Hacker News Reader

Every so often, usually after a firefox update, CF will get into a "I'm convinced your a bot" mode with me. I can get out of it by solving 20 CAPTCHAs.

View on HN

It's probably just a higher rate of autonomous vehicles needing stop signs and buses identified at that moment, and cognitive bias causes you to only remember when that happens when you recently performed an update. /s

>It's probably just a higher rate of autonomous vehicles needing stop signs and buses identified at that moment

I can't tell whether you're serious but in case you are, this theory immediately falls apart when you realize waymo operates at night but there aren't any night photos.

Thanks for the comment. Lack of seriousness is now appropriately indicated.

My assumption is that CF has something like a SVM that it's feeding a bunch of datapoints into for bot detection. Go over some threshold and you end up in the CAPTCHA jail.

I'm certain the User-Agent is part of it. I know that for certain because a very reliable way I can trigger the CF stuff is this plugin with the wrong browser selected [1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com