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Cloudflare offers to make AI pay to crawl websites
(www.computerworld.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Privacy
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Okay great. Go ahead and explain to me how they plan to fight an army of bots doing everything they can to be invisible?
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.
Yeah that's how most VPNs work.
Okay? Analyze all you want. They can't stop bots on any of the other sites they regulate either.
Great. Bots intentionally change up their behavior and identifying information as to be undetected.
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.
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.
blocking DDoS is trivial by comparison.