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Comment by shiomiru | Hacker News Reader

If you'd like to experience this treatment first-hand, try surfing the web using the Tor Browser.

Spoiler alert: many websites simply refuse to load at all (e.g. any google service, and lots of websites "protected" by CF). Captchas are everywhere: in many cases, you can't even complete simple GETs of blogs without donating free labor to CF.

And the most infuriating part, you get CF marketing messages right in your face while your browser is calculating hashcash (I guess?)... At this point I can recognize every single one of them: something about bots making up 40% of all internet traffic, something about their web scraper protection racket, something about small businesses (???), etc etc...

To be fair, Tor exit nodes have an awful reputation for sure. Nevertheless, I have a hard time forgiving how CF makes browsing the Internet hell for those who actually need Tor.

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> And the most infuriating part, you get CF marketing messages right in your face while your browser is calculating hashcash (I guess?)... At this point I can recognize every single one of them: something about bots making up 40% of all internet traffic,

Yeah, there's something amazingly aggravating about CF telling you how much traffic is bots while showing that they can't distinguish you from a bot.

CloudFlare are creating a new devision for advertising to bots. They have projected that in the near future, bots will be 90% of spending, so the bot demographic is the most important to target, marketingwise.

The fact that humans are seeing the traffic meant for bots is an unfortunate side-effect.

I personally welcome our future bot overlords (not only because being unwelcome might be unhealthy for me — why would I publicly disagree with an overlord or not want to be their friend?).

Someone has seen a basilisk...

Cloudflare has mixed up the definitions of "bot" and "abuse". Tor users may or may not be bots, but as long as they don't abuse (spamming or DoS), they ought to be treated the same.

Citation needed.

I think this is more of an opinion than a matter of fact

It wasn’t framed as an opinion. And even if it was, I’m saying I think it is wrong and I want to know why I should change my mind.

The fact is that CloudFlare distinguishes abuse (DDoS at IP layers 3 and 4) completely separately from bot detection. And it allows user controls to domain owners to allow some bots like Google Search Crawler.

So my statement stands: I want to see a citation of evidence that CloudFlare doesn’t have the ability to distinguish abuse.

You don't even need TOR. Try a public wifi that is not in the "preferred geographical location" (i.e. US or Europe). The gaming cafes in SEA are probably responsible for 90% of all AI training datasets lol

I routinely use Youtube with Tor. I will occasionally get kicked off with a "suspicious traffic" message, but it isn't my experience that it "refuses to load at all".

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