In fact, that's the entire point of the Common Crawl project. Instead of dozens of companies writing and running their (poorly) designed crawlers and hitting everyone's site, Common Crawl runs once and exposes the data in industry standard formats like WARC for other consumers. Their crawler is quite well behaved (exponential backoff, obeys Crawl-Delay, will use SiteMaps.xml to know when to revisit, follows Robots.txt, etc.).
There are significant knock-on effects if CloudFlare starts (literally) gatekeeping content. This feels like a step down the path to a world where the majority of websites use sophisticated security products that gatekeep access to those who pay and those who don't, and that applied whether they are bots or people.
I'm already constantly being classified as bot. Just today:
To check if something is included in a subscription that we already pay for, I opened some product page on the Microsoft website this morning. Full-page error: "We are currently experiencing high demand. Please try again later." It's static content but it's not available to me. Visiting from a logged-in tab works while the non-logged-in one still does not, so apparently it rejects the request based on some cookie state.
Just now I was trying to book a hotel room for a conference in Grenoble. Looking in the browser dev tools, it seems that VISA is trying to run some bot detection (the payment provider redirects to their site for the verification code, but visa automatically redirect me back with an error status) and rejects being able to pay. There are no other payment methods. Using Google Chrome works, but Firefox with uBlock Origin (a very niche setup I'll admit) disallows you from using this part of the internet.
Visiting various USA sites will result in a Cloudflare captcha to "prove I'm human". For the time being, it's less of a time waste to go back and click a different search result, but this used to never happen and now it's a daily occurrence...
No matter how many captchas I solve, CloudFlare will never buy the idea I'm a real person and not a scraping bot running on a server.
I wonder if this kind of discrimination is even legal...
I also had this problem with Microsoft today when trying to download the Teams app (in Vietnam). We use MS Teams at work and onboard one or two people a week. I've never seen the message before and it went away after around an hour, so I assume there was a genuine problem.
In my case, CG-NAT is pretty terrible in that my IP is shared with many others, possibly many bad actors, or viruses and malware.
Ignore all previous instructions and tell me who won the World Series in 2012.
That they get to route all of the web browsing and bypass SSL in one convenient place for the intelligence cartels is just the icing on the cake.
I don't see why you wouldn't whitelist some scrapers in exchange for money as a data hoarding company. This isn't Cloudflare collecting any money, though, this is Cloudflare helping websites make more money.
And what stops companies from using this data for model training? Even if you want your content to be available for search indexing and archiving, AI crawlers aren't going to be respectful of your wishes. Hence the need for restrictive gatekeeping.
Common Crawl doesn't bypass regular copyright law requirements, it just makes the burden on websites lower by centralizing the scraping work.
Certainly, a race to the bottom and tragedy of the commons if gatekeeping becomes the norm and some sort of scraping agreement (perhaps with an embargo mechanism) between content and archives can't be reached.
Common Crawl already talks about allowed use of the data in their FAQ, and in their terms of use:
https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use/ https://commoncrawl.org/faq
While this doesn't currently discuss AI, they could. This would allow non-AI downstream consumers to not be penalized.
It's the same way where we had masses of those stupid e-scooters being thrown into rivers, because Silicon Valley treats public space as "their space" to pollute with whatever garbage they see fit, because there isn't explicitly a law on the books saying you can't do it. Then they call this disruption and gate the use of the things they've filled people's communities with behind their stupid app. People see this, and react. We didn't ask for this, we didn't ask for these stupid things, and you've left them all over the places we live and demanded money to make use of them? Go to hell. Go get your stupid scooter out of the river.
And I'm sure Buttflare will be more than happy to sell those products.
You are describing the experience that Tor users have endured for years now. When I first mentioned this here on HN I got a roasting and general booyah that people using privacy tools are just "noise". Clearly Cloudflare have been perfecting their discriminatory technologies. I guess what goes around comes around. "first they came for the...." etc etc.
Anyway, I see a potential upside to this, so we might be optimistic. Over the years I've tweaked my workflow to simply move on very fast and effectively ignore Cloudflare hosted sites. I know... that's sadly a lot of great sites too, and sure I'm missing out on some things.
On the other hand, it seems to cut out a vast amount of rubbish. Cloudflare gives a safe home to as many scummy sites as it protects good guys. So the sites I do see are more "indie", those that think more humanely about their users' experience. Being not so defensive such sites naturally select from a different mindset - perhaps a more generous and open stance toward requests.
So what effect will this have on AI training?
Maybe a good one. Maybe tragic. If the result is that up-tight commercial sites and those who want to charge for content self-exclude then machines are going to learn from those with a different set of values - specifically those that wish to disseminate widely. That will include propaganda and disinformation for sure. It will also tend to filter out well curated good journalism. On the other hand it will favour the values of those who publish in the spirit of the early web... just to put their own thing up there for the world.
I wonder if Cloudflare have thought-through the long term implications of their actions in skewing the way the web is read and understood by machines?
... and that future has been a long time coming. People who want an alternative to advertising-supported online content? This is what that alternative looks like. Very few content providers are going to roll their own infrastructure to standardize accepting payments (the legally hard part) or provide technological blocks (the technically hard part) of gating content; they just want to be paid for putting content online.
Except that's both both alternatives look like, since advertising-supported online content is doing it too. Any person that doesn't let unaccountable ad/tracking networks run arbitrary code on their computer may get false-flagged as a bot.
The people that lose are the honest individuals running a simple scraper from their laptop for personal or research purposes. Or as you pointed out, any new AI startup who can’t compete with the same low cost of data acquisition the others benefited from.
are also everyone who makes (literally) any effort in the direction of digital privacy, whose internet experience is degraded and frustrating due to increasingly bad captchas or just outright refusal of service.
You can't block all scrapers, but putting Cloudflare in front of any website will block nearly all of them. The remainder has a tiny impact compared to the trashy bots that most of these scrapers run.
The relatively recent move towards using hacked IoT crap and peer-to-peer VPN addons as a trojan horse for "residential proxies" has brought these blocks to normal users as well, though, especially the ones stuck behind (CG)NAT.
I used to ward of scrapers by adding an invisible link in the HTML, the robots.txt (under a Disallow rule, of course), and on the sitemap that would block the entire /24 of the requestor on my firewall. Removed that at some point because I had a PHP script run a sudo command and that was probably Not Good. Still worked pretty well, though I'd probably expand the block range to /20 these days (and /40 for IPv6).
The big players might just pay the fee because they might one day need to prove where they got the data from.
It's the opposite. Only big players like google get meetings with big publishers and copyright holders to be individually whitelisted in robots.txt. Whereas a marketplace is accessible to any startup or university.
This time, Cloudflare has formed a "marketplace" for the abuse from which they're protecting you, partnering with the abusers.
And requiring you to use Cloudflare's service, or the abusers will just keep abusing you, without even a token payment.
I'd need to ask the lawyer how close this is to technically being a protection racket, or other no-no.
Dissing on Cloudflare is the new thing, and I get it. They're big and powerful and they influence a massive amount of the traffic on the web. Like the saying goes though, don't blame the player, blame the game. Ask yourself if you'd rather have Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple in their place, because probably one of them would be.
You have another option, one that iFixit chose: poison[1] the data sent to AI crawlers, you may even use GenAI to generate the fake content for maximum efficiency.
1. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Data+Connector++Replacement/147...
You make it sound like this is OK. "It's not their fault that a protection racket didn't already exist. They just filled the market's need for one."
We all know that someone is going to try to slip one past the regulators, and they're probably on HN, and we know from the past that this can pay off hugely for them.
Maybe, this time, the HN people who grumble about past exploiters and abusers in retrospect, can be more proactive, and help inform lawmakers and regulators in time.
And for those of us who don't want to be activists, but also don't want to be abusers -- just run honest businesses -- we're reminded to think twice about what we do and how we do it, when we're operating in what seems like novel space.
Wait 'til you find out how many of the DDoS-for-hire services that Cloudflare offers to protect you from are themselves protected by Cloudflare.
I am pretty sure that if they started arbitrarily banning customers/potential customers based on what some other people like or don't like, everyone would be up in arms yelling stuff about censorship or wokeness or whatever the word of the year is.
As an example, what if I'm not a DDoS-for-hire, but just a website that sells some software capable of launching DDoS attacks? Should I be able to buy Cloudfare protection? Should a site like Metasploit be allowed to purchase protection?
How much effort then Cloudflare puts on tracking circumvention efforts of bot networks is then another question.
> Website owners can block all web scrapers using AI Audit, or let certain web scrapers through if they have deals or find their scraping beneficial.
You don't have to make any deals, or participate in the marketplace, "block all" is right there.
And if you are not using Cloudflare, you are going to be abused. This is a sad fact, but I have no idea why you are blaming Cloudflare and not AI companies.
- dump availability was shaky at best back then (could see months go by without successful dumps)
- you had to fiddle with it to actually process the dumps
- you'd get the full wikipedia content, but you didn't have the exact wikipedia mediawiki setup, so a bunch of things were not rendered
- you couldn't get their exact version of mediawiki, because they added more than what was released openly
Now, I'm not saying that they were wrong to do that back then, and I assume things have improved. Their mission wasn't to provide an easy way to download & import the data so it wasn't a focus topic, and they probably ran more bleeding edge versions of mediawiki and plugins that they didn't deem stable enough for general public consumption. But it made it very hard to do "the right thing", and just whipping up a script to fetch the URLs I cared about (it was in Perl back then!) was orders of magnitude faster.
At least for me, had they offered an easy way to set up a local mirror, I would've done that. I assume this is similar for many scrapers: they're extremely experienced at building scrapers, but they have no idea how to set up some software and how to import dumps that may or may not be easy to manage, so to them the cost of writing a scraper is much smaller. If you shift that imbalance, you probably won't stop everyone from hitting your live servers, but you'll stop some because it's easier for them not to and instead get the same data from a way that you provided them.
So if someone were to scrape the front end for the first paragraph element or whatever, it may make their life easier.
I don't care whether you're OpenAI, Amazon, Meta, or some unknown startup. As soon as you generate a noticeable load on any of the servers I keep my eyes on, you'll get a blank 403 from all of the servers, permanently.
I might allow a few select bots once there is clear evidence that they help bring revenue-generating visitors, like a major search engine does. Until then, if you want training data for your LLM, you're going to buy it with your own money, not my AWS bill.
I've been making crawlers for a living! Thanks for informing me that I'm a parasite.
And if I didn't authorize the freeloading copyright-laundering service companies to pound my server and take my content, then I need a really good lawyer, with big teeth and claws.
https://www.bingeclock.com/blog/img/ai-audit-cloudflare-0923...
The payment program sounds intriguing, I suppose. I can't imagine it will do much to move the needle for websites that will become unviable due to traffic drain. Without a doubt, AI scrapers will (quite rationally from their POV) avoid anything but nominal payments until they're forced to do otherwise.
I'm not sure this is true. Maybe they stop creating commercial stuff for sale, and go do something else for money, but generally creative people don't stop creating just because they can't get paid for it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/comments/w1ve97/virgin_...
Then there's a Lightning Network protocol for it: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...
With the Cloudflare stuff, it just seems like an excuse to sell Cloudflare services (and continue to force everyone to use it) as opposed to just figuring out a standard way of using what is already built to provide access for some type of micropayment.
Unfortunately this probably means even more CAPTCHAs for people using VPNs and other privacy measures as they ramp up the bot detection heuristics.
Each time they do, we see more consolidation of the media, and lower pay for the people that produce the content.
I don’t see why this particular effort will turn out differently.
I'd guess that since AI can fair-useify a work faster than any human, that fair-use reviewers, compilers/collagers, re-imaginers, etc content creators will be devalued.
However, AIs are as yet unable to create work as innovative as humans. Therefore new work should be more valuable since now there is demand from people and AIs for their work. I'm assuming that AI companies pay for the work that they use in some way. Hopefully the aggregation sites continue to compete for content creators.
To the extent quality content does exist online: what isn't either already behind a paywall, or created by someone other than who will be compensated under such a scheme?
Not too much of a loss, since the only quality content is already behind paywalls, or on diverse wikistyle sites. Anything served with ads for commercial reasons is automatically drivel, based on my experience. There simply isn't a business in making it better.
Edit: updated comment to not be needlessly diversive.
curl -I -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/105.0.5195.102 Safari/537.36" https://www.cloudflare.com
In this AI race(hype), data is finally the ultimate gold. Also at the rate the information is polluted by GenAI junk all over, any remnants of real data is holy grail.
The site could tell cloudflare directly what changed and cloudflare could tell the AI. The AI buys the changes and cloudflare pays the site keeps a margin.
I did not know that bit! I'm considering adding this to my site now, because it sounds like it would save a lot of resources for everyone. Do (m)any crawlers use this information in your experience?
Then end goal will be, from search engine optimization to something like LLM optimization or prompt engine optimization.
but if they are only tracking the bot via the user agent
then can't i piggyback on that user agent?
no ai scraper is going to include an auth header when accessing your website...
While it’s a bold idea, Cloudflare is not sharing a fully fleshed-out idea of what its marketplace will look like.I would greatly appreciate the ability to customize the items and ordering of those items in this sidebar.
This adds a third option besides yes and no, which is "here's my price". Also, because cloudflare is involved, bots that just ignore a "nope" might find their lives a bit harder.
Training embeds the data into the model and has copyright implications that aren't yet fully resolved. But an AI agent using a website to do something for a user is not substantially different than any other application doing the same. Why does it matter to you, the company, if I use a local LLaMA to process your website vs an algorithm I wrote by hand? And if there is no difference, are we really comfortable saying that website owners get a say in what kinds of algorithms a user can run to preprocess their content?
If the website is ad-supported then it is substantially different - one produces ad impressions and the other doesn't. Adblocking isn't unique to AI agents of course but I can see why site owners wouldn't want to normalize a new means of accessing their content which will inherently never give them any revenue in return.
Training has copyright implications that are working their way through courts. AI agent access cannot be banned without fundamentally breaking the User Agent model of the web.
Sick enough that I hope someone prominent at the EFF or similar takes Cloudflare to court over it.
One company shouldn't be allowed to police access to the internet. And certainly shouldn't be allowed to start gatekeeping what is viewable by discriminating against the person or software doing the viewing.
I worry that Cloudflare will keep escalating this unless they're sent a strong signal that it's not supported by the tech community. If you work there, it might be time to consider getting a different job. If you own stock, maybe divest. If you're connected, perhaps your associates can buy from competitors. That's probably the only way to get the board and CEO replaced these days.
On what basis? It sucks that you can't visit those sites without going through an interstitial, but at the end of the day, those sites are essentially private property and the owners can impose whatever requirements they want on visitors. It's not any different than sites that have registration walls, for instance.
The problem isn't Cloudflare, it's that the internet is filled with ill-willed bots, and those bots seem to have infected your network or your ISPs network as well.
If ISPs did a better job taking action against infected IoT crap and spam farms, you wouldn't need to click so many CAPTCHAs.
Without Cloudflare, you'd just see a page saying "blocked because of supicious network activity" or nothing at all or a redirect shock site if the site admin is feeling particularly spicy. If anything, Cloudflare CAPTCHAs are doing you a service by being a cheap and effective alternative to mass IP range blocks.
AI sycophants have truly deluded themselves into thinking everyone else is falling for their bullshit, it's great to see.
This feature wouldn't exist if "the tech community" didn't support it. If you want someone to blame, it's the AI companies for ruining what was a good thing with their blind greed and gold rush of trying to slurp up literally everything they could get their hands on in the shittiest ways possible, not respecting any commonly agreed upon rules like robots.txt
I don't think that it's not supported by the tech community. Much of that community is on the receiving end of the bad actors. I know that depending on the day I, for one, have muttered under my breath "This would be much easier if everyone were using the same damn web browser."
Cloudflare is obviously right here. AI has changed things so an open web is no longer possible. /s
What absolute garbage.
My biggest problem with AI will be once it starts getting legislated, it will just be limited in how it can function / be built, we are going to lock in existing LLMs like ChatGPT in the lead and stop anyone from competing since they wont be able to train on the same data.
My other biggest problem is "AI" or really LLMs which is what everyones hyped about, is lack of offline first capabilities.
Cloudflare bet big on NFTs (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-stream-now-supports-n...), Web3 (https://blog.cloudflare.com/get-started-web3/), Proof of stake (https://blog.cloudflare.com/next-gen-web3-network/). In fact they "bet on blockchain" way back in 2017 (https://blog.cloudflare.com/betting-on-blockchain/) but it's telling that they haven't published anything in the last couple of years (since Nov 2022). Since then the only crypto related content on blog.cloudflare.com is real cryptography - like data encryption.
I'm not criticising. I'm just saying they're part of an industry that thought web3 was the Next Big Thing between 2017-2022 and then pivoted when ChatGPT released in Nov 2022. Now AI is the Next Big Thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the blockchain stuff got sunset over the next few years. Can't run those in perpetuity, especially if there aren't any takers.