Comment by discardedrefuse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by discardedrefuse | Hacker News Reader

discardedrefuse

Cloudflare has been doing some great things. But lately it seems that, maybe, they have their hands in too many cookie jars. I get the ominous feeling that things could go south real fast.

I have my browser setup in a way that makes Cloudflare quite intrusive. I use the Temporary Containers extension on Firefox to open almost all websites in temporary containers (paired with the Containerise extension to whitelist the handful of sites that I like to stay logged in to).

About 30% of the random (like from web searches) sites I visit throw the Cloudflare captcha at me...EVERY SINGLE TIME. I'm so sick of picking out boats and buses that I just close out the tab without bothering the visit site.

I assume, that if I wasn't using Temporary Containers, a Cloudflare cookie after the 1st captcha would persist for the entire browser session, but there are privacy implications which are beyond the scope of this post.

Anyways, I guess what I'm saying is...Cloudflare sure seems great. Dangerously great.

The problem is not really Cloudflare. Captchas are terrible from a UX perspective. Instead of Captchas a lot of companies just log suspicious activities and only enables Captchas when things gotten out of hand.

If you design a web site with this in mind from the start, then there are several ways to make the Captchas less intrusive. However, a lot of Captchas are enabled to current solutions after problems have arisen and then it may hurt the UX.

dunno where we’re at today with newer captcha models, but for old-style static image captchas there used to be browser extensions where you could solve (say) 100 captchas in one sitting and then navigate the web freely and the next NN captchas your browser receives would be solved automatically.

or you could pay like $1 to cover 1000 captcha solutions. again, not sure if these still exist for newer style captchas though.

I've inadvertently made captchas worse for myself (in the interest of privacy). My current method of simply not visiting the site has been working well enough. I'm certainly not going to pay for an extension to solve them for me. That sounds crazy. "Am I a robot? Yes, I am."

Anyways, my post was actually less about captchas and more about Cloudflare's silent consolidation of internet traffic.

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