Until last spring my bots never saw those Cloudflare CAPTCHAs despite not taking any serious evasion measures. Then all of a sudden they started getting them 100% of the time on sites I was crawling. For that particular project my webcrawler was cued by a bookmarklet, like I was picking the pages to import manually so switching to getting the data right out of the web browser got my system back on the road.
I always had the feeling that the Cloudflare CAPTCHAs discriminate in various ways, for instance I would see them much more when I was browsing on a Samsung Galaxy tablet than when I was browsing on an iPad. They disproportionately affect the disabled and I wouldn't be surprised other vulnerable populations.
If I had anything to do with it having a CAPTCHA or a GDPR popup would be an immediate WCAG fail at A level.
I get them more on Zen (Gecko-engined) than I did on Arc (Chromium-engined). I came across this blog post about user-agent discrimination by the Vivaldi team on HN this week: https://vivaldi.com/blog/user-agent-changes/
the economic mechanism behind "captcha", and other verifications is to increase proffits by bleeding off relavance, a very litteral mechanical braking system, trading momentum for money, or money for momentum on a closed course.
The ability to scale up friction is almost infinite and realy quite cheap, but humans are finnicky and also energetic, but the real threat to building a closed internet, is simply demand collapse.
That the article is about adhesives, is a bit funny.
I too detest captchas. I found the paper elsewhere:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08804
Ironically, if you throw up road blocks for human visitors, the only ones who take the abuse will be bots.
Until last spring my bots never saw those Cloudflare CAPTCHAs despite not taking any serious evasion measures. Then all of a sudden they started getting them 100% of the time on sites I was crawling. For that particular project my webcrawler was cued by a bookmarklet, like I was picking the pages to import manually so switching to getting the data right out of the web browser got my system back on the road.
I always had the feeling that the Cloudflare CAPTCHAs discriminate in various ways, for instance I would see them much more when I was browsing on a Samsung Galaxy tablet than when I was browsing on an iPad. They disproportionately affect the disabled and I wouldn't be surprised other vulnerable populations.
If I had anything to do with it having a CAPTCHA or a GDPR popup would be an immediate WCAG fail at A level.
Good to hear I might not be paranoid, I could swear I get them far more on my linux desktop than my macbook.
I get them more on Zen (Gecko-engined) than I did on Arc (Chromium-engined). I came across this blog post about user-agent discrimination by the Vivaldi team on HN this week: https://vivaldi.com/blog/user-agent-changes/
the economic mechanism behind "captcha", and other verifications is to increase proffits by bleeding off relavance, a very litteral mechanical braking system, trading momentum for money, or money for momentum on a closed course. The ability to scale up friction is almost infinite and realy quite cheap, but humans are finnicky and also energetic, but the real threat to building a closed internet, is simply demand collapse. That the article is about adhesives, is a bit funny.