Cloudflare, the publicly traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models.
Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training by amending their site’s robots.txt, the text file that tells bots which pages they can access on a website. But, as Cloudflare points out in a post announcing its bot-combating tool, not all AI scrapers respect this.
I know we hate Cloudflare, but that’s a good feature addition.
Went to turn it on on the domain covering some of my stuff, and they also directed me to their Radar site, which shows the volume of and which bots are making the most noise, and not the least bit shockingly, it’s AI bots all the way down.
If nothing breaks I’m totally leaving this on and Amazon, Google, and OpenAI can all go screw themselves.
Can you educate me on the negatives of Cloudflare?
My company is on Akamai, who has a pretty solid combined offering of WAF, DNS, and CDN, and yet I still feel like their platform is antiquated and well overdue for a refresh.
Thinking back to log4j, it was cloudflare who had the automatic protections in place well ahead of Akamai, who we had to ask for custom filters. Cloudflare also puts out many articles on Internet events and increase adoption of emerging best practices, sometimes through heavy shaming.
Cloudflare’s free CDN offering is a MiTM (you use their certificates ONLY to be able to go through their network). Adding to this, they control a lot of Internet infrastructure (comparable to Microsoft and Google). I hate all of these companies and specifically use Quad9 till I get my own DNS running. It probably doesn’t matter to the end-user but I’m happy to see a technical crowd who maintains my ideals on big tech on Lemmy
It can matter to the end user. I had to spoof my user agent, because I was using a beta version of Firefox, and cloudflare thought I was a bot. Sites still don’t load sometimes at work (just keeps cycling through the “checking to make sure you’re a human” bullshit), regardless of browser. It’s a single point of failure for much of the web. Not that long ago (last year, I think), cloudflare had some bad config files pushed to prod, and about half the web broke. Cloudflare can arbitrarily block (and has done so) websites, since they’re serving the content. In theory, cf is a great service. In practice, they’ve abused it enough that we really shouldn’t trust them again.
I’m not opposed to them, but a lot of people on Lemmy have pretty strong opinions, primarily around the centralization around, and potential of MITMing data.
I don’t think they’re wrong, because the centralization has given Cloudflare a shocking amount of power over who sees what and how: they, for example, will put you in captcha hell if you’re using certain browsers, connecting from certain networks, or using TOR. I don’t ever run into those issues, but they’re certainly ones that happen to people often enough that a quick search will find story after story of people that run into this mess, and that it’s sometimes annoying and painful to dig out of when and if it happens.
And, due to how their service works and the way the certificates are handled, they are essentially MiTMing your traffic. The certificate chain between your client and cloudflare and cloudflare and your server, depending on how exactly you’ve configured it, can be done in such a way that there’s a re-encryption happening with them in the middle, and thus, Cloudflare can see all your data.
I’ve met their CEO and VP of Safety and worked extensively with them in a previous job and don’t actually believe they’re doing anything untowards, but the fact is that they, if they so desired, absolutely could.
I use their stuff on anything I setup for public access, either via an argo tunnel or their more traditional CDN stuff, but I can understand why other people concerned about user blocking and privacy (which are less of a venn diagram of users impacted, and more of a single circle: the privacy people are usually using browsers, addons, and VPN connections that are directly the cause of the block) wouldn’t be Cloudflare fans.