"Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future."
George Orwell, 1984
I get why you're frustrated and you have every right to be. I'm going to preface what I'm going to say next by saying I work in this industry. I'm not at Cloudflare but I am at a company that provides bot protection. I analyze and block bots for a living. Again, your frustrations are warranted.
Even if a site doesn't have sensitive information, it likely serves a captcha because of the amount of bots that do make requests that are scraping related. The volume of these requests can effectively DDoS them. If they're selling something, it can disrupt sales. So they lose money on sales and eat the load costs.
With more and more username and password leaks, credential stuffing is getting to be a bigger issue than anyone actually realizes. There aren't really good ways of pinpointing you vs someone that has somehow stolen your credentials. Bots are increasingly more and more sophisticated. Meaning, we see bots using aged sessions which is more in line with human behavior. Most of the companies implementing captcha on login segments do so to try and protect your data and financials.
The rise in unique, privacy based browsers is great and it's also hard to keep up with. It's been more than six months, but I've fingerprinted Pale Moon and, if I recall correctly, it has just enough red flags to be hard to discern between a human and a poorly configured bot.
Ok, enough apologetics. This is a cat and mouse game that the rest of us are being drug into. Sometimes I feel like this is a made up problem. Ultimately, I think this type of thing should be legislated. And before the bot bros jump in and say it's their right to scrape and take data it's not. Terms of use are plainly stated by these sites. They consider it stealing.
Thank you for coming to my Tedx Talk on bots.
Edit: I just want to say that allowing any user agent with "Pale Moon" or "Goanna" isn't the answer. It's trivially easy to spoof a user agent which is why I worked on fingerprinting it. Changing Pale Moon's user agent to Firefox is likely to cause you problems too. The fork they are using has different fingerprints than an up to date Firefox browser.
Damn an actual shit post.
Me too, Bernie. Me too.
“Look, Laura Loomer is not affiliated with the Trump campaign. She said something about curry in the White House that I first read about this morning actually, because I knew that you would ask me about it...” [emphasis my own]
These guys are terrible liars. Between him and Trump, they sound like they have no idea what is going on.
This is correct. I work in bot detections. There are baseline checks for various browser automation used as bot frameworks like Puppeteer or Playwright. Then there is basic analysis of server side and client side fingerprints; meaning, do the fingerprints you claim make sense. There are other heuristics too and I imagine Cloudflare is monitoring movements that point to automation. All of this happens after you click. I personally prefer this over Google's captcha which frequently doesn't recognize me as a human but is easily bypassed by bots.
You can't blame kids for trying to get away from camps if they're abusive.
For anyone not aware of what goes on in some of these camps, give this a read: https://elan.school/
Trigger warning.
Police in The Netherlands: "We will have some fun while solving this crime. We may even put some sprinkles on the bread if the bird is good."
Police in America: "The bird looked like it was going to shoot us so we shot it first. And everyone in the bank too just to be safe. Why don't you respect us?"
Thank you for being a kind person.
Is this from Mcmenamins in Troutdale?