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Comment by binaryturtle | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree. It's not only the waste of time when you have to confirm you're a human (that adds up to multiple hours per month).

It's also the entire blockage of older or less mainstream systems that no longer can access, sometimes critical, websites at all when the Cloudflare check blocks things entirely because the "browser is out of date" or not on their whitelist. Therefore causing excessive discrimination of poorer folks that can't afford upgrading to never/ other systems that still are legible to pass Cloudflare's "grace".

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Moreover, the most hilarious thing here is that Turnstile is easily bypassed by "patchright" (patched playwright runtime) + xvfb + good residential IP pool. So it's hurting real users and not protecting against bots.

That is still more of an ask than what most IoT volumetric attacks can do. It’s like saying Turnstile is bypassed by paying a human to do the captcha.

(Note I share your sentiment, however)

Is there any data that’s supports this suggestion users with older devices are actually being discriminated? (% of users actually using older devices incapable of upgrading to browser versions supported by cloud flare)

I just find it hard to believe users are actually getting denied access because their device are old. Surely you can still run new versions of Chrome and Firefox on most things [1].

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[1] Don’t get me wrong I use Safari and I find it inflammatory when a site tells me to use a modern browser because they doesn’t support safari (the language more so). But I wouldn’t call it discrimination seeing as I have an opinion to run firefox/chrome from time to time.

Without a market CloudFlare wouldn't be able to ruin the internet. You can thank all of the incessant AI bots for that. I can't even browse GitHub anymore without logging in.

Cloudflare doesn't need AI to survive as a business. There are more than enough DDoS attacks to protect from.

Yet it wasn't until AI grifters started aggressively scraping everything that sites started turning to CloudFlare (and the like) en masse.

Don’t forget that the main issue isn’t the initial data scrape but rather the fact that prompting an llm agent like claude code can amplify into 10 requests as it tries to answer your question.

Cloudflare was huge before AI bots became a problem.

Neither Cloudflare nor their competitors were aywhere near as prevalent before the AI bots. Farnell and Renesas outright blocked me, DigiKey makes me sit through their bullshit at nearly every request, issue trackers have the slowdown widgets etc. etc. etc. As late as early this year I never had these problems.

I wish there were more information and guides being spread of free and open source systems worldwide, there is tremendous potential in upgrading "end of life" systems to use a Linux-based operating system. That way we could avoid unfathomable amounts of e-waste being dumped for no other reason than them not being commercially viable anymore and poor people could keep using their computers

What are the symptoms of being shadowbanned? I see an awful lot of "click here to prove you are human" boxes, click then, the page reloads, and I'm left with the captcha again. It's been very very frustrating.

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