
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.