523
The AI company Perplexity is complaining their bots can't bypass Cloudflare's firewall
(www.searchenginejournal.com)
You could say they are... Perplexed.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
523 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
74193 readers
3916 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Perplexity argues that a platform’s inability to differentiate between helpful AI assistants and harmful bots causes misclassification of legitimate web traffic.
So, I assume Perplexity uses appropriate identifiable user-agent headers, to allow hosters to decide whether to serve them one way or another?
This is a nice CloudFlare ad
yeah. still not worth dealing with fucking cloudflare. fuck cloudflare.
That’s the entire point, dipshit. I wish we got one of the cool techno dystopias rather than this boring corporate idiot one.
I'm still holding out for Stephen Hawking to mail out Demon Summoning programs.
Traveling snake oil salesman complains he can't pick people's locks.
It seems like it's some kind of distraction to make people think things aren't as bad as they really are, it just sounds too far-fetched to me.
It's like a bear that has eaten too much and starts whining because a small rabbit is running away from him, even though the bear has already eaten almost all the rabbits and is clearly full.
Words cannot describe how much I hate this person
good, that means it’s working
I’m gonna be frustrated (though not surprised) if the response is anything other than this.
Good. I went through my CF panel, and blocked some of those "AI Assistants" that by default were open, including Perplexity's.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Is there some simply deployable PHP honeytrap for AI crawlers?
Well... Good.
When a firm outright admits to bypassing or trying to bypass measures taken to keep them out, you think that would be a slam dunk case of unauthorized access under the CFAA with felony enhancements.
Right? Isn’t this a textbook DMCA violation, too?
Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.
They already prosecute people under the unauthorized access provision. They just don’t prosecute rich people under it.
They prosecuted and convicted a guy under the CFAA for figuring out the URL schema for an AT&T website designed to be accessed by the iPad when it first launched, and then just visiting that site by trying every URL in a script. And then his lawyer (the foremost expert on the CFAA) got his conviction overturned:
https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-auernheimer
We have to maintain that fight, to make sure that the legal system doesn't criminalize normal computer tinkering, like using scripts or even browser settings in ways that site owners don't approve of.
That logic would not extend to ad blockers, as the point of concern is gaining unauthorized access to a computer system or asset. Blocking ads would not be considered gaining unauthorized access to anything. In fact it would be the opposite of that.
You say, just as news breaks that the top German court has over turned a decision that declared "AD blocking isn't piracy"
Unauthorized access into a computer system and “Piracy” are two very different things.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(11 replies)
rare cloudflare w
As far as security is concerned, their w's are pretty common tbh. It's just the whole centralization issue.
This is why companies like Perplexity and OpenAI are creating browsers.
It's difficult to be a shittier company than OpenAI, but Perplexity seems to be trying hard.
Step 1, SOMEHOW find a more punchable face than Altman
I hate that these bots ruin my read it later app. :(
Uh.. good?
view more: next ›