Technology

I've developed my own agent for assisting me with researching a topic I'm passionate about, and I ran into the exact same barrier: Cloudflare intercepts my request and is clearly checking if I'm a human using a web browser. (For my network requests, I've defined my own user agent.)

So I use that as a signal that the website doesn't want automated tools scraping their data. That's fine with me: my agent just tells me that there might be interesting content on the site and gives me a deep link. I can extract the data and carry on my research on my own.

I completely understand where Perplexity is coming from, but at scale, implementations like this are awful for the web.

they cant get their ai to check a box that says "I am not a robot"? I'd think thatd be a first year comp sci student level task. And robots.txt files were basically always voluntary compliance anyway.

Can't believe I've lived to see Cloudflare be the good guys

Here comes the ridiculous offer to buy Google chrome with money they don't have: easy delicious scraping directly from the user source

You could say they are... Perplexed.

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

That’s the entire point, dipshit. I wish we got one of the cool techno dystopias rather than this boring corporate idiot one.

Traveling snake oil salesman complains he can't pick people's locks.

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.

It's difficult to be a shittier company than OpenAI, but Perplexity seems to be trying hard.

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.

Good. I went through my CF panel, and blocked some of those "AI Assistants" that by default were open, including Perplexity's.

rare cloudflare w

good, that means it’s working

I’m gonna be frustrated (though not surprised) if the response is anything other than this.

Well... Good.

Uh.. good?

This is why companies like Perplexity and OpenAI are creating browsers.

Words cannot describe how much I hate this person

You'd think that a competent technology company, with their own AI would be able to figure out a way to spoof Cloudflare's checks. I'd still think that.

ask AI how to do it?