Re: Captchas on Cloudflare-Proxied Sites

[Josh Reynolds via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

The problem is the bots.

The captchas are just a symptom.

Josh Reynolds
Chief Technology Officer | SPITwSPOTS

On Tue, Jul 1, 2025, 9:04 PM Constantine A. Murenin via NANOG <
nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:

> On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 at 09:15, Brandon Butterworth via NANOG
> <nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
> > On 01/07/2025 15:05:16, "Johannes Müller Aguilar via NANOG"
> > <nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
> > > For about a month, users behind IP addresses we announce have been
> prompted to solve captchas when accessing Cloudflare-proxied sites.
> > I've seen that increase and now regularly get it on home
> > broadband services, others have reported this too. I suspect
> > many are getting it and assumed this is the new normal.
>
> I'm seeing this on StackOverflow / StackExchange on my home broadband as
> well.
>
> Having to wait half a minute to glance at a search result completely
> ruins the use-case for said result.  If your time is worth $120/h,
> that's a $1 for each StackOverflow visit just to open the page,
> obviously it's cheaper to use AI at that point, so, no idea what
> they're thinking killing their own market.
>
> I wish Google Search would let people blacklist StackOverflow as long
> as they're a Cloudflare user; or, heck, anything with these captchas.
> It's effectively just search spam with all those captchas.
>
> But the "best" part about the security industry, is that because I do
> close the window in less than a second, Cloudflare probably reports my
> visit attempt as saving StackOverflow from yet another bot!  "Look how
> many bots we've saved you from!"
>
> I'd like to see the metrics from Cloudflare and the other captcha
> vendors on how they justify wasting billions of dollars in lost
> productivity.  It probably costs way-way-way-way less than $0.01 to
> serve a page for which the legitimate users must now waste $1 in lost
> income.  There's probably a 10000x amplification factor for real users
> wasting resources compared to how much resources are saved from the
> most basic bots that can't get through, bravo!  All for what?
>
> Did anyone think of the environment, how much computing resources are
> wasted by everyone proving that they're not a bot?
>
> C.
> _______________________________________________
> NANOG mailing list
>
> https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog () lists nanog org/message/ROWRSJDJKROFAH54DJ3ATVMTG4JTQGFL/
_______________________________________________
NANOG mailing list 
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog () lists nanog org/message/JH2MTCKJWRGILR2RY2UPAGOJGJCTLSRC/