptcha etc. are all shitty technical solutions because, as we are all discovering, it comes at the cost of our privacy (i.e. our personal data may monetise these services) and / or our computing resource and time. If current copyright laws aren't sufficient to prevent this, we have to acknowledge the system is broken. The answer could be enhancing it with some kind of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -like laws, but in favour of the creators against BigTech or rogue actors.
- Web-scraping and copyright law - https://www.neudata.co/blog/web-scraping-and-copyright-law
- Why DMCA Claims Against Web Scrapers Face Long Odds - https://capstonedc.com/insights/why-dmca-claims-against-web-...
As for issues like bots overloading websites or using too many resources scaling laws will take care of it quickly, it’s not like you can’t serve thousands of RPS from a Raspberry Pi these days.
The thing why Cloudflare got invented isn't AI scrapers. These are just the latest development... the original reason why Cloudflare got created and why it experienced such a meteoric growth is DDoS and botnets.
Yes. We need regulation in the AI space. But it will be useless as long as bad actors aren't held accountable - and a lot of the bad actors aren't in our jurisdictions. You got hacked devices all over the world in giant botnets, controlled by Russia, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean actors. You got Chinese AI scraper bots as China is heavily investing into training their own models. You got Indian, Filipino and Myanmar-based scammers.
And frankly I have no idea how to get all of that under control. As much as I'd like to see sanctions against both domestic and foreign enablers of abuse (which includes residential ISPs) - it's going to be one giant ass whack-a-mole game.
> we have to acknowledge the system is broken
The system is broken. It probably takes, what, 10 seconds or less to use a residential or foreign proxy, 6+ months to internationally track and prosecute a single offender? So like a million times more effort going the regulatory route.
Which sounds extremely difficult to differentiate
You can forget about it. It is not possible. Simple as that.
Then when it's "processing", do them in bulk and prioritize slower users. There's huge opportunity do bot checks after checkout without affecting user experience.
Also on product launches you could add unique field which requires user to input, for example that way bots can't prepare for launches.
Normally websites feature test and just skip using obscure disabled APIs, or more likely, websites don't use those APIs at all or only tracking scripts use it, which are already optional usually.
Problem with CF is that if you want increased security they'll prevent you from gaining it everywhere, even on sites they don't protect, or prevent you from accessing services even the ones you paid for. Browsers don't allow disabling APIs per domain, so you're either at risk everywhere or you're blocked from accessing a lot of things for no particular reason.
CF can't be bothered to feature test.
>Turns out it's because Cloudflare wants to have a fingerprint of your device via WebGL, the only reason for doing this would be tracking.
> So Cloudflare just banned all WebKitGTK browsers as I guess they put an exception for Safari.
This is false. I ran firefox with:
* hardware acceleration disabled (so software renderer, nothing to fingerprint)
* resistfingerprinting enabled, including letterboxing with default window size
* webgl disabled
* VPN enabled
* In a Windows VM
By all accounts this should be the most suspicious fingerprint ever, but turnstile happily lets me through. If they want to track people, they're doing a pretty bad job. My guess is that OP's browser is getting banned because his WebKitGTK has a weird fingerprint, not because of webgl or whatever.
> Such things are blocked in WebKit, and have been for years. Meaning it's tracking so awful that even Apple would block it, and as far as I can tell it's not the kind of privacy protection you can easily disable in it.
This is also false. Webgl fingerprinting works just fine on Safari. They might try to mitigate it by adding some noise, but that's not so different than what firefox does, and is certainly not "blocked".
Official Firefox can be leaky unless you build it yourself with some build-time changes or use a fork with such[0]. Am I guessing right that you still have Webcompat, RemoteSettings, and Nimbus enabled still? How do you know a compatibility intervention isn't causing your browser to open the kimono just enough to "unbreak the page"?
> My guess is that OP's browser is getting banned because his WebKitGTK has a weird fingerprint, not because of webgl or whatever.
My guess is a different flavor of the same: Not matching an expected fingerprint (simplified: whitelist vs blacklist approach) combined with other factors.
[0]: I'm currently aware of Tor Browser, Konform Browser (am dev), Mullvad Browser, and to a certain extent Waterfox, LibreWolf, and r3df0x doing that.
See my other comment, tor browser works fine too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48346659
fingerprintingProtection works fine on the other hand, but then again that's intentionally less intrusive.
So why is Cloudflare saying the author got blocked because of WebGL?
> > Such things are blocked in WebKit, and have been for years. Meaning it's tracking so awful that even Apple would block it, and as far as I can tell it's not the kind of privacy protection you can easily disable in it.
> This is also false. Webgl fingerprinting works just fine on Safari. They might try to mitigate it by adding some noise, but that's not so different than what firefox does, and is certainly not "blocked".
While I don't have an iDevice to try, the assumption that they are special cased is fair... because they are: https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...
(Yes, this is basically WEI in a shinier package.)
No idea. I can't even reproduce the error OP got with webgl disabled.
