Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Cloudflare offers to make AI pay to crawl websites (www.computerworld.com)

submitted 1 week ago by Zerush@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[+] Ulrich@feddit.org -14 points 1 week ago (21 children)

Okay great. Go ahead and explain to me how they plan to fight an army of bots doing everything they can to be invisible?

[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 34 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (15 children)

they can already block VPN traffic (unless you use their VPN)
their whole business model is based on them being a man in the middle that decrypts ssl and analyses the packets plainly
about a third of the worldwide websites are using cloudflare so they have a pretry good birds eye view on behaviour of any machine, datacenter or ip range that will be visiting a lot of websites, which in turn will trivially whether it is normal user behaviour or a crawler.

[+] Ulrich@feddit.org -8 points 1 week ago (9 children)

they can already block VPN traffic unless it goes through their VPN

Yeah that's how most VPNs work.

their whole business model is based on them being a man in the middle that decrypts ssl and analyses the requests plainly

Okay? Analyze all you want. They can't stop bots on any of the other sites they regulate either.

about a third of the worldwide websites are using cloudflare so they have a pretry good birds eye view on behaviour of any machine that will be visiting a lot of websites

Great. Bots intentionally change up their behavior and identifying information as to be undetected.

[–] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

They can’t stop bots on any of the other sites they regulate either.

Why not? They are doing edge caching, they can literally just block the connection from visiting the site just like they do with their DDoS mitigation.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org -2 points 1 week ago

they can literally just block the connection

block which connection? Again, these AI companies know people don't want them crawling their sites and they do everything they can to be invisible. This has been an issue for years at this point.