Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users.

We also keep a very close eye on the user impact. We monitor things like page load time, time to first token and payload size, with a focus on reducing the overhead of these protections. For the majority of people, the impact is negligible, and only a very small percentage may see a slight delay from extra checks. We also continuously evaluate precision so we can minimize false positives while still making abuse meaningfully harder.

• vlovich123

  today at 3:39 AM

  That still doesn’t explain why you can’t even start typing until that check proceeds. You could condition the outbound request from being processed until that’s the case. But preventing from typing seems like it’s just worse UX and the problem will fail to appear in any metrics you can track because you have no way of measuring “how quickly would the user have submitted their request without all this other stuff in the way”.

  Said another way, if done in the background the user wouldn’t even notice unless they typed and submitted their query before the check completed. In the realistic scenario this would complete before they even submit their request.

  • mike_hearn

    today at 10:05 AM

    I developed the first version of Google's equivalent of this (albeit theirs actually computes a constantly rotating key from the environment, it doesn't just hard-code it in the program!).

    The reason it has to block until it's loaded is that otherwise the signal being missing doesn't imply automation. The user might have just typed before it loaded. If you know a legit user will always deliver the data, you can use the absence of it to infer something about what's happening on the client. You can obviously track metrics like "key event occurred before bot detection script did" without using it as an automation signal, just for monitoring.

    • fc417fc802

      today at 12:18 PM

      That doesn't make sense. The server would wait to process anything until after you received the signal. If it doesn't arrive within a reasonable period of time that tells you something, the same as right now.

      If you mean that you can infer client side tampering with the page contents you could still do that - permit typing but don't permit the submit action on the client. The user presses enter but nothing happens until the check is complete. There you go, now you can tell if the page was tampered with (not that it makes much difference tbh).

      • mike_hearn

        today at 3:12 PM

        The typing actions have to be observed by JavaScript. It's not different to any other JS blocking page load because it's needed for the site to work, that's just how the web works.

        • electroly

          today at 3:45 PM

          This doesn't seem to be the same thing. The article isn't about being unable to type before JavaScript starts executing. If I understand correctly, you're unable to type until a network request to Cloudflare returns. The question is: why not allow typing during that network request? JavaScript is running and it's observing the keystrokes. Everyone understands that you can't use a React application until JavaScript is running. They're asking why the network request doesn't happen in the background with the user optimistically allowed to type while waiting for it to return.

          (Separately, I don't think the article has adequately demonstrated this claim. They just make the claim in the title. The actual article only shows that some network request is made, and that the request happens after the React app is loaded, but not that they prevent input until it returns. Maybe it's obvious from using it, but they didn't demonstrate it.)

          • mike_hearn

            today at 4:24 PM

            The network request to Cloudfare is part of the JavaScript (in effect).

            • electroly

              today at 4:40 PM

              I don't think that's true in this case; the React application loads first, fully initializes, and then sends its state via Cloudflare request. It can't happen at the same time, by design. It has to happen serially. The article's claim is that you can't type during this second request. Frankly, I wonder if this is actually true at all. The article did not demonstrate this, and there's no problem if you can actually interact as soon as the React application is running. ChatGPT running abuse prevention and React applications requiring JavaScript to work are both uncontroversial, I think.

              • mike_hearn

                today at 6:19 PM

                OK, I haven't looked at the exact sequencing here. But generally, once the action goes back to the anti-abuse service for checking the user can't be allowed to change what they're submitting. The view the anti-abuse system saw has to match what the app server sees.

        • root_axis

          today at 3:18 PM

          Why can't you allow typing and just consume the state of the text input as the initial state of the js logic?

          • arccy

            today at 3:43 PM

            how you type is also part of the signal

    • susupro1

      today at 12:28 PM

      This perfectly explains the trade-off. But from a pure UX perspective, freezing the input pipeline feels uniquely hostile. They could buffer the keystrokes invisibly in the background instead of locking the cursor, which creates the jarring perception that the site is actively fighting the user.

    • today at 3:00 PM

    • toinewx

      today at 2:27 PM

      can you reformulate your message?

      • gavinray

        today at 3:22 PM

        Mike is saying that if you allow users to type before the scripts are fully loaded, there is no way to tell the difference between a human and bot.

        Blocking until load means that human interaction is physically impossible, so you are certain that any input before that is automated.

        If you allow typing, this distinction vanishes

        • LtWorf

          today at 3:53 PM

          Load fewer scripts so it doesn't take that long?

    • diablevv

      today at 2:03 PM

      [dead]

    • triangleman

      today at 3:21 PM

      [dead]

  • matchagaucho

    today at 5:36 PM

    Keyboard response feels 10x slower in ChatGPT Projects (possibly for reasons other than react state).

  • p-e-w

    today at 6:09 AM

    Many cloud products now continuously send themselves the input you type while you are typing it, to squeeze the maximum possible amount of data from your interactions.

    I don’t know whether ChatGPT is one of those products, but if it is, that behavior might be a side effect of blocking the input pipeline until verification completes. It might be that they want to get every single one of your keystrokes, but only after checking that you’re not a bot.

    • davidkunz

      today at 6:28 AM

      It's still possible to let users already type from the beginning, just delay sending the characters until checks are complete. Hold them in memory until then.

      • miyuru

        today at 6:44 AM

        Instagram was uploading the images while the user were adding post details, back in 2012!

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913919

        No one seem to use or care about their own product anymore. Only uses dashboard and metrics, which does not explain the full situation.

        • AlecSchueler

          today at 6:59 AM

          That makes total sense from a UX perspective though, the ChatGPT thing does not.

          • scottyah

            today at 6:48 PM

            there were a lot of helpdesk chats doing the same, so you could see users typing messages, then deleting words, etc before hitting send.

        • Imustaskforhelp

          today at 5:45 PM

          This was actually one of the reasons why Instagram felt smooth.

          Another thing but Facebook/Instagram have also detected if a person uploads an image and then deletes it and recognizes that they are insecure, and in case of TEENAGE girls, actually then have it as their profile (that they are insecure) and show them beauty products....

          I really like telling this example because people in real life/even online get so shocked, I mean they know facebook is bad but they don't know this bad.

          [Also a bit offtopic, but I really like how the item?id=3913919 the 391 came twice :-) , its a good item id ]

    • mort96

      today at 9:59 AM

      I just checked the network inspector, the only thing it does per key press is to generate an autocomplete list. It doesn't seem too hard to wait with the autocomplete generation until after whichever checks you run pass.

    • andai

      today at 7:59 AM

      I wondered if ChatGPT streams my message to the GPU while I type it, because the response comes weirdly fast after I submit th message. But I don't know much about how this stuff works.

      • aabhay

        today at 1:38 PM

        Likely prefix caching among many other things

  • m3kw9

    today at 5:44 PM

    Because the way they have the server architecture setup and how it loads the screen. You don’t even want all the bots hitting servers

  • dncornholio

    today at 2:45 PM

    You cannot know what verifications they use. I could argue the disabled textbox is some sort part of the verification process. Humans will click on it while bots won't.

    • root_axis

      today at 3:19 PM

      Seems like a trivially simple verification to defeat.

      • YetAnotherNick

        today at 3:27 PM

        You can defeat all client side verification by definition if you know what verification is run.

  • QEDCTrL

    today at 3:08 PM

    Sounds like anti-distillation to me. But, know what? Meh.

    • mcmcmc

      today at 3:37 PM

      I’d be inclined to agree with the “meh” if their entire product weren’t built off pirated content

  • federicosimoni

    today at 11:14 AM

    [flagged]

  • deadbabe

    today at 12:08 PM

    Remember you’re talking to a vibe coder who just stares at code being printed out by AI.

    • mcmcmc

      today at 3:40 PM

      That’s a big assumption. It’s a brand new account, might be a bot. PR/astroturfing is a great use case for agentic AI

• Imnimo

  yesterday at 10:38 PM

  It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.

  • DrinkyBird

    today at 12:49 PM

    It’s funny because the first AI scraper I remember blocking was from OpenAI’s, as it got stuck in a loop somehow and was impacting the performance of a wiki I run. All to violate every clause of the CC BY-NC-SA license of the content it was scraping :)

  • raincole

    today at 5:07 AM

    Quite sure even literal thieves would consider thievery a form of abuse.

    • mcmcmc

      today at 3:42 PM

      What’s being stolen? AI output isn’t copyrightable, and it’s not like they’re ripping pages out of a book

      • plutokras

        today at 6:27 PM

        They can train on the outputs i.e. distillation attacks.

    • duped

      today at 2:11 PM

      Engineers working on AI and AI enthusiasts are seemingly incapable of seeing the harm they cause, so I disagree.

      It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

    • littlestymaar

      today at 5:34 AM

      Yeah, they know it's bad, they just don't think the rules apply to them.

      • mapt

        today at 12:23 PM

        The rules are that a large corporate AI company is able to scrape literally everything, and will use the full force of the law and any technology they can come up with to prevent you as an individual or a startup from doing so. Because having the audacity to try to exploit your betters would be "Theft".

      • vbezhenar

        today at 9:43 AM

        They know that the rules apply to them. They hope that they can avoid being caught.

      • skeeter2020

        today at 1:40 PM

        Small mitigation (by no way absolving them): isolated developers, different teams. Another way: they see "stealing" of their compute directly in their devop tools every day, but are several abstractions away from doing the same thing to other people.

      • catoc

        today at 6:44 AM

        It’s only bad if you’re a closed, for-profit entity

        </sarcasm>

        • lukan

          today at 8:08 AM

          Was that sarcasm? Speaking of it, what parts of OpenAI are still open?

          • catoc

            today at 8:15 AM

            I know, always hard to tell on HN. Added the relevant declarative tag

            • today at 10:19 AM

          • reactordev

            today at 10:51 AM

            The front door…

            • today at 11:04 AM

      • splatter9859

        today at 4:43 PM

        They never have and feel they are above reproach. Anytime Altman opens his mouth that's apparent. It's for the good of humanity dontcha know. LOL

      • kamban

        today at 6:03 AM

        You nailed it.

      • tedsanders

        today at 7:35 AM

        For what it's worth, the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search.

        OpenAI documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots

        Anthropic documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropi...

        I'm not sure if Gemini lets you opt out without also delisting you from Google search rankings.

        • foresterre

          today at 7:57 AM

          I think opt-outs are a bit backwards, ethically speaking. Instead of asking for permission, they take unless you tell them to no longer do it from now on.

          I can imagine their models have been trained on a lot of websites before opt outs became a thing, and the models will probably incorporate that for forever.

          But at least for websites there's an opt-out, even if only for the big AI companies. Open source code never even got that option ;).

          • kneel25

            today at 12:38 PM

            > a lot of websites

            It was a dataset of the entirety of the public internet from the very beginning that bypassed paywalls etc, there’s virtually nothing they haven’t scraped.

        • qaadika

          today at 2:03 PM

          > the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search.

          PRESS RELEASE: UNITED BURGLARS SOCIETY

          The United Burglars Society understands that being burgled may be inconvenient for some. In response, UBS has introduced the Opt-Out system for those who wish not to be burgled.

          Please understand that each burglar is an independent contractor, so those wishing not to burgled should go to the website for each burglar in their area and opt-out there. UBS is not responsible for unwanted burglaries due to failing to opt-out.

        • netdevphoenix

          today at 9:56 AM

          Performing an automated action on a website that has not consented is the problem. OpenAI showing you how to opt-opt is backwards. Consent comes first.

          Bit concerning that some professional engineers don't understand this given the sensitive systems they interact with.

        • subscribed

          today at 1:45 PM

          Just respect the bloody robots.txt and hold your horses. Ask your precious product built on the relentless, hostile scraping to devise a strategy that doesn't look like a cancer growth.

        • keybored

          today at 10:03 AM

          Death by a thousand opt-outs.

  • jordanb

    today at 2:37 PM

    They don't want anyone to take that which they have rightfully stolen.

    • altmanaltman

      today at 7:01 PM

      Well at least they have 1 person working on "Integrity" so can't be too bad

    • splatter9859

      today at 4:42 PM

      Exactly! How dare you have access to their stolen content in the midst of them doing the same.

  • axegon_

    today at 7:36 AM

    The levels of irony that shouldn't be possible...

  • ProofHouse

    yesterday at 11:44 PM

    The irony is thick

  • sabedevops

    yesterday at 10:45 PM

    Seriously. The hypocrisy is staggering!

  • wiseowise

    today at 9:28 AM

    Church, politicians, moralists are all the biggest hypocrites that want to teach you something.

    • newsoftheday

      today at 3:05 PM

      I agree on politicians, no idea what a "moralist" is supposed to be but there are good and bad churches and church goers; lumping all church goers into one category calling them hypocrites is wrong. There are many good churches and church goers who help people and their communities.

  • zer00eyz

    yesterday at 11:00 PM

    " Integrity at OpenAI .. protect ... abuse like bots, scraping, fraud "

    Did you mean to use the word hypocrisy. If not, I'm happy to have said it.

    I just want to note, that it is well covered how good the support is for actual malware...

  • RobotToaster

    today at 9:41 AM

    "You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!"

  • gib444

    today at 10:02 AM

    And have absolutely no reservations about making such an obvious statement on a public forum

  • Aurornis

    today at 12:25 AM

    I interpreted scraping to mean in the context of this:

    > we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users

    I have no doubt that many people see the free ChatGPT access as a convenient target for browser automation to get their own free ChatGPT pseudo-API.

    • lelanthran

      today at 8:59 AM

      > I have no doubt that many people see the free ChatGPT access as a convenient target for browser automation to get their own free ChatGPT pseudo-API.

      Not that hard - ChatGPT itself wrote me a FF extension that opened a websocket to a localhost port, then ChatGPT wrote the Python program to listen on that websocket port, as well as another port for commands.

      Given just a handful of commands implemented in the extension is enough for my bash scripts to open the tab to ChatGPT, target specific elements, like the input, add some text to it, target the relevant chat button, click it, etc.

      I've used it on other pages (mostly for test scripts that don't require me to install the whole jungle just to get a banana, as all the current playright type products do). Too afraid to use it on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc because if they detect that the browser is being drive by bash scripts they can terminate my account.

      That's an especially high risk for Gemini - I have other google accounts that I won't want to be disabled.

    • wolvoleo

      today at 6:15 AM

      This is bad why? Well yeah for openai because all they want it to be is a free teaser to get people hooked and then enshittify.

      Morally I don't see any issues with it really.

  • rsrsrs86

    today at 3:18 PM

    This

  • nikitaga

    yesterday at 11:53 PM

    Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things.

    The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less.

    It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity in this case is quite superficial.

    • PunchyHamster

      today at 1:29 AM

      > Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things.

      I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree

      Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

      • remus

        today at 7:42 AM

        I think the parent is just pointing out that these things lie on a spectrum. I have a website that consists largely of static content and the (significant) scraping which occurs doesn't impact the site for general users so I don't mind (and means I get good, up to date answers from LLMs on the niche topic my site covers). If it did have an impact on real users, or cost me significant money, I would feel pretty differently.

        • 0xEF

          today at 8:35 AM

          Putting everything on a spectrum is what got us into this mess of zero regulation and moving goal posts. It's slippery slope thinking no matter which way we cut it, because every time someone calls for a stop sign to be put up after giving an inch, the very people who would have to stop will argue tirelessly for the extra mile.

          • Aerroon

            today at 12:23 PM

            What mess are you talking about? The existence of LLMs? I think it's pretty neat that I can now get answers to questions I have.

            This is something I couldn't have done before, because people very often don't have the patience to answer questions. Even Google ended up in loops of "just use Google" or "closed. This is a duplicate of X, but X doesn't actually answer the question" or references to dead links.

            Are there downsides to this? Sure, but imo AI is useful.

            • butlike

              today at 4:39 PM

              It's just repackaged Google results masquerading as an 'answer.' PageRank pulled results and displayed the first 10 relevant links and the LLM pulls tokens and displays the first relevant tokens to the query.

              Just prompt it.

          • daveidol

            today at 10:50 AM

            I’d argue putting everything in terms of black and white is the bigger issue than understanding nuance

            • instig007

              today at 11:07 AM

              Generalizing with "everything", "all", etc exclusive markers is exactly the kind of black/white divide you're arguing against. What happened to your nuanced reality within a single sentence? Not everything is black and white, but some situations are.

              • fc417fc802

                today at 12:24 PM

                The person he's replying to argued against putting things on a spectrum. Does that not imply painting everything in black and white? Thus his response seems perfectly sensible to me.

                • instig007

                  today at 6:57 PM

                  He argued against putting things in a spectrum in many instances where that would be wrong, including the case under the question. What's your argument against that idea? LLM'ed too much lately?

      • Den_VR

        today at 2:47 AM

        I miss the www where the .html was written in vim or notepad.

        • mghackerlady

          today at 1:20 PM

          It still can be. Do it. Go make your website in M$ Frontpage, for all I care

          • butlike

            today at 4:42 PM

            Shameless plug: My music homepage follows the HTML 2.0 spec and is written by hand

            https://sampleoffline.com/

            • mghackerlady

              today at 5:05 PM

              heck yeah B)

        • consp

          today at 7:19 AM

          Just did that for a test frontend for a module I needed to build (not my primary job so don't know anything about UI but running in browsers was a requirement), so basic HTML with the bare minimum of JS and all DOM. Colleagues were very surprized. And yes, vim is still the goto editor and will be for a long time now all "IDE" are pushing "AI" slop everywhere.

        • holler

          today at 3:03 AM

          ahh yes, fresh off reading "Html For Dummies" I made my first tripod.com site

          • sdsd

            today at 3:43 AM

            For me it was making a petpage for my neopets using https://lissaexplains.com/

            It's still up in all its glory.

            • DigiEggz

              today at 5:28 AM

              This is great! The name reference also made me smile.

      • eloisius

        today at 6:39 AM

        Also wild that from the tech bro perspective, the cost of journalism is just how much data transfer costs for the finished article. Authors spend their blood, sweat and tears writing and then OpenAI comes to Hoover it up without a care in the world about license, copyright or what constitutes fair use. But don’t you dare scrape their slop.

        • lelanthran

          today at 8:48 AM

          > Also wild that from the tech bro perspective, the cost of journalism is just how much data transfer costs for the finished article.

          Exactly. I think the unfairness can be mitigated if models trained on public information, or on data generated by a model trained on public information, or has any of those two in its ancestry, must be made public.

          Then we don't have to hit (for example) Anthropic, we can download and use the models as we see fit without Anthropic whining that the users are using too much capacity.

        • mikkupikku

          today at 10:25 AM

          [flagged]

          • jazzyjackson

            today at 1:36 PM

            The library's archive is not a service provided by the newspaper

            • mikkupikku

              today at 4:15 PM

              So? If the newspaper's website is willing to serve the documents, what's the problem?

              The point is, if you're pleading with others to respect ""intellectual property"" then you're a worm serving corporate interests against your own.

      • 1718627440

        today at 11:08 AM

        Off topic, but why is a DoS something considered to act on, often by just shutting down the service altogether? That results in the same DoS just by the operator than due to congestion. Actually it's worse, because now the requests will never actually be responded rather then after some delay. Why is the default not to just don't do anything?

        • pocksuppet

          today at 12:39 PM

          It keeps the other projects hosted on the same server or network online. Blackhole routes are pushed upstream to the really big networks and they push them to their edge routers, so traffic to the affected IPs is dropped near the sender's ISP and doesn't cause network congestion.

          DDoSers who really want to cause damage now target random IPs in the same network as their actual target. That way, it can't be blackholed without blackholing the entire hosting provider.

        • echoangle

          today at 11:25 AM

          I think some people use hosting that is paid per request/load, so having crawlers make unwanted requests costs them money.

        • ImPostingOnHN

          today at 11:39 AM

          *> Why is the default not to just don't do anything?

          Because ingress and compute costs often increase with every request, to the point where AI bot requests rack up bills of hundreds or thousands of dollars more than the hobbyist operator was expecting to send.

      • eru

        today at 3:44 AM

        > I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree

        Are you sure it's a DDoS and not just a DoS?

        • MattJ100

          today at 6:57 AM

          Yes, it is. The worst offenders hammer us (and others) with thousands upon thousands of requests, and each request uses unique IP addresses making all per-IP limits useless.

          We implemented an anti-bot challenge and it helped for a while. Then our server collapsed again recently. The perf command showed that the actual TLS handshakes inside nginx were using over 50% of our server's CPU, starving other stuff on the machine.

          It's a DDoS.

        • troyvit

          today at 4:58 AM

          You should see Cloudflare's control panel for AI bot blocking. There are dozens of different AI bots you can choose to block, and that doesn't even count the different ASNs they might use. So in this case I'd say that a DDoS is a decent description. It's not as bad as every home router on the eastern seaboard or something, but it's pretty bad.

        • Bilal_io

          today at 3:55 AM

          Uncoordinated DDoS, when multiple search and AI companies are hammering your server.

          • susupro1

            today at 12:48 PM

            [dead]

        • catoc

          today at 6:50 AM

          > Are you sure it's a DDoS and not just a DoS?

          I think these days it’s ‘DAIS’, as in your site just DAIS - from Distributed/Damned AI Scraping

        • SolarNet

          today at 3:54 AM

          When every AI company does it from multiple data centers... yes it's distributed.

      • lm411

        today at 5:01 AM

        > Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

        Wild eh.

        If it's not ai now, it's by default labelled "static content" and "near-zero marginal cost".

        • littlestymaar

          today at 5:32 AM

          What's a database after all.

      • nikitaga

        today at 12:12 PM

        All this reactionary outrage in the comments is funny. And lame.

        Yes, for the vast majority of the internet, serving traffic is near zero marginal cost. Not for LLMs though – those requests are orders of magnitude more expensive.

        This isn't controversial at all, it's a well understood fact, outside of this irrationally angry thread at least. I don't know, maybe you don't understand the economic term "marginal cost", thus not understanding the limited scope of my statement.

        If such DDOSes as you mention were common, such a scraping strategy would not have worked for the scraper at all. But no, they're rare edge cases, from a combination of shoddy scrapers and shoddy website implementations, including the lack of even basic throttling for expensive-to-serve resources.

        The vast majority of websites handle AI traffic fine though, either because they don't have expensive to serve resources, or because they properly protect such resources from abuse.

        If you're an edge case who is harmed by overly aggressive scrapers, take countermeasures. Everyone with that problem should, that's neither new nor controversial.

        • ipaddr

          today at 12:59 PM

          "such DDOSes as you mention were common, such a scraping strategy would not have worked for the scraper at all"

          They are common. The strategy works for the llm but not for the website owner or users who can't use a site during this attack.

          The majority of sites are not handling AI fine. Getting Ddosed only part of the time is not acceptable. Countermeasures like blocking huge ranges can help but also lock out legimate users.

          • nikitaga

            today at 8:15 PM

            > They are common

            Any actual evidence of the alleged scope of this problem, or just anecdotes from devs who are mad at AI, blown out of proportion?

        • fireflash38

          today at 12:52 PM

          It's not a cost for me to scrape LLM.

          It is a cost for me for LLM to scrape me.

          Why should I care about costs that have when they don't care about the costs I have?

        • juliangmp

          today at 6:57 PM

          "They are rare edge cases" are we on the same internet?

        • grayhatter

          today at 12:51 PM

          The extent of the utilization is new.

          The number of bots that try to hide who they are, and don't bother to even check robots.txt is new.

        • today at 1:08 PM

        • expedition32

          today at 2:00 PM

          One euro is marginal for me for someone else it is their daily meal.

    • not2b

      today at 1:10 AM

      I understand why OpenAI is trying to reduce its costs, but it simply isn't true that AI crawlers aren't creating very significant load, especially those crawlers that ignore robots.txt and hide their identities. This is direct financial damage and it's particularly hard on nonprofit sites that have been around a long time.

      • zer00eyz

        today at 4:42 AM

        > but it simply isn't true that AI crawlers aren't creating very significant load.

        And how much of this is users who are tired of walled gardens and enshitfication. We murdered RSS, API's and the "open web" in the name of profit, and lock in.

        There is a path where "AI" turns into an ouroboros, tech eating itself, before being scaled down to run on end user devices.

      • stingraycharles

        today at 2:41 AM

        These are ChatGPT and Claude Desktop crawlers we’re talking about? Or what is it exactly? Are these really creating significant load while not honoring robots.txt?

        Genuinely interested.

        • 63stack

          today at 9:06 AM

          Is this the first time you are reading HN? Every day there are posts from people describing how AI crawlers are hammering their sites, with no end. Filtering user agents doesn't work because they spoof it, filtering IPs doesn't work because they use residential IPs. Robots.txt is a summer child's dream.

        • miki123211

          today at 8:48 AM

          They seem to mostly be third-party upstarts with too much money to burn, willing to do what it takes to get data, probably in hopes of later selling it to big labs. Maaaybe Chinese AI labs too, I wouldn't put it past them.

          OpenAI et al seem to mostly be well-behaved.

        • cruffle_duffle

          today at 2:54 AM

          I bet dollars to doughnuts that 95% of the traffic is from Claude and ChatGPT desktop / mobile and not literal content scraping for training.

          • crote

            today at 4:10 AM

            That wouldn't explain the 1000x increase in traffic for extremely obscure content, or seeing it download every single page on a classic web forum.

            • duttish

              today at 6:52 AM

              And doing it over, and over, and over and over again. Because sure it didn't change in the last 8 years but maybe it's changed since yesterdays scrape?

    • cicko

      today at 6:19 AM

      Interesting how other people's cost is "near-zero marginal cost" while yours is "an expensive LLM service". Also, others' rights are "fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use" while yours is "direct financial damage". I like how you frame this.

    • lm411

      today at 3:18 AM

      That is ridiculous.

      You imply that "an expensive llm service" is harmed by abuse, but, every other service is not? Because their websites are "static" and "near-zero marginal cost"?

      You have no clue what you are talking about.

      • camillomiller

        today at 5:23 AM

        Well he’s a simp

    • sandeepkd

      today at 2:36 AM

      Lets not try to qualify the wrongs by picking a metric and evaluating just one side of it. A static website owner could be running with a very small budget and the scraping from bots can bring down their business too. The chances of a static website owner burning through their own life savings are probably higher.

      • expedition32

        today at 7:55 AM

        Perhaps the long play is to destroy all small hobby websites until only a AI directed web is left.

      • miki123211

        today at 8:51 AM

        If you're truly running a static site, you can run it for free, no matter how much traffic you're getting.

        Github pages is one way, but there are other platforms offering similar services. Static content just isn't that expensive to host.

        THe troubles start when you're actually running something dynamic that pretends to be static, like Wordpress or Mediawiki. You can still reduce costs significantly with CDNs / caching, but many don't bother and then complain.

        • ezrast

          today at 3:36 PM

          Setting aside the notion that a site presenting live-editability as its entire core premise is "pretending to be static", do the actual folks at Wikimedia, who have been running a top 10 website successfully for many years, and who have a caching system that worked well in the environment it was designed for, and who found that that system did not, in fact, trivialize the load of AI scraping, have any standing to complain? Or must they all just be bad at their jobs?

          https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-th...

        • jazzyjackson

          today at 1:40 PM

          It's true it can be done but many business owners are not hip to cloudflare r2 buckets or github pages. Many are still paying for a whole dedicated server to run apache (and wordpress!) to serve static files. These sites will go down when hammered by unscrupulous bots.

    • alsetmusic

      today at 2:33 AM

      Have you not seen the multiple posts that have reached the front page of HN with people taking self-hosted Git repos offline or having their personal blogs hammered to hell? Cause if you haven't, they definitely exist and get voted up by the community.

    • AmbroseBierce

      today at 4:49 AM

      It's not like those models are expensive because the usefulness that they extracted from scraping others without permission right? You are not even scratching the surface of the hypocrisy

    • VadimPR

      today at 6:10 AM

      Getting scraped by abusive bots who bring down the website because they overload the DB with unique queries is not marginal. I spent a good half of last year with extra layers of caching, CloudFlare, you name it because our little hobby website kept getting DDoS'd by the bots scraping the web for training data.

      Never in 15 years if running the website did we have such issues, and you can be sure that cache layers were in place already for it to last this long.

    • unsungNovelty

      today at 12:21 PM

      "near-zero marginal costs". For whom exactly????

      https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

    • wolvoleo

      today at 5:59 AM

      It's more ironic because without all the scraping openai has done, there would have been no ChatGPT.

      Also, it's not just the cost of the bandwidth and processing. Information has value too. Otherwise they wouldn't bother scraping it in the first place. They compete directly with the websites featuring their training data and thus they are taking away value from them just as the bots do from ChatGPT.

      In fact the more I think of it, I think it's exactly the same thing.

      • expedition32

        today at 7:59 AM

        This leads me to thinking: I ask chatGPT a question and they get the answer from gamefaqs.

        But what happens if gamefaqs disappears because of lack of traffic?

        Can LLM actually create or only regurgitate content.

        • Aerroon

          today at 1:15 PM

          >Can LLM actually create or only regurgitate content.

          Contrary to what others say, LLMs can create content. If you have a private repo you can ask the LLM to look at it and answer questions based on that. You can also have it write extra code. Both of these are examples of something that did not exist before.

          In terms of gamefaqs, I could theoretically see an LLM play a game and based on that write about the game. This is theoretical, because currently LLMs are nowhere near capable enough to play video games.

        • wolvoleo

          today at 8:26 AM

          It will remain in their scraped data so they can keep including it in their later training datasets if they wish. However it won't be able to do live internet searches anymore. And it will not generate new content of course. Especially not based on games released after the site codes down so it doesn't know. Though it could of course correlate data from other sources that talk about the game in question.

        • stefanka

          today at 8:08 AM

          They cannot create original content.

          • wolvoleo

            today at 8:27 AM

            Well they can make some up, like hallucination. That's an additional problem: when the original site that provided the training data is gone: how can they use verify the AI output to make sure it's correct?

    • lelanthran

      today at 8:29 AM

      I don't think a rule along the lines of "Doing $FOO to a corporate is forbidden, but doing $FOO to a charitable initiative is fine" is at all fair.

      What "$FOO" actually is, is irrelevant. I'm curious how you would convince people that this sort of rule is fair.

      The corp can always ban users who break ToS, after all. They don't need any help. The charitable initiative can't actually do that, can they?

    • ungreased0675

      today at 11:39 AM

      You’re describing the tragedy of the commons. No single raindrop thinks it’s responsible for the flood.

      • cindyllm

        today at 11:49 AM

        [dead]

    • ori_b

      today at 1:47 PM

      My website serving git that only works from Plan 9 is serving about a terabyte of web traffic monthly. Each page load is about 10 to 30 kilobytes. Do you think there's enough organic, non-scraper interest in the site that scrapers are a near-zero part of the cost?

    • grishka

      today at 8:27 AM

      > Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server

      It's not possible to know in advance what is static and what is not. I have some rather stubborn bots make several requests per second to my server, completely ignoring robots.txt and rel="nofollow", using residential IPs and browser user-agents. It's just a mild annoyance for me, although I did try to block them, but I can imagine it might be a real problem for some people.

      I'm not against my website getting scraped, I believe being able to do that is an important part what the web is, but please have some decency.

    • xmcqdpt2

      today at 11:29 AM

      AI providers also claim to have small marginal costs. The costs of token is supposedly based on pricing in model training, so not that different from eg your server costs being low but the content production costs being high. And in many cases AI companies are direct competitors (artists, musicians etc.)

      (TBH it's not clear to me that their marginal costs are low. They seem to pick based on narrative.)

    • the_sleaze_

      today at 4:14 AM

      60% of our traffic is bot, on average. Sometimes almost 100%.

    • razingeden

      today at 1:25 AM

      It is direct financial damage if my servers not on an unmetered connection — after years of bills coming in around $3/mo I got a surprise >$800 bill on a site nobody on earth appears to care about besides AI scrapers.

      It hasn’t even been updated in years so hell if I know why it needs to be fetched constantly and aggressively, - but fuck every single one of these companies now whining about bots scraping and victimizing them, here’s my violin.

      • gzread

        today at 5:31 AM

        If you can identify the scraper you should have a valid legal case to recover damages.

        • thisislife2

          today at 2:37 PM

          Only if they had a robots.txt for their site.

          • razingeden

            today at 2:58 PM

            I hadn’t even considered that. Don’t know why that comment is greyed out or downvoted.

            It’s a static site that hasn’t been updated since 2016—- so it’s .. since been moved to cloudflare r2 where it’s getting a $0.00 bill, and it now has a disallow / directive. I’m not sure if it’s being obeyed because the cf dash still says it’s getting 700-1300 hits a day even with all the anti bot, “cf managed robots” stuff for ai crawlers in there.

            The content is so dry and irrelevant I just can’t even fathom 1/100th of that being legitimate human interest but I thought these things just vacuumed up and stole everyone’s content instead of nailing their pages constantly?

          • gzread

            today at 3:02 PM

            No, it's still illegal to DDoS sites that don't have robots.txt.

            • thisislife2

              today at 3:46 PM

              You are right, I hadn't considered that aspect.

    • not_your_vase

      today at 5:06 AM

        > net-zero marginal cost
      

      Lol, you single-handedly created a market for Anubis, and in the past 3 years the cloudflare captchas have multiplied by at least 10-fold, now they are even on websites that were very vocal against it. Many websites are still drowning - gnu family regularly only accessible through wayback machine.

      Spare me your tears.

    • foobiekr

      today at 2:33 PM

      You are, of course, ignoring the production costs of the static content that OpenAi is stealing.

      Stop justifying their anti-social behavior because it lines your pockets.

    • SkiFire13

      today at 5:47 AM

      > Scraping static content

      How do you know the content is static?

    • bakugo

      yesterday at 11:55 PM

      The cost is so marginal that many, many websites have been forced to add cloudflare captchas or PoW checks before letting anyone access them, because the server would slow to a crawl from 1000 scrapers hitting it at once otherwise.

    • mcfedr

      today at 4:24 PM

      I'm sure the copyright holders would consider your use of their content as direct financial damage

    • heyethan

      today at 2:41 AM

      I think this also explains why the checks are moving up the stack.

      If the real cost is in actually running the app or the model, then just verifying a browser isn’t enough anymore. You need to verify that the expensive part actually happened.

      Otherwise you’re basically protecting the cheapest layer while the expensive one is still exposed.

    • gmerc

      today at 7:04 AM

      It’s not for techbros to decide at what threshold of theft it’s actually theft. “My GPU time is more valuable than your CPU time” isn’t a thing and Wikipedias latest numbers on scraping show that marginal costs at scale are a valid concern

    • swagmoney1606

      today at 2:09 AM

      And yet I have to pay in my time and cash to handle the constant ddos'es from the constant LLM scraping

    • today at 4:46 AM

    • today at 2:59 AM

    • nozzlegear

      today at 2:35 AM

      Are they, actually?

    • make3

      today at 5:10 AM

      Absolutely not, the former relies on controversial ideas to qualify as legal.

      Stealing the content from the whole planet & actively reducing the incentive to visit the sites without financial restitution is pretty bad.

    • nickphx

      today at 10:55 AM

      Speak for yourself.

    • AtlasBarfed

      today at 12:59 AM

      Because you say it is?

      I obviously disagree. I mean, on top of this we are talking about not-open OpenAI.

    • karlshea

      today at 12:59 AM

      I don’t know what world you live in but it’s not this one.

    • platybubsy

      today at 7:04 AM

      Bait or genuine techbro? Hard to say

    • andrepd

      today at 2:19 PM

      > Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server

      The gall. https://weirdgloop.org/blog/clankers

    • 9864247888754

      today at 8:05 AM

      [dead]

    • nslsm

      yesterday at 11:56 PM

      The issue is that there are so many awful webmasters that have websites that take hundreds of milliseconds to generate and are brought down by a couple requests a second.

      • bakugo

        today at 12:16 AM

        OpenAI must be the most awful webmasters of all, then, to need such sophisticated protections.

  • miki123211

    today at 8:43 AM

    It's not scraping they're concerned about, it's abusing free GPU resources to (anonymously) generate (abusive) content.

  • heyethan

    today at 2:14 AM

    I think the distinction is less about scraping itself, and more about marginal cost.

    Scraping static pages is cheap for both sides. Scraping an LLM-backed service effectively externalizes compute costs onto the provider.

    Same behavior, very different economics.

    • crote

      today at 4:37 AM

      Very few websites are truly static. Something like a Wordpress website still does a nontrivial amount of compute and DB calls - especially when you don't hit a cache.

      There's also the cost asymmetry to take into account. Running an obscure hobby forum on a $5 / month VPS (or cloud equivalent) is quite doable, having that suddenly balloon to $500 / month is a Really Big Deal. Meanwhile, the LLM company scraping it has hundred of millions of VC funding, they aren't going to notice they are burning a few million because their crappy scraper keeps hammering websites over and over again.

• everdrive

  yesterday at 9:43 PM

  It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.

  Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and functionality?

  • mememememememo

    yesterday at 10:44 PM

    Local models for privacy.

    You want to go to the world's best hotel? You are gonna be on their CCTV. Staying at home is crappier but private.

    Unfortunately for the first time moores law isn't helping (e.g. give a poor person an old laptop and install linux they will be fine). They can do that and all good except no LLM.

    • karlgkk

      yesterday at 11:30 PM

      > You want to go to the world's best hotel? You are gonna be on their CCTV.

      ironically, in high end hotels, there's often a lot less cctv. not none. just less. rich people enjoy privacy

      • xtajv

        today at 11:50 AM

        In hotels of all tax brackets, you usually get a room key.

        And the salient difference is that CCTV is simply defense-in-depth, not a primary means for authentication.

      • Barbing

        yesterday at 11:58 PM

        So they’re not just hidden better? Does make sense.

        Well, I can use the world‘s best safety deposit box without being on CCTV while I pass secrets in and out of it, right? Just not for free.

        Bummer, this sounds like it is about to turn into a Monero ad (“let us pay privately”)

        • wolvoleo

          today at 6:12 AM

          Probably not even hidden because rich people are also catching a lot of legal winds, in which case the hotel has no choice but to provide the material. Better not to have it in the first place. You don't want your hotel cams listed as evidence in a 500M$ divorce case I guess.

          Also are hidden cameras even legal? I know here in EU they aren't.

    • nozzlegear

      today at 2:39 AM

      > Staying at home is crappier but private.

      Doesn't make sense, my home is much more preferable to a hotel

      • hedora

        today at 5:13 AM

        With any luck, local models will be too (soon).

        • littlestymaar

          today at 5:36 AM

          My local models didn't get >20h of outage this quarter like Claude did so in a way it's already the case.

      • today at 1:05 PM

  • 0x3f

    yesterday at 9:49 PM

    Meet me in a cafe and I will sign a JWT saying you're not a bot. You can submit this to whoever will accept it.

    • magicseth

      yesterday at 9:59 PM

      If apple approves it, ive got a solution: A keyboardthat attests to your humanity https://typed.by/magicseth/2451#2NyGLfAQxmqRiAOTlaX7ma3G4d1o...

      • mzajc

        yesterday at 10:10 PM

        Brilliant! Just the thing we want: more hardware attestation, more deanonymization, less user control, all diligently orchestrated in a repository where the only contributor is Anthropic Claude [0]. Comes complete with a misaligned ASCII diagram in the README to show how much effort the humans behind it put in!

        Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.

        [0]: https://github.com/magicseth/keywitness/graphs/contributors

        • delish

          yesterday at 10:28 PM

          Those are all situationally-valid criticisms, but I've long thought the ability to have smartphones' cameras cryptographically sign photos is good when available. The use case is demonstrating a photo wasn't doctored, and that it came from a device associated with e.g. a journalist, who maintains a public key. Of course, it should be optional.

          • magicseth

            yesterday at 11:43 PM

            Yes! That's what I'm getting at. This protocol optionally allows you to sign with your private key, but you don't have to for the protocol to provide utility. It could just be enough to say "if you trust magicseth's binary and apple, then this was typed one letter at a time"

            There's nothing stopping folks from typing a message an LLM wrote one at a time, but the idea of increasing the human cost of sending messages is an interesting one, or at least I thought :-(

            • johnmaguire

              today at 2:53 AM

              The problem is that it's not optional to end-users if sites enforce its use.

              • hedora

                today at 5:16 AM

                The other problem is that the device or company might decide not to attest for you.

                For instance, the employee at Apple that decided to pull ICE Block from the store could decide that the "admissible in court" bit should be false if it looks like a police officer is in frame.

                Similarly, the keyboard could decide your social credit score is too low, and just stop attesting. A court could order this behavior.

                Or, you could fail mandatory age / id verification because your credit card expired, and then all the above + more could happen! Good luck getting through to credit card tech support at that point...

        • magicseth

          yesterday at 11:35 PM

          Hi! I want anonymity! I also want to be able to prove what level of effort has been put in to something. I think there's room for both. This is an encrypted proof that I wrote something on a keyboard that tracks fingers. The protocol allows you to optionally sign it with your identity, but that isn't strictly required.

          It is an attempt at putting something into the conversation more than just "OSS is broken because there are too many slop PRs." What if OSS required a human to attest that they actually looked at the code they're submitting? This tool could help with that.

          Yes LLMs were used greatly in the production of this prototype!

          It doesn't change the goal of the experiment! or it's potential utility! Do you see any potential area in your world where some piece of this is valuable?

        • Arainach

          yesterday at 10:48 PM

          > Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.

          ....no. There's not a single occurrence of that.

          https://keywitness.io/manifesto

          There are six emdashes on that page. NONE of them are "it's not X it's why".

          > Emails, messages, essays, code reviews, love letters — all suspect.

          > We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity.

          > KeyWitness captures cryptographic proof at the point of input — the keyboard.

          > When you seal a message, the keyboard builds a W3C Verifiable Credential — a self-contained proof that can be verified by anyone, anywhere, without trusting us or any central authority.

          > That's an alphabet of 774 symbols — each carrying log2(774) ≈ 9.6 bits. 27 emoji for 256 bits.

          > They're a declaration: this message was written by a person — one of the diverse, imperfect, irreplaceable humans who still choose to type their own words.

          Clarifications: 4

          Continuation from a list: 1

          Could just be a comma: 1

          "It's not X -- it's Y": 0.

          If you're going to make lazy commentary about good writing being AI, please at least be sure that you're reading the content and saying accurate things.

          • magicseth

            yesterday at 11:37 PM

            It is largely written by iteration with an LLM! No need to speculate or analyze em dashes :-)

            The emoji idea was mine. I like it :-) unfortunately it doesn't work in places like HN that strip out emoji. So I had to make a base64 encoding option.

            The goal was to create an effective encryption key for the url hash (so it doesn't get sent to the server). And encoding skin tone with human emojis allows a super dense bit/visual character encoding that ALSO is a cute reference to the humans I'm trying to center with this project!

          • josephg

            yesterday at 11:00 PM

            > We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity

            “It's not X -- it's Y": 1

          • dandellion

            yesterday at 11:02 PM

            It's either a bot, or someone who writes exactly like a bot. I don't care which it is, both go to the discard pile.

            • magicseth

              yesterday at 11:38 PM

              phew!

            • arrowsmith

              today at 2:01 AM

              It’s a product for people who need help telling whether text was written by AI.

              Maybe they deliberately write it like that, to filter out people who aren’t the target market?

          • arrowsmith

            today at 1:59 AM

            From their “how it works” page:

            > The server stores an encrypted blob it can't decrypt. We couldn't read your messages even if we wanted to. That's not a policy — it's math.

            If you can’t tell that this is AI slop then maybe KeyWitness does solve a real problem after all.

          • Velocifyer

            yesterday at 10:56 PM

            <redacted because my friend posted it but accidentaly used my account>

            • magicseth

              yesterday at 11:40 PM

              Oh you think it's stupid? It was an attempt to encode an encryption key that isn't sent to the server in a way that is minimally invasive. The skintone emomis allow pretty high byte density, and also are cute!

              Sorry it doesn't meet your needs.

              There is irony in having an ai generated humanifesto. Could it be intentional? hmm?

              Is there no irony in deriding a project for being potentially LLM generated, when it's goal is to aide people in differentiating? :shrug:

      • Terretta

        yesterday at 11:58 PM

        The first widely distributed and open source version of this typist timing validation idea I saw (and incorporated into my own software at the time) was released by Michael Crichton as part of a password 2nd-factor checker (1st factor a known phrase or even your name, the 2nd factor being your idiosyncratic typing pattern) in Creative Computing magazine that printed the code.

        Original here: https://archive.org/details/sim_creative-computing_1984-06_1...

      • arrowsmith

        today at 2:11 AM

        You’re getting a negative reaction from others but I share this feedback in good faith: I don’t understand what problem your product is supposed to solve.

        Yeah I guess the cryptographic stuff sounds vaguely impressive although it’s been a long time since I had to think about cryptography in detail. But what is this _for_? I’m going to buy an expensive keyboard so that I can send messages to someone and they’ll know it’s really me – but it has to be someone who a) doesn’t trust me or any of our existing communication channels and b) cares enough to verify using this weird software? Oh and it’s important they know I sent it from a particular device out of the many I could be using?

        Who is that person? What would I be sending them? What is the scenario where we would both need this?

        Also the server can’t read the message but the decryption key is in the URL? So anyone with the URL can still read it? Then why even bother encrypting it?

        Maybe this is one of those cases where I’m so far outside your target market that it was never supposed to make sense to me but I feel like I’m missing something here. Or maybe you need to work on your elevator pitch.

        Just sharing my honest reaction.

      • scoofy

        yesterday at 10:17 PM

        Somewhere there is someone 3D printing a keyboard cover that an llm can type with.

        • magicseth

          yesterday at 11:41 PM

          I'm actually building a physical keyboard for those people who don't have iphones! Though given the reaction I'm seeing here, I probably won't share it with this audience :-P it has capacitive keys, a secure enclave, and a fingerprint sensor.

          • mike_hearn

            today at 10:08 AM

            Please do share. This sort of tech is necessary, for better or worse, and I'd have a bunch of use cases in mind for it!

      • Velocifyer

        yesterday at 10:50 PM

        This does not prove anything and it is only avalible to users with X.com accounts (you need a X.com account to download the app).

        • magicseth

          yesterday at 11:31 PM

          Hi! You don't need an x.com account to download, that's just the easiest way to dm me. If you're actually interested, I can let you try it! The source is also available.

          It proves 1) that an apple device with a secure enclave signed it. 2) that my app signed it.

          If you trust the binary I've distributed is the same as the one on the app store, then it also proves: 3) that it was typed on my keyboard not using automation (though as others have mentioned, you could build a capacitive robot to type on it) 4) that the typer has the same private key as previous messages they've signed (if you have an out of band way to corroborate that's great too) 5) optionally, that the person whose biometrics are associated with the device approved it.

          There is also an optional voice to text mode that uses 3d face mesh to attempt to verify the words were spoken live.

          Not every level of verification is required by the ptrotocol, so you could attest that it was written on a keyboard, but not who wrote it (not yet implemented in the client app).

          The protocol doesn't require you to run my app, if you compile it yourself, you can create your own web of trust around you!

          • Velocifyer

            today at 12:00 AM

            >that an apple device with a secure enclave signed it.

            What Apple devices are supported? All I have is a iPhone 4 running a old iOS version(pre iOS 7) (which I will not update and I don't think has a secure enclave) and a M1 mac mini and some lightning earpods and a apple thunderbolt display and some USB-A chargers and some old MacBooks.

            I saw something about android (https://typed.by/manifesto#:~:text=Android,Integrity) on the website, but it mentioned Play Integrity which I do not have becuase I use LineageOS for MicroG.

            I think that the concept is stupid becuase it would require to somehow prove that the app is not modified(which is impractical) and there is no stylus on a motor or fake screen(which is also impractical).

            I think that a better aproach would be to form a Web Of Trust where only people's (not just humans, this would include all animals and potentially aliens but no clankers) certificates are signed, but with a interface that is friendly to people who are not very into technology but with some sort of way to not have who your friends are revealed, but this would still allow someone to get a attestation for their robot.

      • xeyownt

        today at 7:43 AM

        Why 256-bit key AES? It brings nothing but longer key. 128-bit is more than enough. Please don't mention PQC :fire:

        • ImPostingOnHN

          today at 11:55 AM

          "why do you need more compute resources? Please don't mention computer programs"

      • toss1

        yesterday at 11:18 PM

        Oh Gawd, not this idea again!

        This idea of capturing the timing of people's keystrokes to identify them, ensure it is them typing their passwords, or even using the timing itself as a password has been recurring every few years for at least three decades.

        It is always just as bad. Because there are so many cases where it completely fails.

        The first case is a minor injury to either hand — just put a fat bandage on one finger from a minor kitchen accident, and you'll be typing completely differently for a few days.

        Or, because I just walked into my office eating a juicy apple with one hand and I'm in a hurry typing my PW with my other hand because someone just called with an urgent issue I've got to fix, aaaaannnd, your software balks because I'm typing with a completely different cadence.

        The list of valid reasons for failure is endless wherein a person's usual solid patterns are good 90%+ of the time, but will hard fail the other 10% of the time. And the acceptable error rate would be 2-4 orders of magnitude less.

        It's a mystery how people go all the way to building software based on an idea that seems good but is actually bad, without thinking it through, or even checking how often it has been done before and failed?

        • magicseth

          yesterday at 11:23 PM

          That's not what this is. at all.

        • monocularvision

          today at 12:41 AM

          You might want to check out “How it Works” on the site as none of what you said applies: https://typed.by/how

          • josefx

            today at 1:00 AM

            Then why does your link claim the following?

            > While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.

            > Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.

            • arrowsmith

              today at 2:22 AM

              I’m sceptical about this idea but, to give it full credit, it’s a custom piece of hardware that would presumably be more accurate than previous software-only attempts. Maybe it will actually work this time, idk, although I still don’t really see the point.

            • 59nadir

              today at 5:32 AM

              Vibe copy is a hell of a drug.

          • toss1

            today at 2:03 PM

            Yes. This is from that page:

            >>While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.

            >>Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.

            This very precisely makes my point:

            Yes, the typing pattern of any human is highly and possibly even completely unique to that human — UNTIL any of a myriad of everyday issues makes it falsely deny access because the human's typing pattern has changed in a way the human can't do anything to fix at the moment.

            If you are only attempting to distinguish a human from an automated system, it'll be better, until someone just starts recording the same patterns and re-playing them to this upstream process; then its a mere race to who can get their hooks in at a lower level. And someone is always going to say: "Oh, this system can identify the specific human", and we're off to the races again.

            So, no. Unless you can account for ALL of the reasonable everyday failure modes, typing with either hand, any finger or combination of fingers out of commission for a minute or a lifetime, this idea will fail.

            • toss1

              today at 7:00 PM

              IOW, if you are doing this, it does not matter what you are doing afterwards.

              You are assuming that a human's particular typing pattern is consistent, when the fact is that any number of ordinary events will render your assumption false (one or more fingers bandaged, sprained, whatever, or one hand occupied ATM).

              This is not a hardware or software problem, and no amount of code, hardware, or cleverness will fix it; this is a fundamental mismatch between your assumption vs reality.

        • xtajv

          today at 11:53 AM

          can confirm. am weird enough to routinely flag as "inhuman".

          thaaaaaaaaanks

    • jagged-chisel

      yesterday at 9:53 PM

      Sounds like we’re bringing back the PGP key signing parties

      • __MatrixMan__

        yesterday at 9:55 PM

        The sooner we do the better.

        • hathawsh

          yesterday at 10:51 PM

          I wonder what the PGP signing concept does to thwart people who want to profit and don't care about the public good. It seems like anyone who attends a signing party can sell their key to the highest bidder, leading to bots and spammers all over again.

          • __MatrixMan__

            today at 2:17 AM

            In the flat trust model we currently use most places, it's on each person to block each spammer, bot, etc. The cost of creating a new bot account is low so it's cheap to make them come back.

            On a web of trust, if you have a negative interaction with a bot, you revoke trust in one of the humans in the chain of trust that caused you to come in contact with that bot. You've now effectively blocked all bots they've ever made or ever will make... At least until they recycle their identity and come to another key signing party.

            Once you have the web in place though, a series of "this key belongs to a human" attestations, then you can layer metadata on top of it like "this human is a skilled biologist" or "this human is a security expert". So if you use those attestations to determine what content your exposed to then a malicious human doesn't merely need to show up at a key signing party to bootstrap a new identity, they also have to rebuild their reputation to a point where you or somebody you trust becomes interested in their content again.

            Nothing can be done to prevent bad people from burning their identities for profit, but we can collectively make it not economical to do so by practicing some trust hygiene.

            Key signing establishes a graph upon which more effective trust management becomes possible. It on its own is likely insufficient.

          • 0x3f

            yesterday at 10:56 PM

            You can never prevent things like this, but you can make it expensive enough to effectively solve the problem for almost all use cases.

      • zar1048576

        today at 12:59 AM

        Definitely miss those!

    • tshaddox

      yesterday at 10:43 PM

      Doesn’t really make sense, because any service can just say “you must paste your human-attestation JWT here to use this service” and plenty of people will.

      • 0x3f

        yesterday at 10:46 PM

        You can just decay your trust level based on the `iat` value. That way people will need to keep buying me coffee. I can optionally chide them for giving out their token.

        If you're engaging with the idea seriously, I suppose we'd need to build a reputation or trust network or something.

        Although if you're talking about replay attacks specifically, there are other crypto based solutions for that.

        • tshaddox

          today at 2:07 AM

          My point is that there probably is no way in principle to distinguish between a human user utilizing automation on their own behalf in good faith (e.g. RSS readers) and bad faith automations.

          • crote

            today at 4:51 AM

            That's a feature, not a bug.

            A human is personally responsible for a bot acting on their behalf. If your bot behaves, nothing is going to happen. If you keep handing out your personal keys to shitty misbehaving bots, then you will personally get banned - which gives you a pretty good incentive to be a bit more discerning about the bots you use.

            • 0x3f

              today at 12:11 PM

              Yes, everything should just be agnostic, as long as the incentives work out it's all fine. Like if we had worked out micropayments for the web (not saying that's a good idea per se), then who cares if you're a bot or a human when you're paying a toll either way? Flipping it to be a cost rather than payment is functionally equivalent.

        • magicseth

          yesterday at 11:51 PM

          I am engaging with this seriously! I don't know if there will be any real solution. But I think it's worth exploring.

    • yesterday at 9:54 PM

  • kevin_thibedeau

    yesterday at 11:11 PM

    I've been doing that for years. Cloudflare is slowly breaking more and more of the web.

  • subscribed

    today at 8:42 AM

    This is indeed what I do. And you also should. Separate browser for banking, trusted shipping sites etc, and the normal one.

    Make sure not to browse the Internet without adblock and/or similar.

  • lukewarm707

    today at 9:50 AM

    i am increasingly moving towards a model of 'no browser'.

    search for me is now a proprietary index (like exa) that filters rubbish, with a zero data retention sla. so we don't need google profiling.

    the content is distilled into markdown pulled from cloudflare's browser rendering api.

    i let cloudflare absorb the torrent of trackers and robot checks, i just get md from the api with nothing else. cloudflare is poacher and gamekeeper.

    an alternative is groq compound which can call browsers in parallel.

    for interactive sites, or local ai browsing, i sometimes run a browser in a photon os docker with vnc, which gives you the same browser window but it runs code not on your pc.

    that said little of my use is now interacting with websites, its all agentic search and websets so i don't have to spend mental energy on it myself

    • lukewarm707

      today at 10:51 AM

      is this bad?

  • madrox

    yesterday at 10:44 PM

    I am not Nick, but there's a few ways that world happens: the free tier goes away and what people pay for more correctly reflects what they use, this all becomes cheap enough that it doesn't matter, or we come up with an end to end method of determining usage is triggered by a person.

    Another way is to just do better isolation as a user. That's probably your best shot without hoping these companies change policies.

  • atoav

    yesterday at 11:43 PM

    What if I run a website and OpenAI produces bot traffic? Do they also consider it abuse when they do it?

  • SV_BubbleTime

    yesterday at 9:49 PM

    Firefox multicontainers are pretty cool. But it’s an advanced process that most people wouldn’t do or do correctly.

    • Sabinus

      yesterday at 10:40 PM

      I love the containers too. My current use case is to keep my YouTube account separate from my Google one. Google doesn't need all that behavioural data in one place.

      It's a pity Firefox doesn't get the praise it deserves half as much as it cops criticism.

    • halJordan

      yesterday at 10:54 PM

      It is absolutely not an advanced process. It's clicking a gui. It's not advanced thinking to understand profiles. It's a basic ability to hold multiple things in your mind at once. Telling people that's difficult only increases the societal problem that being ignorant is ok.

      • subscribed

        today at 8:48 AM

        Mostof the people I met outside work wouldn't understand this concept.

        I think you're lucky to hang around people whose heads don't hurt when they think.

      • docjay

        yesterday at 11:44 PM

        “Difficult” is a relative term. They were saying it was a difficult concept for them, not you. In order to save their ego, people often phrase those events to be inclusive of the reader; it doesn’t feel as bad if you imagine everyone else would struggle too. Pay attention and you’ll notice yourself doing it too.

        “Ignorant” is also infinite - you’re ignorant of MANY things as well, and I’m sure you would struggle with things I can do with ease. For example, understanding the meaning behind what’s being said so I know not to brow-beat someone over it.

        • SV_BubbleTime

          today at 1:38 AM

          Mostly right; it’s not that it was difficult for me. It’s that normal people are never going to do it.

          I’m almost endlessly surprised by the probably-autistic-spectrum responses to tech things from people with no idea how things seem to other people.

    • Imustaskforhelp

      yesterday at 9:55 PM

      The possibilities with Firefox multi containers and automation scripts as well are truly endless.

      It's also possible to make Firefox route each container through a different proxy which could be running locally even which then can connect to multiple different VPN's. I haven't tried doing that but its certainly possible.

      It's sort of possible to run different browsers with completely new identities and sometimes IP within the convenience of one. It's really underrated. I don't use the IP part of this that I have mentioned but I use multi containers quite a lot on zen and they are kind of core part of how I browse the web and there are many cool things which can be done/have been done with them.

  • gib444

    today at 11:35 AM

    > It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.

    Every time I try this, I end up crossing wires (ie using the browser that 'works' for most things, more than the one that is 'broken')

  • cruffle_duffle

    today at 2:56 AM

    There is also the browser I use to get Claude to route around people blocking its webfetch. Both Playwright and chrome-mcp.

    • gck1

      today at 4:44 AM

      Camoufox?

  • gruez

    yesterday at 9:50 PM

    >It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.

    What are you talking about? It works fine with firefox with RFP and VPN enabled, which is already more paranoid than the average configuration. There are definitely sites where this configuration would get blocked, but chatgpt isn't one of them, so you're barking up the wrong tree here.

    • scared_together

      today at 2:52 AM

      Is your interlocutor barking up the wrong tree, or are you missing the forest for the trees?

      According to the OP:

      > The program checks 55 properties spanning three layers: your browser (GPU, screen, fonts), the Cloudflare network (your city, your IP, your region from edge headers), and the ChatGPT React application itself (__reactRouterContext, loaderData, clientBootstrap).

      I guess Firefox VPN will hide the IP at least. But what about the other data, is it faked by RFP? Because if not, the so-called privacy offered by this configuration is outdated.

      You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.

      • gruez

        today at 12:44 PM

        >But what about the other data, is it faked by RFP?

        Yes, RFP spoofs or at least somewhat obfuscates/normalizes GPU/screen/font info. The rest are integrity validations of the server/app, and not really identifying in any way.

        >You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.

        I'm not sure what the broader point you're trying to make here is. Is fingerprinting bad? Yes. All things being equal, I'd rather not have it than have it, but at the same time it's not realistic to expect openai to serve anonymous requests from anyone. Back when chatgpt was first launched you had to sign up and verify your phone number. Compared to mandatory logins, fingerprinting is definitely the lesser evil here.

• lionkor

  today at 8:11 AM

  Hi Nick, first of all, very cool of you to respond here instead of letting us all sit in the dark. I think that's what makes HN special.

  That said, is it not a little bit weird that you want to protect yourself from scraping and bots, when your entire company, product, revenue, and your employment, depends on the fact that OpenAI can bot and scrape literally every part of the internet? So your moat is non-hydrated react code in the frontend?

  • Schiendelman

    today at 2:02 PM

    Don't beat up an engineer for decisions made by company leadership. It's really inappropriate.

    • diebillionaires

      today at 2:09 PM

      Yeah, no one is responsible for what they do as long as someone else tells them to do it.

    • lionkor

      today at 3:37 PM

      They decided to work at this company, I think it's a reasonable discussion to have?

    • SilasX

      today at 5:23 PM

      While I would generally sympathize on that front, it doesn't really apply here.

      None of the management-level desiderata he appealed to require that the user experience be broken this bad. There is very little bot deterrence from prevention of typing at that stage, while it heavily impacts user experience, especially on mobile.

      I elaborate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575982

• halflife

  yesterday at 9:44 PM

  Don’t know if it’s related to the article, but the chats ui performance becomes absolutely horrendous in long chats.

  Typing the chat box is slow, rendering lags and sometimes gets stuck altogether.

  I have a research chat that I have to think twice before messaging because the performance is so bad.

  Running on iPhone 16 safari, and MacBook Pro m3 chrome.

  • DenisM

    yesterday at 10:32 PM

    In the good old days Netflix had "Dynamic HTML" code that would take a DOM element which scrolled out of view port and move it to the position where it was about to be scrolled in from the other end. Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.

    They did it because a lot of devices running Netflix (TVs, DVD players, etc) were underpowered and Netflix was not keen on writing separate applications. They did, however, invest into a browser engine that would have HW acceleration not just for video playback but also for moving DOM elements. Basically, sprites.

    The lost art of writing efficient code...

    • zdragnar

      yesterday at 10:44 PM

      > Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.

      This is generally called virtual scrolling, and it is not only an option in many common table libraries, but there are plenty of standalone implementations and other libraries (lists and things) that offer it. The technique certainly didn't originate with Netflix.

      • weird-eye-issue

        today at 8:47 AM

        Yes, tables and lists, since they have a fixed height per item/row. Chat messages don't have a fixed height so its more difficult. And by more difficult I mean that every single virtual paging library that I've looked at in the past would not work.

        • amluto

          today at 11:56 AM

          But they do have constant height in the sense that, unless you resize the window horizontally, the height doesn’t change.

          For what it’s worth, modern browsers can render absurdly large plain HTML+CSS documents fairly well except perhaps for a slow initial load as long as the contents are boring enough. Chat messages are pretty boring.

          I have a diagnostic webpage that is a few million lines long. I could get fancy and optimize it, but it more or less just works, even on mobile.

          • weird-eye-issue

            today at 1:54 PM

            Exactly, browsers can render it fast. It's likely a re-rendering issue in React. So the real solution is just preventing the messages from getting rendered too often instead of some sort of virtual paging.

        • zdragnar

          today at 2:01 PM

          Dynamic height of virtual scrolling elements is a thing. You just need to recalculate the scrollable height on the fly. tanstack's does it, as do some of the nicer grid libraries.

          • weird-eye-issue

            today at 2:41 PM

            To be fair I haven't looked at any solutions in about a decade lol

      • tmpz22

        yesterday at 11:41 PM

        Its been about three years but infinite scroll is naunced depending on the content that needs to be displayed. Its a tough nut to crack and can require a lot of maintenance to keep stable.

        None of which chatgpt can handle presumably.

      • dotancohen

        yesterday at 11:26 PM

        And yet ChatGPT does not use it.

        GP was mentioning that a solution to the problem exists, not that Netflix specifically invented it. Your quip that the technique is not specific to Netflix bolsters the argument that OpenAI should code that in.

        • jasonfarnon

          yesterday at 11:45 PM

          I'm ignorant of the tech here. But I have noticed that ctrl-F search doesn't work for me on these longer chats. Which is what made me think they were doing something like virtual scrolling. I can't understand how the UI can get so slow if a bunch of the page is being swapped out.

          • dotancohen

            today at 12:34 AM

            Ctrl-A for select all doesn't work either. I actually wondered how they broke that.

        • BoorishBears

          yesterday at 11:43 PM

          They didn't actually name the solution: the solution is virtualization.

          They described Netflix's implementation, but if someone actually wanted to follow up on this (even for their own personal interest), Dynamic HTML would not get you there, while virtualization would across all the places it's used: mobile, desktop, web, etc.

    • groundzeros2015

      yesterday at 11:22 PM

      This is how every scrolling list has been implemented since the 80s. We actually lost knowledge about how to build UI in the move to web

      • bloomca

        today at 12:29 AM

        The biggest issue is that there is no native component support for that. So everyone implements their own and it is both brittle and introduces some issues like:

        - "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected - the scrollbar has wrong dimensions - sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall)

        The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to optimize the same way it is possible in native apps (they are much less flexible overall).

        • TeMPOraL

          today at 12:56 AM

          Right. This is one of my favorite examples of how badly bloated the web is, and how full of stupid decisions. Virtual scrolling means you're maintaining a window into content, not actually showing full content. Web browsers are perfectly fine showing tens of thousands of lines of text, or rows in a table, so if you need virtual scrolling for less, something already went badly wrong, and the product is likely to be a toy, not a tool (working definition: can it handle realistic amount of data people would use for productive work - i.e. 10k rows, not 10 rows).

          • exchemist

            today at 11:27 AM

            Agreed - I've had this argument with people who've implemented virtual scroll on technical tools and now users can't Ctrl-F around, or get a real sense of where they are in the data. Want to count a particular string? Or eyeball as you scroll to get a feel for the shape of it?

            More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).

            There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.

            Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)

        • mike_hearn

          today at 10:13 AM

          Desktop GUI toolkits aren't less flexible on layout, they're often more flexible.

          We lost it because the web was never designed for applications and the support it gives you for building GUIs is extremely basic beyond styling, verging on more primitive than Windows 3.1 - there are virtually no widgets, and the widgets that do exist have almost no features. So everyone rolls their own and it's really hard to do that well. In fact that's one of the big reasons everyone wrote apps for Windows back in the day despite the lockin, the value of the built-in widget toolkit was just that high. It's why web apps so often feel flaky and half baked compared to how desktop apps tend(ed) to feel - the widgets just don't get the investment that a shared GUI platform allows.

  • bschwindHN

    today at 1:12 AM

    Almost certainly running some sort of O(n^2) algorithm on the chat text every key press. Or maybe just insane hierarchies of HTML.

    Either way, pretty wild that you can have billions of dollars at your disposal, your interface is almost purely text, and still manage to be a fuckup at displaying it without performance problems.

  • stacktraceyo

    yesterday at 9:48 PM

    Same. It’s wild how bad it can get with just like a normal longer running conversation

  • qingcharles

    today at 1:26 AM

    OpenAI sites are the only ones that do this to me. I have to keep a separate browser profile just for my OpenAI login with absolutely nothing installed on it or it'll end up being dogshit slow and unusable.

  • today at 6:39 PM

  • moffkalast

    yesterday at 10:14 PM

    Yeah just had this earlier today, I had to write my response in vscode and paste it in, there were literal seconds of lag for typing each character. Typical bloated React.

    • scq

      yesterday at 10:31 PM

      Just because a web application uses React and is slow, it does not follow that it is slow because of React.

      It's perfectly possible to write fast or slow web applications in React, same as any other framework.

      Linear is one of the snappiest web applications I've ever used, and it is written in React.

      • moffkalast

        today at 9:21 AM

        Sure it's possible but those are a handful of exceptions against the norm, when the general approach so easily guides you towards bloat upon bloat that you have to be an expert to actively avoid going down that route.

      • brigandish

        yesterday at 11:20 PM

        Does not, in the seeming absence of other snappy examples and the overwhelming evidence of many, many slow React apps, the exception prove the rule?

        • scq

          yesterday at 11:39 PM

          There are plenty of snappy examples. Off the top of my head: Discord, Netflix, Signal Desktop, WhatsApp Web.

          • genthree

            today at 12:43 PM

            Those are all really poorly-performing.

          • TeMPOraL

            today at 11:37 AM

            Discord, maybe. But Netflix and WhatsApp Web? Those are bloated cows, just less broken than average.

  • PunchyHamster

    today at 1:34 AM

    That's how eating your own dogshit works, or whatever was that saying

• sebmellen

  yesterday at 9:40 PM

  Great to hear from a first-party source. I'm a Pro subscriber and my team spends well over two thousand dollars per month on OpenAI subscriptions. However, even when I'm logged in with my Pro account, if I'm using a VPN provider like Mullvad, I often have trouble using the chat interface or I get timeout errors.

  Is this to be expected? I would presume that if I'm authenticated and paying, VPN use wouldn't be a worry. It would be nice to be able to use the tool whether or not I'm on a VPN.

  • JumpCrisscross

    today at 12:02 AM

    > even when I'm logged in with my Pro account, if I'm using a VPN provider like Mullvad, I often have trouble using the chat interface or I get timeout errors

    Heard from a founder who recently switched his company to Claude due to OpenAI's lagginess–it's absolutely an OpenAI problem. Not an AI problem in general.

• lm411

  today at 3:19 AM

  "we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform"

  The scary part is that you don't even see the irony in writing this.

  Or, are you just okay "misusing" everyone for your own benefit?

• xg15

  today at 6:36 PM

  > how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

  Are you applying the same standards to your own scraper bots?

• ghm2199

  today at 2:49 PM

  Would OpenAI also consider renumerations to every site they have scraped that had a robots.txt file and they chose to ignore it anyway? Feel free to not answer this question.

  I have kind of lost count of how many content creators have said personally to me traffic is meaningfully down because of all these chatbots. The latest example is this poor but standup guy: moneyfortherestofus.com.

  • timeinput

    today at 4:15 PM

    I'm really glad Hacker News disallows AI generated comments. The response I got from asking that question really is quite enlightening. Short answer: "no", long answer: "no -- fuck off", longer answer: "no -- fuck off -- if you want I can dig into whether or not you should fuck off harder"

• noosphr

  yesterday at 9:45 PM

  >These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

  Can you share these mitigations so we can mitigate against you?

  • 0x3f

    yesterday at 9:50 PM

    It's just Cloudflare. Bypassing it is a whole industry.

    • zenethian

      yesterday at 11:02 PM

      I read the comment as “use it to mitigate against OpenAI bots scraping the web” and not to mitigate Cloudflare.

      • 0x3f

        yesterday at 11:28 PM

        Well it's the same answer isn't it... use Cloudflare. And hope OpenAI doesn't have a backroom scraping deal with them, which they might.

  • dawnerd

    yesterday at 9:59 PM

    Flaresolverr is one way. Isn’t perfect but bypasses a lot.

• seba_dos1

  yesterday at 9:42 PM

  Hi! It's all perfectly understandable - after all, we use things like Anubis to protect our services from OpenAI and similar actors and keep them available to the real users for exactly the same reasons.

• driverdan

  today at 12:04 AM

  Brand new account with 2 comments in this thread. How can we be sure you're not a bot deployed to defend OpenAI?

  Please run Cloudflare's privacy invasive tool and share all the values it generates here so we can determine if you're a real person.

• conartist6

  today at 10:17 AM

  Still feels very anti-consumer.

  If every company behaved like you do, the internet would be a much worse place.

  In fact, OpenAI has already made the Internet a much worse place, already much, much less open and much less optimistic about its own future than it was even five years ago...

• wiseowise

  today at 9:27 AM

  > A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.

  Thank you for the reply, Nick. It wouldn’t be a problem to disable the tracking for authenticated users then, would it?

  • lloydatkinson

    today at 9:31 AM

    It would because someone's KPI depends on number of tracked users lol

    • matsemann

      today at 11:25 AM

      If logging in disabled all checks, all bots would just spam-create users first. Of course it needs to run for all users, without it being necessarily nefarious.

      • toddmorey

        today at 2:01 PM

        Paid users?

• mehov

  yesterday at 9:40 PM

  > because we want to keep free and logged-out access

  But don't you run these checks on logged-in users too?

  • MyNameIsNickT

    yesterday at 9:48 PM

    Yep, on logged-in users too. The reason is basically the same: we want scarce compute going to real people, not attackers. Being logged in is one useful signal, but it doesn’t fully prevent automation, account abuse, or other malicious traffic, so we apply protections in both cases.

    • lelanthran

      today at 9:09 AM

      > The reason is basically the same: we want scarce compute going to real people, not attackers.

      You are defining "Bots" and "Scrapers" as a subset of attackers, though.

      Is this really fair? The value in your product came from people who wrote for other people, not bots, but your bot scraped them anyway.

      There is no way to determine if a request that is coming from my browser is typed in by me or automated with a browser extension. Your only way to win this "war" on "attackers" is by forcing users into using your own application to access your product.

      My browser extension (see my previous reply on this story) automates the existing open tab I have to all the different chat AIs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc).

      I suppose all you can do is rate-limit each user.

    • angoragoats

      yesterday at 10:30 PM

      Nothing you do can fully prevent automation. Someone who wants to automate requests badly enough will be able to do it, especially when the “protections” are as easy to decrypt and analyze as the OP proved.

      Meanwhile, the rest of us (well, not me, because I don’t use your garbage product, but lots of others do) have to suffer and have our compute resources used up in the name of “protection.”

      • 3form

        yesterday at 10:43 PM

        Yeah, that's it. Also, it is a bit amusing to me - "We want to prevent automation", says the employee of Let's Automate Inc.

      • geetee

        yesterday at 10:41 PM

        [flagged]

    • jorvi

      yesterday at 11:14 PM

      I'm glad you guys at least went with CloudFlare. LMarena went with Google's ReCaptcha, which is plain evil. It'll often gaslight you and pretend you failed a captcha of identifying something as simple as fire hydrants. Another lovely trick is asking you to identify bridges or busses, but in actuality it also wants you to identify viaducts or semi-trucks.

    • salawat

      yesterday at 10:49 PM

      More like "We want your money, but don't want to provide service." Are you sure OpenAI isn't morphing into a finance/insurance company?

      • pixl97

        yesterday at 11:13 PM

        While OAI is one of the more hypocritical of the bunch, it is not uncommon for paid services to have some limitations in their terms of service. Like going in a store and buying stuff, it doesn't me a free for all doing whatever you want.

        • zamadatix

          today at 12:39 AM

          Limitations on the ChatGPT subscription should have to do with the usage limits of the tier you paid for (and I don't think anyone has a problem with that). If I'm in the limits of requests I paid for then it's usage rather than abuse.

          "Abuse" checks should only come into play when someone tries to leverage the free tier. It reminds me of those cable companies that try to sell "unlimited" plans and then try to say customers who use more than x GB/month are abusing the service rather than just say what the real limits are because "unlimited" sounds better in marketing.

• jesuslop

  today at 6:50 PM

  Hi Nick, the lag is quite bad in the field, honest. In desktop app in this case/datapoint. There was that "halt and catch fire" episode where they spoke about a millisencod threshold of delay that separated usability and non. Solvent hw and fiber connection.

• c0_0p_

  yesterday at 9:43 PM

  Can't have those bots or scrapers running amok can we...

• lm411

  today at 5:33 AM

  "Integrity at OpenAI"

  Basically an oxymoron at this point.

• witx

  today at 8:15 AM

  > These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping,

  Do you guys see the irony here?

  • hosteur

    today at 8:41 AM

    They obviously get it. They just do not care.

• pdntspa

  yesterday at 10:32 PM

  Y'all just salty that DeepSeek et al are training their LLMs on yours

• numlock86

  today at 8:44 AM

  > [...] we protect our first-party products from abuse like [...] scraping [...]

  what an odd thing to say for someone whose product is built entirely on exactly that

• egorfine

  today at 7:35 AM

  Paying customer since inception here.

  I presume the local ChatGPT.app has even more measures to prevent automation, right? Presumably privacy-invasive ones as it is customary these days?

  Is there a way I can opt out? I really, really, really don't like it.

  • radicality

    today at 3:57 PM

    The way I use the products something like this. My main account on my MacBook - ChatGPT website, codex cli. Then, a Mac VM running via UTM with shared writable dir - anything more ‘shady’ in terms of permissions and for playing with new ai apps - eg ChatGPT/Codex standalone apps, Atlas, Claude desktop app etc. Seems to work decently enough. And I do totally agree that there should be a way to opt out of all these privacy invasive measures, especially after paying $200/mo

• the_gipsy

  yesterday at 10:09 PM

  But is the title true, is typing specifically blocked? Or does it just block submitting the text?

  I ask because I have seen huge variations in load time. Sometimes I had to wait seconds until being able to type. Nowadays it seems better though.

• leros

  today at 1:33 PM

  Fwiw, I stopped using ChatGPT and went to a competitor because the checks slow down ChatGPT so much that the webapp becomes unusable in anything but a new short chat. CPU usage goes to 100%, you can't type, the entire tab freezes, etc. It's a miserable experience to use and I'm on a relatively new MacBook not some old computer. If you read around it's a very common problem people have been having for a while now.

• tipiirai

  today at 1:40 AM

  I don't trust what OpenAI says. Sam Altman gives shivers, and these kinds of blog posts make things look even worse.

• myHNAccount123

  yesterday at 10:16 PM

  Can you fix the resizing text box issue on Safari when a new line is inserted? When your question wraps to a newline Safari locks up for a few seconds and it's really annoying. You can test by pasting text too.

• cheese_van

  today at 12:28 PM

  <protect our first-party products from abuse like scraping>

  Abuse from scraping has long been a serious problem for many, good job!

• vkou

  yesterday at 10:01 PM

  > Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

  How can first-party products protect themselves from abuse by OpenAI's bots and scraping?

  • mystraline

    yesterday at 10:53 PM

    This is a completely in-scope question.

    How do we defend against your scraping, OpenAI?

    I dont want any of my content scraped or seen by you all. Frankly, fuck you all for thinking my content is owned by you.

    • CableNinja

      today at 4:29 AM

      I use nginx conditionals and useragent checking, then respond with 418 or 410.

      Probably too late now but my list needs updating

    • tedsanders

      today at 7:26 AM

      It's documented here: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots

      • subscribed

        today at 2:31 PM

        - which one is to stop you from hammering small servers with hundreds simultaneous connections?

        - why don't you just respect existing robots.txt that apply to you already?

        - does every LLM scraper seriously think the onus to opt out from the EVERY SINGLE SCRAPER is on the webmasters/owners?

    • wilg

      yesterday at 11:49 PM

      robots.txt bro https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots/

      • tomalbrc

        today at 1:10 AM

        "bro": https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-anthropic-ai-ignore-r...

        • stefanka

          today at 8:33 AM

          The article is from 2024. Is this still happening?

          • ImPostingOnHN

            today at 12:08 PM

            Do we have any evidence they started complying?

            If not, we can conclude they did not, until such evidence shows up.

            • stefanka

              today at 3:24 PM

              I’m genuinely curious to know whether there was a change in behavior especially after OpenAI informed about how to prevent scraping (robot.txt, etc.).

              • ImPostingOnHN

                today at 3:29 PM

                I am as well. Like, is there any evidence of a change, or can we assume nothing changed?

        • wilg

          today at 2:28 AM

          should be pretty easy to test and not rely on an anonymous source from a weird analytics company via business insider. are these bots actually from openai or are they just using their user agent? are they coming from openai ip ranges? etc. https://openai.com/gptbot.json

          • stefanka

            today at 3:55 PM

            Are all of OpenAI’s ip ranges known?

          • ImPostingOnHN

            today at 12:10 PM

            > should be pretty easy to test

            I look forward to your results, whether or not they disprove the article.

• 20k

  today at 11:52 AM

  >abuse like bots, scraping

  10/10, I've got no notes

• xtajv

  today at 11:47 AM

  Earnest question: if I was feeling lazy and security-conscious at the same time, would I be better off...

  (A) opening chatgpt.com in qubes (but staying logged out, i.e. never creating a chatgpt account)

  -or-

  (B) creating a freemium chatgpt account

  ?

  (Obviously, the "best" answer would be something like running a local LLM from an airgapped machine in a concrete bunker :) But that's not what I'm after).

• toddmorey

  today at 2:07 PM

  Why are all these checks still performed on an authenticated, paid user?

• diebillionaires

  today at 2:08 PM

  As a free tier user I only get like three queries in now without model quality reduction, so I'd say your bases are covered as far as GPU costs around misuse.

• huertouisj

  yesterday at 10:24 PM

  sometimes I paste giant texts (think summarization) in the chatgpt (paid) webapp and I noticed that the CPU fans spin up for about 5 seconds after, as if the text is "processed" client side somehow. this is before hitting "submit" to send the prompt to the model.

  I assumed it was maybe some tokenization going on client side, but now I realize maybe it's some proof of work related to prompt length?

• aucisson_masque

  today at 10:37 AM

  Why send the Turnstile bytecode encrypted ? Surely people savvy enough to abuse the system will find out how to decrypt it, see OP, and it gives the impression that you are trying to hide stuffs you're not proud about.

  • pocksuppet

    today at 12:45 PM

    Because they want to make it as hard as possible to reverse engineer. If they wanted it to be easy, they'd use <input type="checkbox" name="ishuman">I am a human

• invalidusernam3

  today at 8:44 AM

  But why block the ui until then? Surely you can just not make any requests until the checks are complete?

• htx80nerd

  today at 3:21 PM

  Thanks. I've used ChatGPT a million times and never had any input issues.

• mghackerlady

  today at 1:16 PM

  No, leave it. Surely the mighty OpenAI can deal with the scraping. At least, it seems to think everyone else can

• dev1ycan

  yesterday at 9:53 PM

  "abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform"

  This has to be a joke, right?

  • pera

    yesterday at 10:13 PM

    I really can't tell for sure (new user posting a ridiculously hypocritical corporate message on a Sunday) but if GP actually works for OpenAI the lack of self-awareness is seriously striking

    • singpolyma3

      yesterday at 10:41 PM

      How?

      • oblio

        yesterday at 11:51 PM

        Because OpenAI built their entire business around shamelessly scraping anything that had bits on it.

        • singpolyma3

          today at 12:01 AM

          Maybe. But scraping isn't abuse. Seems a bit different?

          • cycomanic

            today at 7:11 AM

            Quoting the OP

            > These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

            That implies that OpenAI (or at least this employee) considers scraping abuse.

          • ludwik

            today at 7:13 AM

            The top comment categorized scraping as abuse ("abuse such as [...] scraping") - that's precisely why some accuse its author of lack of self awareness.

          • PunchyHamster

            today at 1:35 AM

            Given that the scraping doesn't do any rate limiting and pisses on robots.txt, yes it is abuse

            • singpolyma3

              today at 2:41 AM

              Is there any evidence OpenAI has been ignoring robots.txt for scraping purposes? AFAIK the main sources of that traffic are still unknown.

  • yesterday at 10:36 PM

• matheusmoreira

  today at 2:47 PM

  > protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping

  You do see the irony here?

• sourcecodeplz

  today at 11:25 AM

  I really appreciate the free options, without even needing a login. Wish they would also keep the small free weekly allowance for Codex.

• prmoustache

  today at 9:08 AM

  > we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

  Isn't that how you build your service from the very start? How ironic.

• sandeepkd

  today at 4:18 PM

  You do not ever trust the client side. Sometimes being simple is good enough. The maximum you can do is put rate limits on the IP address and/or user account. You just do not want some one to use the product at machine speeds.

• gck1

  today at 4:40 AM

  I always wondered why you even have logged out access. I'm glad I can use ChatGPT in incognito when I want a "clean room" response, but surely that's not the primary use case.

  Is user base that never logs in really that significant?

  • pocksuppet

    today at 12:46 PM

    This episode proves they know who you are, even when you're logged out. If they didn't know, they wouldn't let you use the service.

• piskov

  yesterday at 9:42 PM

  Tangential question: are there chatgpt app devs on X? There are a few from Codex team but I couldn’t find guys from “ordinary” chatgpt.

  Also if you could pass this over: it takes 5 taps to change thinking effort on ios and none (as in completely hidden) on macos.

  If I were to guess it seems that you were trying to lower the token usage :-). Why the effort is only nicely available on web and windows is beyond me

• AndrewKemendo

  today at 6:48 PM

  Kudos for trying

  This whole thread was like watching a swarm of ants try and take a grasshopper down

• nicbou

  today at 8:32 AM

  For what it's worth, I switched to Gemini because of the long ChatGPT load time. Gemini loads as fast as Google Search.

• rglullis

  yesterday at 10:25 PM

  I shouldn't be giving ideas to your boss, but I bet he would be interested in making ChatGPT available only by paying customers or free for those whose who gets their eyes scanned by The Orb. Give 30 days of raised limits and we're all set to live in the dystopia he wants.

• lifis

  today at 2:17 PM

  Are you disabling them for paying subscribers?

• freeopinion

  today at 4:10 AM

  Its your business and your call. But my opinion is that I wish you would quit offering free services. I'm pretty concerned about the horrible effect your free services are having on education. Yes, AI can be an incredible tool to enhance education. But the reality is that it is decimating children's will to learn anything.

  I don't want to blame AI for all the world's problems. And I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But I think you should think really hard about the value of gates. Smart people can build better gates than cash. But right now, cash might be better than nothing. Clearly you have already thought about how to build gates, but I don't think you have spent enough time thinking about who should be gated and why. You should think about gates that have more purpose than just maximizing your profit.

  "We want to hook as many people as possible without letting in our competitors" is a pretty crummy thought to use as a public justification.

  (Edited for typos.)

• kelnos

  today at 3:45 AM

  > A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.

  Are these checks disabled for logged-in, paid users?

• subscribed

  today at 3:11 AM

  > "abuse like bots, scraping"

  You what, mate? Would you please use that on yourselves first? Because it comes off as a GROSS hypocrisy. State of the art hypocrisy.

  >> behavioral biometric layer

  But this one, especially, takes the cake.

  Quite disgusting.

• JumpCrisscross

  yesterday at 11:21 PM

  > we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users

  How does this comport with OpenAI's new B2B-first strategy?

  > We also keep a very close eye on the user impact

  Are paid or logged-in users also penalised?

• gmerc

  today at 7:02 AM

  the company that scrapes every until it collapses really needs to protect itself from scraping. Lol.

• andrepd

  yesterday at 9:42 PM

  > OpenAI: These checks are part of how we protect products from abuse like bots, scraping, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

  This would be fucking HILARIOUS if it wasn't so tragic.

  • rchaud

    yesterday at 10:38 PM

    Manifest destiny for me, border enforcement for thee.

    • lmz

      today at 1:20 AM

      This kind of flawed thinking again. Like the natives didn't fight and lose wars against the manifest destiny types.

      • ImPostingOnHN

        today at 3:31 PM

        I don't think anybody claimed no Native Americans tried to fight back against their genocide?

        • lmz

          today at 3:59 PM

          It's painting border enforcement as somehow immoral. There is no sin in trying to be better at it than those before.

          • ImPostingOnHN

            today at 4:45 PM

            genociding people to take their land within their borders is generally frowned upon today

      • today at 12:18 PM

  • Chance-Device

    yesterday at 9:47 PM

    It can be both

• SubiculumCode

  today at 6:23 AM

  In long threads in chatgpt, it grinds to a halt in both Chrome and Firefox. Please fix

• tekawade

  today at 7:22 AM

  Hey Nick, I find it concerning this account is. Frayed just to comment on this thread. And never even reply back to any of the real concerns.

  Here to hoping this is real person and actually created account out of concern and sharing.

• blactuary

  today at 12:49 PM

  > I work on Integrity at OpenAI

  Irony is truly dead. Show you have integrity by quitting your job

• SilasX

  today at 4:00 PM

  It has not been negligible for me, and, however you're doing this, there is significant room for improvement.

  There have been times when, across about ten minutes of usage, most of which is me typing on iOS Safari, it drained 15% of my battery. There is no functional justification for this beyond poor code quality. (It was on a long conversation FWIW.)

  This when I'm logged in, with a paid (Plus) account, connected to a very old email address with a real user profile. That can't be the result of super-clever bot defense measures, because it's merely an inconvenience on desktop. And if you genuinely believe that email has been compromised, why aren't you reaching out the to the account owner, as the account isn't otherwise connected to fraud by your heuristics?

  However brilliant the LLM agent it is, I'm seeing a lot of unforced errors regarding how you implement a web interface to it. If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't really register compared to all the bloat I see on other sites.

• MisterTea

  today at 11:58 AM

  > These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

  Isn't this the same behavior used by AI companies to gather training data? Pot, meet kettle.

• potsandpans

  today at 5:49 AM

  Chatgpt banned me after I said disparaging things about Sam Altman in a chat.

  When I appealed the ban, I was told that I couldn't be told exactly why I was banned, but if I wrote a written apology and "promised to never do it again" my ban could be appealed.

  I asked for an update on the ban via email every month for over a year.

  Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that process?

• wackget

  today at 2:53 PM

  I understand it's not your area, but can you please politely tell your colleagues that the clickbait-type teaser questions from the latest model are absolutely infuriating and are quickly leading to me abandon the platform entirely?

  If you'd like, I can write a two-sentence paragraph to send to your colleagues. It contains a special phrase which most colleagues will find difficult to ignore. Would you like me to do that?

• ryanmcbride

  today at 12:39 PM

  Protecting your site from bots and scraping is absolutely hilarious considering how you acquired (read: stole) the data you trained your bot on dude.

  Just yank that ladder up behind you.

  • pocksuppet

    today at 12:44 PM

    > Just yank that ladder up behind you.

    You would be an irresponsible entrepreneur if you didn't. Don't forget your legal obligation to maximise shareholder value.

• rsrsrs86

  today at 3:21 PM

  Hi Nick, do you believe what you say? You scraped the shit out of everyone

• 0dayman

  yesterday at 10:48 PM

  Hi Nick, your software is a horrendous encroachment on users' privacy and its quality is subpar to those of us who know what we're working with. We don't use your product here.

  • chronc6393

    today at 7:31 AM

    > Hi Nick, your software is a horrendous encroachment on users' privacy and its quality is subpar to those of us who know what we're working with. We don't use your product here.

    It’s ok, OpenAI is cooked.

    Feel bad for anyone who joined OAI in the past 12 months. Their RSU ain’t going to be worth much later this year. IPO is too late.

• marxisttemp

  today at 10:48 AM

  History will not be kind to you and your ilk. Quit your job.

• owebmaster

  today at 10:17 AM

  The reason why you did it is clear, why you guys settle down for such a poor implementation is why this thread exists

• jgalt212

  yesterday at 9:48 PM

  > we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform

  Have you just described the dilemma facing all the content sites used to train LLMs?

• crest

  yesterday at 11:26 PM

  Then make sure they only target the free tier!

• quotemstr

  yesterday at 10:02 PM

  We really need ZKPs of humanity

  • ctoth

    yesterday at 10:17 PM

    No, we really don't. We don't need worldcoin, we don't need papers, please. We just don't.

    "Prove your humanity/age/other properties" with this mechanism quickly goes places you do not want it to go.

    • Muromec

      yesterday at 11:46 PM

      > quickly goes places you do not want it to go.

      Which places?

    • quotemstr

      yesterday at 10:20 PM

      No, it doesn't go places we "do not want it to go". What part of zero knowledge doesn't make sense? How precisely does a free, unlinkable, multi-vendor, open-source cryptographic attestation of recent humanity create something terrible?

      It would behoove people to engage with the substance of attestation proposals. It's lazy to state that any verification scheme whatsoever is equivalent to a panopticon, dystopia as thought-terminating cliche.

      We really do have the technology now to attest biographical details in such a way that whoever attests to a fact about you can't learn the use to which you put that attestation and in such a way that the person who verifies your attestation can see it's genuine without learning anything about you except that one bit of information you disclose.

      And no, such a ZK scheme does not turn instantly into some megacorp extracting monopoly rents from some kind of internet participation toll booth. Why would this outcome be inevitable? We have plenty of examples of fair and open ecosystems. It's just lazy to assert right out of the gate that any attestation scheme is going to be captured.

      So, please, can we stop matching every scheme whatsoever for verifying facts as actors as the East German villain in a cold war movie? We're talking about something totally different.

      • ctoth

        yesterday at 10:28 PM

        The ZK part isn't the problem. The "attestation of recent humanity" part is. Who attests? What happens when someone can't get attested?

        You've been to the doctor recently, right? Given them your SSN? Every identity system ever built was going to be scoped || voluntary. None of them stayed that way.

        Once you have the identity mechanism, "Oh it's zero knowledge! So let's use it for your age! Have you ever been convicted?" which leads to "mandated by employers" which leads to...

        We've seen this goddamn movie before. Let's just skip it this time? Please?

      • dzikimarian

        yesterday at 10:36 PM

        The part where FAANG does usual Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, masses don't care/understand and we have yet another "sign in with... " that isn't open source nor zero-knowledge in practice and monetizes your every move. And probably at least one of the vendors has massive leak that shows half-assed or even flawed on purpose implementation.

  • gzread

    today at 1:22 AM

    Sure. I'll provide an API to provide mine to your bot for $1 each time.

• yesterday at 10:02 PM

• user3939382

  yesterday at 9:40 PM

  Have you given any thought to what we trade when big tech elects one corporation as the gatekeeper for vast swaths of the Internet?

• Razengan

  today at 6:20 AM

  > we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.

  And THANK YOU for that!

  Being able to use ChatGPT and Grok without signing in is a big part of why I like those services over Gemini etc.

  Hell, dummy Claude won't even let me Sign-In-with-Apple on the Mac desktop, even though it let me Sign-UP-with-Apple on the iPhone! BUT they do support Sign-In-with-Google!!? What in the heavenly hell is this dumbassery

• tomalbrc

  today at 1:08 AM

  Fake Account

• thegreatpeter

  yesterday at 10:29 PM

  You’re doing gods work sir, thank you!

• today at 10:32 AM

• boesboes

  today at 11:55 AM

  lol, hypocrites.

• nickphx

  yesterday at 10:36 PM

  the irony of your statement is hilarious, disappointing, and infuriating.

• opsdu

  today at 7:36 PM

  [dead]

• throwaway613746

  today at 2:29 PM

  [dead]

• tempaccountabgd

  today at 5:10 PM

  [dead]

• huflungdung

  yesterday at 11:52 PM

  [dead]

It's absurd how unusable Cloudflare is making the web when using a browser or IP address they consider "suspicious". I've lately been drowning in captchas for the crime of using Firefox. All in the interest of "bot protection", of course.

• lucasfin000

  yesterday at 9:12 PM

  The real frustrating part is that Cloudflare's "definition" of suspicious keeps changing and expanding. VPN users, privacy-first browsers, uncommon IP ranges, they all get flagged. The people most likely to get caught by these systems are exactly the ones who care most about their privacy, and not the bots that they are apparently targeting.

  • gruez

    yesterday at 9:30 PM

    >The real frustrating part is that Cloudflare's "definition" of suspicious keeps changing and expanding.

    That's... exactly expected? It's a cat and mouse game. People running botnets or AI scrapers aren't diligently setting the evil bit on their packets.

    • lxgr

      yesterday at 10:33 PM

      So the stable state here is all humans eventually being locked out? (Bots are getting better every day; I doubt the same is true for all humans, including those with weird browsers or networks unwilling to install some dystopian Cloudflare "Internet passport".)

      But hey, at least some bots are also not making it past Cloudflare!

      • small_scombrus

        today at 12:07 AM

        > So the stable state here is all humans eventually being locked out?

        Yep. The most easy to implement stable state for any system where you're aiming to prevent misuse is to just prevent use

      • kristjansson

        today at 3:25 PM

        Or else a player too big to be blocked moves into the space with a service that provides some/all of the privacy benefits, but declines to offer the other undesirable aspects of VPN (e.g. location shifting to circumvent local restrictions)

        i.e. iCloud private relay is the future

        • lxgr

          today at 6:52 PM

          I’ve already had a few services lock me out with iCloud Private Relay.

      • WatchDog

        today at 12:21 AM

        The inevitability is that these kinds of services just won't be offered without identifying yourself.

        Claude's free tier requires a phone number just to try it.

        • sph

          today at 7:30 AM

          PRISM as a Service.

    • jagged-chisel

      yesterday at 9:55 PM

      That’s obviously because they’re not being “evil”

  • Aurornis

    today at 12:40 AM

    > The people most likely to get caught by these systems are exactly the ones who care most about their privacy, and not the bots that they are apparently targeting.

    In my brief experience with abuse mitigation, connections coming from VPNs or unusual IP ranges were very significantly more likely to be associated with abuse.

    It depends on your users. VPNs aren’t common at all, even though you hear about them a lot on Hacker News. For types of social sites where people got banned for abuse (forums) the first step to getting back on the forum was always to sign up for a VPN and try to reconnect. It got so bad that almost every new account connecting via VPN would reveal itself as a spammer, a banned member trying to return, or someone trying to sock puppet alternate accounts for some reason.

    The worst offenders are Tor IP addresses. Anyone connecting from Tor was basically guaranteed to have bad intentions.

    I heard from someone who dealt with a lot of e-mail abuse that the death threats, extortion, and other serious abuse almost always came from Protonmail or one of the other privacy-first providers that I can’t remember right now. He half-jokingly said they could likely block Protonmail entirely without impacting any real users.

    It’s tough for people who want these things for privacy, but the sad reality is that these same privacy protections are favored by people who are trying to abuse services.

    • frig57

      today at 1:15 PM

      The idea that normal people don't use proton is incredibly wrong. Same with VPNs to a large extent.

      I work a customer facing email job and loads of people use Proton across demographics and industries

      • next_xibalba

        today at 2:20 PM

        About what percentage of “normal people” who are email users would you estimate use Proton?

    • gzread

      today at 5:36 AM

      The solution is for more people to use Tor routinely. Like I'm doing right now.

      • perching_aix

        today at 12:29 PM

        How does the Tor network counter abuse? Like, say you're hosting a service on the Tor network, what does the Tor network offer if anything to defend against e.g. DDoS attacks?

        • gzread

          today at 3:02 PM

          It's a solution for users because you can't afford to demand ID from your users (such as an IP address) if all your users quit when you do that.

          • perching_aix

            today at 3:31 PM

            Sure, but if the service keeps getting overwhelmed (financially or traffic-wise) or compromised (not even necessarily in the security sense but in the semantic purpose sense, like via spam floods on a message board) due to a lessened capability to combat abuse, then the user is worse off all over again, no?

            All it would solve then is laundering Tor traffic from being probably malicious to being reputationally ambiguous. Though for a within-network service, that's probably assumed anyways - hard to run a Tor service if you assume all Tor users are malicious, that would be nonsensical.

  • whatisthiseven

    yesterday at 9:37 PM

    Which VPNs are people using that actually care about the user's privacy? Most of them don't, sell their home IP to buyers, sell their DNS history to others, etc. Worse, some of them could require invasive MITM cert stuff most users will just click yes through.

    I have yet to see a use case for VPNs for the casual internet audience, and for a tech savvy user, their better off renting through some datacenter or something, which at that point is hardly a VPN and more home IP obfuscation. All the same downsides, and at least you get real privacy.

    • traceroute66

      yesterday at 9:55 PM

      > Which VPNs are people using that actually care about the user's privacy?

      Mullvad.

      It has been proven in a court of law that when Mullvad says "no logging", they mean it.

      They also regularly have security audits and publish the results[2][3]

      [1]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-a-sea... [2]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/new-security-audit-of-account-an... [3]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/successful-security-assessment-o...

      • monista

        today at 12:24 AM

        I don't use the VPN, but I still happily use their privacy-oriented (Firefox-based) Mullvad browser.

        https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser/

      • thisisnow

        yesterday at 10:08 PM

        Second for Mullvad, I am quite distrusting in general but more I know about Mullvad, more I am convinced they really are serious about user privacy

      • mahmoudimus

        today at 5:48 AM

        Seconding Mullvad. I am paranoid and I think they're trustworthy

    • evilduck

      yesterday at 9:42 PM

      Using any popular datacenter's IP range for a personal VPN is likely to be outright blocked.

      • Imustaskforhelp

        yesterday at 9:49 PM

        Also you only get 1 IP so its not really anonymous and you definitely would have a fingerprint.

        • thisisnow

          yesterday at 10:04 PM

          you just rotate it?

    • lxgr

      yesterday at 10:37 PM

      I'm forced to use a VPN to occasionally check my US bank account, since a foreign IP address is obviously a harbinger of unspeakable evil (while the friendly Youtube advertised neighborhood VPN is obviously evidence of pure intentions).

    • gruez

      yesterday at 9:41 PM

      >Most of them don't, sell their home IP to buyers, sell their DNS history to others, etc. Worse, some of them could require invasive MITM cert stuff most users will just click yes through.

      Source? I haven't seen any evidence that the major paid VPN providers engage in any of those things. At best it's vague implications something shady is happening because one of the key people was previously at [shady organization].

    • Imustaskforhelp

      yesterday at 9:51 PM

      ProtonVPN with bitcoin which you get from a monero swap is a good idea for complete privacy if you want port forwarding.

      MullvadVPN is also another great one.

      I have heard some good things about AirVPN, but I can absolutely attest for mullvad and to a degree ProtonVPN (Just with Proton, depending upon your threat model, do make the necessary precautions like buying with monero for example)

      There are others, but mostly its the 2-3 that I trust.

      • lxgr

        today at 12:18 PM

        How do you square "complete privacy" with the fact that you're authenticating to these VPNs with a persistent username or other credential and are then sending traffic through them, both from an IP address that might identify you, and to services that you authenticate against?

        Best case, the VPN learns your residential IP and the names of every HTTPS host you connect to (if not your entire DNS traffic as well); worst case, they collude with any of the services you use (or some ad tracker they embed) and persistently deanonymize your account.

        VPNs are structurally not great for privacy.

  • ymolodtsov

    today at 8:44 AM

    Yes, using an incognito windows is more than enough to kick off their checks.

• yesterday at 9:41 PM

• ehnto

  yesterday at 9:42 PM

  I recently had the insane experience of filling out 15 consecutive captchas, after, I had checked out and entered my payment information into the payment processor widget. I just wanted to submit the order. I was logged in to their website, and the bank even needed a one time code for payment. If the bank is pretty sure I am human then your ecomm site can figure it out surely.

  • lxgr

    yesterday at 10:27 PM

    That's my favorite combination: Shitty bot detection meeting shitty payment security systems.

    At least outside the US, there's 3DS as an (admittedly often high friction) high quality cardholder verification method, but in the US, that's of course considered much too consumer-hostile, so "select 87 overpasses" it is.

  • amatecha

    yesterday at 9:50 PM

    A while back I was buying tickets for a gondola for a trip in Europe and the checkout process failed during payment because their site didn't load their analytics/tracking stuff with proper error-handling, so when my ad-blocker prevented the tracking stuff, their checkout process failed to handle my CC's 2-factor auth and the checkout would fail. Had to contact my CC company and work with the gondola company to tell them what they're doing wrong so they could fix their website code. Pretty sad to know whoever built their stuff actually shipped a checkout flow (for a VERY popular tourist destination) without testing with ad-blockers enabled.

    • lxgr

      yesterday at 10:29 PM

      To be fair, this sometimes seems on the ad blocker. I've definitely seen mine accidentally nuke part of the payment Javascript (or maybe the 3DS iframe?) because some substring of it matched some common ad URL, which is obviously unrecoverable for the site itself.

• girvo

  yesterday at 10:16 PM

  Surprising really, because I'm a Firefox + Ublock Origin die hard and I never get Cloudflare captchas. Wonder what the difference is? I have CGNAT turned off, if that matters at all (probably not).

  • lxgr

    yesterday at 10:30 PM

    I could definitely imagine a public IPv4 with lots of good, logged-in Cloudflare traffic to act as a positive signal for their heuristics, possibly even overriding the Firefox penalty.

• danielheath

  yesterday at 9:09 PM

  Maybe check your network isn't sending web traffic you're not aware of?

  I'm running firefox and seeing the normal amount.

  • jychang

    yesterday at 9:24 PM

    Most people are on a CGNAT these days, drowning in captchas is the new normal. You’re at the mercy of one of your neighbors not hosting a botnet from their home computer.

    • perching_aix

      yesterday at 9:40 PM

      For better or for worse, CF's fingerprinting and traffic filtering is a lot more in-depth than just IP trend analysis. Kind of by necessity, exactly because of what you mention. So I'd think that's not as big a worry per se.

      • lxgr

        yesterday at 10:32 PM

        Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a while, so it's quite a big worry for me.

        Maybe I just have to disable all ad blockers and Safari tracking prevention? Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?

        • perching_aix

          yesterday at 10:45 PM

          > Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a while, so it's quite a big worry for me.

          I think I was sufficiently clear that I was specifically talking about CGNAT-caused IP address tainting being an unreasonably emphasized worry, not the worry about their detections overall misfiring. Though I certainly don't hear much about people having issues with it (but then anecdotes are anecdotal).

          > Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?

          Sounds good, have you tried?

          Not sure what's the point of these comically asinine rhetoricals.

    • tokioyoyo

      yesterday at 9:39 PM

      Not even remotely true, I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about. The only time I get captcha'ed is when I sometimes VPN around, or do some custom browser stuff and etc. I'll even say I get captcha'ed less now than maybe 5 years ago.

      • jychang

        today at 6:33 AM

        Just wait until your ISP puts you behind a CGNAT.

        Or if you ever need to travel a lot and tether off your phone. Most mobile devices are IPV6 only (via 464XLAT) behind a CGNAT these days.

  • cogman10

    yesterday at 9:22 PM

    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.

    • hansvm

      yesterday at 9:27 PM

      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

      • gruez

        yesterday at 9:32 PM

        >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.

        • hansvm

          yesterday at 9:42 PM

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

      • cogman10

        yesterday at 9:32 PM

        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/

  • g-b-r

    yesterday at 9:28 PM

    Maybe you allow tracking and cookies?

    • Eji1700

      yesterday at 9:32 PM

      I don't, and I rarely have issues with firefox. Private + blockers + VPN causes, expected, issues but otherwise i'm usually fine?

• mghackerlady

  today at 1:23 PM

  Heaven forbid you not use JavaScript, then they can't <s>track you</s> keep the internet safe!

• geysersam

  today at 5:55 AM

  I use firefox daily and I don't encounter the problems you describe, might be worth looking if there's some other issue.

• binaryturtle

  yesterday at 10:23 PM

  I'm with a slightly older Firefox and can't use many websites at all anymore because the Cloudflare cancer.

  Of course then you got sites like gnu.org too that block you because your slightly outdated user agent.

  • mghackerlady

    today at 1:26 PM

    I... Don't think it does that? It shouldn't, anyway. How long has that been a thing? They've been hit pretty hard by the slop crew lately but I couldn't imagine it being so bad they require an up to date UA

• onion2k

  yesterday at 8:59 PM

  Is that because botnets spoof being Firefox? It's not really fair to blame Cloudflare it is. That's on the bots.

  • doctaj

    yesterday at 9:21 PM

    In what way would that not be fair? Their product giving false positives (unnecessary challenges for a normal browser humans commonly use) to real people is definitely their fault.

    • eks391

      today at 5:32 AM

      That sounds like it is working as intended, not a false positive. A false positive would mean it blocked you whereas a challenge means more information is needed. You aren't noticing all of the times it correctly decides you are human, only the times when it needs to "inconvenience" you for more information because you prioritize privacy, a key similarity with some bots.

      I also like privacy. I use GrapheneOS. I compartmentalize my credit cards, emails, and phone numbers. I don't use Google products, and the list continues, but I don't complain about Cloudflare because it is painless and I understand the price I pay for privacy.

      I also have home services accessible via my home website, running on my home server(s). I chose to have cloudflare to host my domain specifically for the easy bot blocking, and it blocks more than 2000 bots/day that otherwise would be trying to find vulnerabilities on my servers, which contain a lot of sensitive things. I've never had an issue personally accessing my services through cloudflare. Sometimes I have to do captchas to access my own things, and that's barely an inconvenience (I am aware the domain isn't necessary to access services, but it makes more sense for my setup and intents)

    • gruez

      yesterday at 9:23 PM

      >Their product giving false positives (unnecessary challenges for a normal browser humans commonly use) to real people is definitely their fault.

      Is it TSA's "fault" that non-terrorists are subject to screening?

      • lxgr

        yesterday at 10:23 PM

        No, but it's entirely within TSA's hands to make that process as frictionless as possible.

        (It's a different question whether zero friction is actually desired, or whether some security theater is actually part of the service being provided, but that's a different question.)

      • forkerenok

        yesterday at 9:26 PM

        We're discussing the quality of screening here, not the act/necessity of screening itself.

        • gruez

          yesterday at 9:28 PM

          >We're discussing the quality of screening here

          The "quality" of TSA's screening seems be pretty bad too given how many people have to go through secondary screening vs how many terrorist they catch (0?)

          • bdangubic

            yesterday at 10:29 PM

            they caught 11 million by now (just as arbitrary as your 0 but probably more accurate since we haven’t had a large terrorist attack since they got the gig to serve and protect and before we lost thousands of lives…)

            • gruez

              yesterday at 11:26 PM

              >they caught 11 million by now (just as arbitrary as your 0 but probably more accurate

              Nice try but I used "caught", not "stopped", which requires they actually apprehended someone, not just prevented some hypothetical attack.

              >since they got the gig to serve and protect and before we lost thousands of lives…)

              You could easily reuse this argument for cloudflare: "if it wasn't for such invasive browser fingerprinting openai would be drowning in bajillion req/s from bots."

              • bdangubic

                yesterday at 11:56 PM

                > “if it wasn't for such invasive browser fingerprinting openai would be drowning in bajillion req/s from bots."

                of course they would be drowning! I have no issues with what CF is doing. too funny that people use tools like chatgpt and expect privacy?!

          • DonHopkins

            yesterday at 9:38 PM

            They are failing to meet there quotas of shooting innocent people in the face, so ICE is helping out.

  • lxgr

    yesterday at 10:22 PM

    No, using a stupid authentication/verification method with lots of false positives is always on whoever deploys it.

    Imagine an apartment building with a flimsy front door lock that breaks all the time, and the landlord only telling you that that can't be helped because of all the burglars.

  • josephcsible

    yesterday at 10:26 PM

    If it's just as easy to spoof being Chrome as it is to spoof being Firefox, then it is indeed fair to blame Cloudflare if they give Firefox users more CAPTCHAs than Chrome users.

  • conradkay

    yesterday at 9:09 PM

    Not really, there's camoufox but the vast majority use modified chrome/chromium

• lm411

  today at 6:17 AM

  That's not Cloudflare trying to make your life hard.

  It's the reality of how bad the bots have become.

• dawnerd

  yesterday at 10:00 PM

  I’ve been getting it in safari too. It’s ridiculous frankly. My residential ip must have been flagged or something. The part that’s really annoying is its trivial for bots to bypass.

  • lxgr

    yesterday at 10:19 PM

    > I’ve been getting it in safari too.

    I'm getting it on iCloud Private Relay all the time. It honestly makes it kind of useless.

    Maybe that's the point? But then again, doesn't Cloudflare run part of it!? And wasn't there some "privacy-preserving captcha replacement" that iOS devices should already be opting me in to? So many questions, nobody there to answer them, because they can get away with it.

    > The part that’s really annoying is its trivial for bots to bypass.

    Not the ethical bots, though! My GPT-backed Openclaw staunchly refuses to go anywhere near a "I'm not a robot" button.

    • gzread

      today at 5:39 AM

      Cloudflare makes money on both sides. It makes money from Apple to run Private Relay and it makes money from website operators to block Private Relay. It hosts the websites of DDoS services and protects them from DDoS, too.

• segmondy

  today at 12:29 AM

  trying using firefox and then using a cellphone network for internet. sometimes i can't access a site, because i get infinite captcha. i know what a damn bus, stairwell, stop light or motorcycle looks like.

• lazycouchpotato

  today at 7:40 AM

  At times I'm completely locked out of a website and Cloudflare asks me to email the website owner to get the issue resolved.

  .. how do they expect me to find the website owner's email if I can't access said website?

  • wongarsu

    today at 10:12 AM

    Once upon a time we had whois lookup for exactly that usecase (finding a domain's owner without visiting the site). Of course now nearly everyone has meaningless entries from some domain privacy service

• today at 6:02 AM

• tshaddox

  yesterday at 10:46 PM

  Is anyone talking about the fact that this is a fundamental design flaw of the web? Or arguably even the entire Internet?

  • 3form

    yesterday at 10:48 PM

    It's hard to call something a "fundamental flaw of web" if it wasn't an issue for 30 years. Unless you mean something more general that I'm missing.

    • tshaddox

      today at 2:04 AM

      Arguably it didn’t see widespread commercial adoption for 30 years, and you wouldn’t expect fundamental design flaws regarding commercial incentives to manifest before that.

    • fastball

      today at 1:39 AM

      Cloudflare isn't providing Turnstile as a service in a vacuum, this is a direct response to bad actors who can trivially abuse the web.

    • pixl97

      today at 2:22 AM

      A flaw can be fundamental but not immediate. It's probably better to say it's a fundamental flaw of the open web, that is the system collapses as the number of bad actors increases, and there is no way to prevent bad actors and have the system keep the name as open web.

• lukewarm707

  today at 10:02 AM

  sometimes when there is mafia you get no option but pay pizzo

  hence i am just using cloudflare remote browser rendering.

• amatecha

  yesterday at 9:48 PM

  These days I just close sites that show that "checking if you're a bot" shit. If this is how the web is going to be now, I don't care, I'll just not use it. I didn't need to see that article or post that badly anyways. I'm tired of paying the price for the sociopathic, greedy actions of others. It's especially bad for anyone who uses an open source OS like Linux or *BSD (to the extent many sites just block me automatically with a 403 Forbidden simply for using OpenBSD + Firefox, completely free pass if I try the same site from a Windows or Linux computer).

  • jgalt212

    yesterday at 9:53 PM

    We use Cloudflare to protect our content, but at the same time our machines mostly run Linux / Firefox so it really is quite a frustrating relationship. It really bums me out how much of Turnstile boils down to these two questions:

    is it Linux (or similar)?

    is it Firefox?

    If yes, to one or both, you're blocked! Clearly millions of dollars of engineering talent and petabytes of data collection should be able to come up with something more nuanced than this.

• dheera

  yesterday at 9:22 PM

  Exactly. For the most part all this bot protection is only protecting these websites against humans.

  I don't do free work. I'm not going to label 50 images of crosswalks and motorcycles for free.

  • ronbenton

    yesterday at 9:37 PM

    > For the most part all this bot protection is only protecting these websites against humans.

    Curious how do you know this?

• TiredOfLife

  today at 5:29 AM

  [flagged]

• EGreg

  yesterday at 9:02 PM

  Well, that's for the public internet.

  I'm building Safebox and Safecloud, where this won't be the case anymore. Not only will you have a decentralized hosting network that can sideload resources (e.g. via a browser extension that looks at your "integrity" attribute on websites) but also the websites will require you to be logged in with a HMAC-signed session ID (which means they don't need to do any I/O to reject your requests, and can do so quickly)... so the whole thing comes down to having a logged in account.

  https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud

  As far as server-to-server requests, they'll be coming from a growing network of cryptographically attested TPMs (Nitro in AWS, also available in GCP, IBM, Azure, Oracle etc.) so they'll just reject based on attestations also.

  In short... the cryptographically attested web of trust will mean you won't need cloudflare. What you will need, however, to prevent sybil attacks, is age verification of accounts (e.g. Telegram ID is a proxy for that if you use Telegram for authentication).

  • password4321

    yesterday at 9:08 PM

    Wow, if Seinfeld can have a soup nazi, I think it's within reason for you to be called the internet nazi.

    "No s̶o̶u̶p̶ internet for you!"

    Good luck!

  • ale42

    yesterday at 9:11 PM

    This was sarcasm, right?

    • EGreg

      today at 6:53 PM

      Why would you assume it needs to be? You don’t think that websites on the Internet might not want to allow random bots and scrapers to waste their resources, and require people to have an account in order to access non-static resources on the website? You do realize that API keys exist, right?

Presumably this is all because OpenAI offers free ChatGPT to logged out users and don't want that being abused as a free API endpoint.

• NotPractical

  yesterday at 9:14 PM

  But do they do it whether you're logged in or not?

  I noticed the ChatGPT app also checks Play Integrity on Android (because GrapheneOS snitches on apps when they do this), probably for the same reason. Claude's app doesn't, by the way, but it also requires a login.

  • Gander5739

    yesterday at 10:20 PM

    Because accounts are free, and could still be used to abuse as a free endpoint, with a little trickiness.

    • gzread

      today at 5:40 AM

      Don't you need a Google account and to get a Google account you need a phone number?

      "You're posting too fast! Please slow down."

      • Gander5739

        today at 2:16 PM

        You don't need a phone number to create a google account. (Though the account creation flow is inconsistent in this, in sone situations it will require a phone number, in some it won't.)

• appreciatorBus

  yesterday at 8:56 PM

  Yup.

  Coincidentally about an hour ago, I wanted to look something up in ChatGPT and I happened to be in a browser window I don’t normally use, with no logged in accounts. I assumed it wouldn’t work, but to my surprise with no account, no cookies of any kind it took my query and gave me an answer.

  • gruez

    yesterday at 9:34 PM

    >I assumed it wouldn’t work, but to my surprise with no account, no cookies of any kind it took my query and gave me an answer.

    They allowed anonymous requests for months now, maybe even a year.

    • solaire_oa

      today at 2:46 AM

      Yeah, additionally gemini.google.com is also free unauthenticated, which I've been using for a very long time (a year?). Why this is being treated as news is confusing.

      • iberator

        today at 8:26 AM

        Microsoft and Gemini can be used without account. just works! (talking about web app)

  • aziaziazi

    yesterday at 9:34 PM

    I used to mostly use chatgpt in an incognito tab, logged out. Until I notice it seems to have some context of my logged in session, and of the logged out as well. It may be paranoia or prompt deduction as well but that felt strange.

  • FergusArgyll

    yesterday at 10:08 PM

    Yeah it works but it's a dumber model. Prob mini

    • lelandfe

      today at 2:14 PM

      You get a couple requests in at a smarter model and then it prompts you to sign up, and from there uses an extremely dumb model.

  • vscode-rest

    today at 12:47 AM

    [dead]

• bredren

  yesterday at 11:20 PM

  It is also intended to protect the usage patterns of pro subscribers.

  As has been amply explained, the API pricing per token is far more for equivalent use when maximizing a subscription plan.

  It isn’t really a massive hurdle to deal with this full SPA load check. If one is even aware it exists they already have the skills to bypass it anyway.

  I get why people would “what about” the automation inherit in what OpenAI is doing but that is a separate matter.

  Other businesses and applications can put into place their own hurdles and anti bot practices to protect the models they’ve leaned into—-and they have been.

• darepublic

  yesterday at 10:41 PM

  Using 5.2 at 20 a month would also be a steal. Other shoe will drop on codex sooner or later

• thisisnow

  yesterday at 10:33 PM

  Its probably same for copilot.microsoft.com and their cloudfart usage

> These properties only exist if the ChatGPT React application has fully rendered and hydrated. A headless browser that loads the HTML but doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have them. A bot framework that stubs out browser APIs but doesn't actually run React won't have them.

> This is bot detection at the application layer, not the browser layer.

I kind of just assumed that all sophisticated bot-detectors and adblock-detectors do this? Is there something revealing about the finding that ChatGPT/CloudFlare's bot detector triggers on "javascript didn't execute"?

• iancarroll

  today at 4:33 AM

  It’s pretty interesting to me that Cloudflare is collecting additional client-side data for individual customers. This is not widely done by most anti-bot solutions.

  • supriyo-biswas

    today at 9:01 AM

    OpenAI is on an enterprise plan and (presumably) gets a customized version of Turnstile.

• red_admiral

  today at 9:37 AM

  "Sophisticated" may vary, but for a lot of EU media products you can just block the script that launches the paywall/consent overlay. Sometimes disabling JS does it; sometimes activating reading mode works.

The irony of a company that sells DDoS protection making the browsing experience worse for legitimate users. The real issue is that Cloudflare's bot detection runs JavaScript that introspects the page state — which means any site using Cloudflare is implicitly giving Cloudflare access to read the DOM of the protected application. That's a much bigger concern than the typing delay.

Perhaps the author should have made it clearer why we should care about any of this. OpenAI want you to use their real react app. That’s… ok? I skimmed the article looking for the punchline and there doesn’t seem to be one.

• raincole

  today at 9:02 AM

  Why does every article need a 'punchline'? It's a technical analysis. Do you expect punchlines when you read recipes or source code?

  • Chance-Device

    today at 9:48 AM

    Where did I say “every article”? This is AI slop that’s set up like it’s some investigative expose of something scandalous and then shows us nothing interesting. A competent human writer would have reframed the whole thing or just not published it.

    • raincole

      today at 10:13 AM

      Do you think

      1. Every person is born with the knowledge of how ChatGPT uses Cloudflare Turnstile?

      2. This article contains factual mistakes? If so, what are they?

      If neither of these is true, then this article strictly provides information and educational value for some readers. The writing style, AI-like or not, doesn't change that.

      • Chance-Device

        today at 10:33 AM

        Do you think I have some obligation to agree with you or something? You love the article, nice, good for you. I think it’s crap.

        • bogdan

          today at 11:44 AM

          Whilst you and a few other commentators call this AI slop and refuse to engage with it, the rest of us have read something interesting and learned something new. Is anything gained if one points out that it's written by AI? I personally know it's written by AI but the value outweighs the stylistic idiosyncrasies.

          Consider also that many people aren't the best at writing blog-like posts but still have things to share and AI empowers them to do that. I can't find anything constructive in your post and I don't understand why you are posting at all.

          • Chance-Device

            today at 4:47 PM

            What’s not constructive about it, Bogdan? I’ve said exactly what I think is wrong with the article, the framing is AI pattern matching to something that it isn’t. It’s a weird kind of incongruent clickbait, it’s not positioning itself as a piece about cloudflare or turnstile, it’s implicitly saying “look at this sneaky thing OpenAI are doing that I uncovered!” and it turns out they’re not doing much of anything at all.

            This may be unintentional and the author simply couldn’t tell it sounded this way. The less charitable interpretation is that they did know it sounded this way and thought that a straightforward blog post about cloudflare bot detection wouldn’t end up on the HN front page.

            What’s my constructive criticism to the author? Write your own posts. Use your own voice. Make sure that what you’re creating actually reads like the kind of thing it is. Don’t get the AI to write it for you. It’s annoying.

            And I would say that if someone is really so bad at writing blogs that they are unable to do this, which I am not saying this author is, then maybe they shouldn’t be writing them.

          • nickelpro

            today at 5:15 PM

            The intended value is difficult to discern in AI written pieces.

            I agree with both of you, there's some interesting tricks here for how a website builds anti-bot protection, but the AI sloppification is framing it as a consumer protection issue but not delivering on that premise.

            It is a reasonable criticism that the post does not deliver a "so what?" on its basic framing.

      • today at 10:30 AM

• dmos62

  today at 8:50 AM

  For me the interesting parts of the article is how author got to the decompiled checks and what the checks are. Anti-bot is an interesting space.

• elwebmaster

  yesterday at 9:58 PM

  That's because the article is AI slop.

I just don't understand why bot owners can't just run a complete windows 11 VM running Google Chrome complete with graphics acceleration.

You can probably run 50 of those simultaneously if you use memory page deduplication, and with a decent CPU+GPU you ought to be able to render 50 pages a second. That's 1 cent per thousand page loads on AWS. Damn cheap.

• jaccola

  yesterday at 10:34 PM

  There are myriad providers competing to offer this, nicely packaged with all the accoutrements (IP rotation, location spoofing, language settings, prebuilt parsers, etc.) behind an easy to use API.

  Honestly it is a very healthy competitive market with reasonably low switching costs which drives prices down. These circumstances make rolling your own a tough sell.

• arcfour

  today at 1:31 AM

  They do, but the fact that they have to do this means there are fewer bots because it's less economical to go to such lengths, compared to something much less complex (which is orders of magnitude cheaper).

• huertouisj

  yesterday at 10:20 PM

  there are scraping subreddits.

  if you browse them you will see that bot writers are very annoyed if they can't scrape a site with a headless browser.

  you can do what you suggested, but with Linux VMs/containers. windows is too heavy, each VM will cost you 4 GB of RAM

  • londons_explore

    today at 6:48 AM

    The reason to use windows is that anti bot tech is going to be a lot stricter if Linux is detected...

  • xmcp123

    today at 12:36 AM

    I’m in those. xvfb and headless=false still works great

• himata4113

  today at 3:22 AM

  284 on 296gb of ram with deduplication enabled on a 128c with 32Q vgpu.

• YetAnotherNick

  today at 3:31 PM

  I am reasonably sure that these kind of fingerprints can detect if the browser is inside a VM.

• kristjansson

  today at 3:41 PM

  … yup?

  I mean you missed the minigame of preventing Chrome from signaling that it’s being programmatically (webdriver etc) driven and tipping your hand, but … yup?

• poly2it

  yesterday at 8:59 PM

  If you know of a simple way to run a Windows 11 VM with good graphics acceleration (no GPU passthrough), please contact me.

  • MarioMan

    yesterday at 9:10 PM

    I assume your concern with GPU passthrough is that each VM needs a whole GPU? You can use GPU-PV to split your GPU between VM instances. Then the main bottleneck becomes how thin you split out your VRAM.

    More info here:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20231107182321/https://mu0.cc/20...

    https://youtu.be/XLLcc29EZ_8?t=570

    https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV

    • deltoidmaximus

      today at 1:59 PM

      Wouldn't virtualbox or vmware's paravirtual GPUs be a better fit for this use case? Unfortunately the offerings with qemu/libvirt still lag vmwares by a lot.

• hrmtst93837

  today at 6:54 AM

  In theory you could run hundreds of full-fat Chrome bots if you don't care about the ops mess, but keeping Windows images stable while Cloudflare and friends keep changing the fingerprinting game turns the cheap math into a maintenance job from hell. AWS VM signals are a big red flag, so you still eat CAPTCHAs and blocks even with a full browser stack. The page load number looks cheap.

To prompt a discussion that's purely technical: I'm interested in how this was done.

Specifically, Turnstile as far as I'm aware doesn't do anything specifically configurable or site specific. It works on sites that don't run React, and the cookie OpenAI-Sentinel-Turnstile-Token is not a CF cookie.

Did OpenAI somehow do something on their own API that uses data from Turnstile?

• XYen0n

  today at 5:04 AM

  Cloudflare should be able to determine whether a website uses React by analyzing data flowing through its CDN.

  • technion

    today at 5:24 AM

    Whilst true, "validate the right state is loaded" would surely be something not done without developer input.

    • kristjansson

      today at 3:44 PM

      If your CF bill reached into 8 figures, you might ask them to accept some developer input?

and chatgpt was then used to write this article. at least try to clean it up a bit

• hx8

  yesterday at 9:02 PM

  Ah yes, the timeless hallmark of web blogs: a draft so messy even a language model would ask for a second pass.

Ah, this explains chatgpt (and probably copilot) performance behind corporate firewalls such as zscaler.

Between the network latency and low end machines, there is an enormous lag between chatgpts response and being able to reply, especially for editing a canvas.

I've been sitting there for up to a minute plus waiting to be able to use the canvas controls or highlight text after an update.

When using ChatGPT Android app with some NextDNS block lists, I get an error modal in app saying "security misconfiguration blah blah".

Clearly I'm blocking some tracker and it's upset about that. I allowlisted a sentry subdomain and since then got no more complaints.

On a related note, ChatGPT.com changed how it handles large text pastes this past week.

It now behaves like Claude, attaching the paste as a file for upload rather than inlining it.

This affected page UX some and reduces the cost of the browser tab some.

At some point, maybe still true, very long conversations ~froze/crashed ChatGPT pages.

It seems they fixed the biggest issue Ive had where you start typing then it erases the content once the page fully loads

I was using KeepChatGPT[1] for a while back in 2023-2024, pre-Gemini-in-Google era, and I was fascinated as to how it was able to mask being a user without needing any API or help from the end user. I stopped using it after 2024 because 1) Gemini and 2) It breaks quite a lot. I did however, like how you had an option to push the AI panel to the right, if only Google even considers doing so.

[1]: https://github.com/xcanwin/keepchatgpt

• qingcharles

  today at 2:27 AM

  I have a little helper app I run sometimes that I have a button to push a query into ChatGPT and get a json response. You wouldn't even know OpenAI had any anti-bot tools because it doesn't get flagged at all. It just uses a webview inside WinForms.

Does anyone know how this is integrated on the Cloudflare side and across the app? Is this beyond standard turnstile? Is this custom/enterprise functionality? Something else?

The chat client has serious performance issues on lower end systems. Now I see why!

That explains why ChatGPT has been running like shit all weekend. In the desktop app on Mac, it could not even complete a response. On the web, it would hang before you could input anything.

It used to be possible to type immediately while the page is loading and have all key presses end up in the input field.

Why run this check before user can type?

Why not run it later like before the message gets sent to the server?

• balkanist

  today at 6:29 PM

  [flagged]

AI-written article?

• avazhi

  yesterday at 9:57 PM

  Yep. I flag these as spam at this point.

AI goes through great lengths to ensure it's talking with humans.

Why would two AI bots want to chat with each other?

• balkanist

  today at 6:26 PM

  [flagged]

Others here are asking if this is the cause of slow performance in a long chat.

But it seems clear to me that this is why I can't start typing right away when I first load the page and click to focus in the text field.

I imagine to stop web automation from getting free API like use of the model

> A headless browser that loads the HTML but doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have them.

this is meaningless btw. A browser headless or not does execute javascript.

• jaccola

  yesterday at 10:27 PM

  I disagree, a browser can have javascript execution disabled (and this is somewhat common in scraping to save time/resources).

  I read it to mean: "A browser that doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have [the rendered React elements]." Which is true.

  • maxwellg

    today at 1:19 AM

    Wouldn't a browser that doesn't execute JS also not execute the browser fingerprinting code in the first place?

  • XYen0n

    today at 5:06 AM

    If JavaScript is disabled, why use a headless browser instead of making HTTP requests directly?

• girvo

  yesterday at 10:18 PM

  A bunch of the points in this AI generated blog post were like that. Makes me feel dirty when I'm 1/3rd of the way through and I realise how off it is.

• thisisnow

  yesterday at 10:44 PM

  Hah, sure, you just let random JS execute from random sites on your machine...

A/B testing /dev/ kit that tokenizes four permutations of language

Preventing me from typing until you SCAN MY SYSTEM?

Fine, by extension, you agree I can scan all of your systems for whatever I desire. This works both ways.

This is a lot of fingerprinting.

CamuFox will fix it easy peasy.

If you have AI write a blog post for ya, when you think it's set, check word count (can c+p to google docs if AI can't pull it off with built in tools), and ask it to identify repetitions if it's over 1000.

Also, you can have it spotcheck colors: light orange on light background is unreadable, ask it to find the L*[1] of colors and dark/lighten as necessary if gap < 40 (that's minimum gap for yuge header text on background, 50 for text on background, these have gap of 25)

I haven't tried this yet, but, maybe have it count word count-per-header too. It's got 11 headers for 1000 words currently, makes reading feel really stacatto and you gotta evaluate "is this a real transition or vibetransition"

[1] L* as in L*a*b*, not L in Oklab

This explains some of the weird performance behavior I've seen in the last 24 hours with ChatGPT, sometimes lagging my entire browser while typing. Note, I'm a paying user with a Teams account, so it's kind of annoying that this is being applied to logged in paying users as well. I might have to vibe-code my own chat webUI using the APIs.

Mistral chat is also free to use without account and doesn't do that.

> They exist only if the request passed through Cloudflare's network. A bot making direct requests to the origin server or running behind a non-Cloudflare proxy will produce missing or inconsistent values.

...I don't think that's possible even if you are a bot? I would be very surprised if OAI had their origin exposed to the internet. What is a "non-Cloudflare proxy"? Is this AI slop?

It's likely just looking at the CF properties as part of a bot scoring metric (e.g. many users from this ASN or that geoip to this specific city exhibit abusive patterns).

Haven't read yet but instantly matched with my experience of the chat being unusable at times. The latency and glitch-like feel is unbearable.

Cómo puedo acceder a un celular

I mean, I can easily get them to behaving defensively for not being abused. But MBP with M5 here, my chatgpt tab always get stucked when I hit some prompt.

Really really bad user experience, wondering about when they will leave this approach.

Imagine if they'd put as much effort into making a decent frontend experience.

I am shocked openai collects data about it's users before users have the opportunity to send the same data to openai servers!

Why does ChatGPT slow down so much when the conversations get long, while Claude does compaction?

My best guess is -- ChatGPT is running something in your browser to try to determine the best things to send down to the model API –- when it should have been running quantized models on its own server.

My theory is that "AI" doesn't really have any long term paying customers and the majority of the "users" are people who have cooked up some clever hack to effectively siphon computing power from these providers in an effort to crank out the lowest effort ad supported slop imaginable.

Every provider seems to have been plauged by these freeloaders to such an extent that they've had to develop extreme and onerous countermeasures just to avoid losing their shirts.

What's the word? Schadenfreude?

cloud flare will not be around for long, its a shame as it is the GOAT lol

wow OpenAi sure doesnt like bots for a company enabling the botification of the world wide web

• baggachipz

  today at 2:22 PM

  "We wouldn't want somebody scraping our data, that's ours!"

Another AI-slop article.

Sick.

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ai slop analysis finding CF detects non javascript capable browsers with no punchline

Ok... so... ?

So are you able to get free inference now that you decrypted this?

• superkuh

  yesterday at 8:43 PM

  It doesn't look like it in the full sense of "free". But part of how one pays these services is by running a permissive modern browser which allows the corporation to spy on you even when you already paid in currency. In a sense by depriving them of the ability to easily spy on your this workaround is closer to "free".

  • gruez

    yesterday at 9:48 PM

    >My best guess is -- ChatGPT is running something in your browser to try to determine the best things to send down to the model API

    There's no way this is worth it unless the models are absolutely tiny, in which case any benefits from offloading to the client is marginal and probably isn't worth the engineering effort.

    • danny_codes

      today at 5:58 AM

      It’s free as a loss leader. The trick is to upsell later. Unfortunately for OpenAI there are plenty of competitors with fungible products, so it might be hard to pull a classic monopoly rug-pull.

  • beering

    yesterday at 8:55 PM

    They already see everything I’m doing because I send my prompts to them. What “workaround” are you referring to?

    • superkuh

      yesterday at 9:08 PM

      They see everything your doing because you send the text. But this is talking about everything about your computer system. You would not normally be sending this to them or having it involved at all. This workaround allows you to not involve unneeded information about your computer setup. It is not about avoiding sending prompt text.

      And as for "but chatgpt isn't paid" (another commenter), well, then yes, that's even closer to free by removing this spying on your computer setup. But they spy on the paid users too.

  • voxic11

    yesterday at 8:52 PM

    But isn't ChatGPT access free through the browser? What do you mean already paid in currency?

    • pocksuppet

      today at 12:48 PM

      If you want to send more than a few prompts each day, you have to pay. With currency.

Why are companies like OpenAI and others that are all-in on LLMs still using ReactJS, Python and so on?

These programming languages and frameworks were made for developer convenience and got wide adoption, because it makes on-boarding easier.

This obviously comes at a cost of performance, complexity and introduces a liability into a system, because they are dependencies that come with a whole bunch of assumptions about how they are used.

Is this tradeoff even worth it anymore?

• robmccoll

  today at 11:59 AM

  Probably training data. The largest number of public repos are built on that stack. We recently picked React for new projects because LLMs seemed to be the most reliable when writing React code.