Yes, I obviously agree with you. My comment's point is missed a little I think by you. CF is making these tools and giving access to it to millions of people.
Well there's open source stuff like https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis; one doesn't need a top-down mandated solution coming from a corporation.
In general Cloudflare has been pushing DRMization of the web for quite some time, and while I understand why they want to do it, I wish they didn't always show off as taking the moral high ground.
The actual response to which Anubis was created is seemingly a strange kind of DDOS attack that has been misattributed to LLMs, but is some kind of attacker that makes partial GET requests that are aborted soon after sending the request headers, mostly coming from residential proxies. (Yes, it doesn’t help that the author of Anubis also isn’t fully aware of the mechanics of the attack. In fact, there is no proper write up of the mechanism of the attack which I hope to write about someday).
Having said that, the solution is effective enough, having a lightweight proxy component that issues proof of work tokens to such bogus requests works well enough, as various users on HN seem to point out.
> a strange kind of DDOS attack that has been misattributed to LLMs, , but is some kind of attacker that makes partial GET requests that are aborted soon after sending the request headers, mostly coming from residential proxies.
um, no? Where did you get this strange bit of info.
(I've seen more posts with the analysis, including one which showed an AI crawler which would identify properly, but once it hits the ratelimit, would switch to fake user agent from proxies.. but I cannot find it now)
