So are you able to get free inference now that you decrypted this?
superkuh•Mar 29, 2026
It doesn't look like it in the full sense of "free". But part of how one pays these services is by running a permissive modern browser which allows the corporation to spy on you even when you already paid in currency. In a sense by depriving them of the ability to easily spy on your this workaround is closer to "free".
voxic11•Mar 29, 2026
But isn't ChatGPT access free through the browser? What do you mean already paid in currency?
pocksuppet•Mar 30, 2026
If you want to send more than a few prompts each day, you have to pay. With currency.
beering•Mar 29, 2026
They already see everything I’m doing because I send my prompts to them. What “workaround” are you referring to?
superkuh•Mar 29, 2026
They see everything your doing because you send the text. But this is talking about everything about your computer system. You would not normally be sending this to them or having it involved at all. This workaround allows you to not involve unneeded information about your computer setup. It is not about avoiding sending prompt text.
And as for "but chatgpt isn't paid" (another commenter), well, then yes, that's even closer to free by removing this spying on your computer setup. But they spy on the paid users too.
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>My best guess is -- ChatGPT is running something in your browser to try to determine the best things to send down to the model API
There's no way this is worth it unless the models are absolutely tiny, in which case any benefits from offloading to the client is marginal and probably isn't worth the engineering effort.
danny_codes•Mar 30, 2026
It’s free as a loss leader. The trick is to upsell later. Unfortunately for OpenAI there are plenty of competitors with fungible products, so it might be hard to pull a classic monopoly rug-pull.
tripdout•Mar 29, 2026
AI-written article?
avazhi•Mar 29, 2026
Yep. I flag these as spam at this point.
petcat•Mar 29, 2026
> These properties only exist if the ChatGPT React application has fully rendered and hydrated. A headless browser that loads the HTML but doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have them. A bot framework that stubs out browser APIs but doesn't actually run React won't have them.
> This is bot detection at the application layer, not the browser layer.
I kind of just assumed that all sophisticated bot-detectors and adblock-detectors do this? Is there something revealing about the finding that ChatGPT/CloudFlare's bot detector triggers on "javascript didn't execute"?
iancarroll•Mar 30, 2026
It’s pretty interesting to me that Cloudflare is collecting additional client-side data for individual customers. This is not widely done by most anti-bot solutions.
supriyo-biswas•Mar 30, 2026
OpenAI is on an enterprise plan and (presumably) gets a customized version of Turnstile.
red_admiral•Mar 30, 2026
"Sophisticated" may vary, but for a lot of EU media products you can just block the script that launches the paywall/consent overlay. Sometimes disabling JS does it; sometimes activating reading mode works.
ripbozo•Mar 29, 2026
and chatgpt was then used to write this article. at least try to clean it up a bit
hx8•Mar 29, 2026
Ah yes, the timeless hallmark of web blogs: a draft so messy even a language model would ask for a second pass.
simonw•Mar 29, 2026
Presumably this is all because OpenAI offers free ChatGPT to logged out users and don't want that being abused as a free API endpoint.
appreciatorBus•Mar 29, 2026
Yup.
Coincidentally about an hour ago, I wanted to look something up in ChatGPT and I happened to be in a browser window I don’t normally use, with no logged in accounts. I assumed it wouldn’t work, but to my surprise with no account, no cookies of any kind it took my query and gave me an answer.
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>I assumed it wouldn’t work, but to my surprise with no account, no cookies of any kind it took my query and gave me an answer.
They allowed anonymous requests for months now, maybe even a year.
solaire_oa•Mar 30, 2026
Yeah, additionally gemini.google.com is also free unauthenticated, which I've been using for a very long time (a year?). Why this is being treated as news is confusing.
iberator•Mar 30, 2026
Microsoft and Gemini can be used without account. just works! (talking about web app)
aziaziazi•Mar 29, 2026
I used to mostly use chatgpt in an incognito tab, logged out. Until I notice it seems to have some context of my logged in session, and of the logged out as well. It may be paranoia or prompt deduction as well but that felt strange.
FergusArgyll•Mar 29, 2026
Yeah it works but it's a dumber model. Prob mini
lelandfe•Mar 30, 2026
You get a couple requests in at a smarter model and then it prompts you to sign up, and from there uses an extremely dumb model.
NotPractical•Mar 29, 2026
But do they do it whether you're logged in or not?
I noticed the ChatGPT app also checks Play Integrity on Android (because GrapheneOS snitches on apps when they do this), probably for the same reason. Claude's app doesn't, by the way, but it also requires a login.
Gander5739•Mar 29, 2026
Because accounts are free, and could still be used to abuse as a free endpoint, with a little trickiness.
gzread•Mar 30, 2026
Don't you need a Google account and to get a Google account you need a phone number?
"You're posting too fast! Please slow down."
Gander5739•Mar 30, 2026
You don't need a phone number to create a google account. (Though the account creation flow is inconsistent in this, in sone situations it will require a phone number, in some it won't.)
thisisnow•Mar 29, 2026
Its probably same for copilot.microsoft.com and their cloudfart usage
darepublic•Mar 29, 2026
Using 5.2 at 20 a month would also be a steal. Other shoe will drop on codex sooner or later
bredren•Mar 29, 2026
It is also intended to protect the usage patterns of pro subscribers.
As has been amply explained, the API pricing per token is far more for equivalent use when maximizing a subscription plan.
It isn’t really a massive hurdle to deal with this full SPA load check. If one is even aware it exists they already have the skills to bypass it anyway.
I get why people would “what about” the automation inherit in what OpenAI is doing but that is a separate matter.
Other businesses and applications can put into place their own hurdles and anti bot practices to protect the models they’ve leaned into—-and they have been.
Chance-Device•Mar 29, 2026
Perhaps the author should have made it clearer why we should care about any of this. OpenAI want you to use their real react app. That’s… ok? I skimmed the article looking for the punchline and there doesn’t seem to be one.
elwebmaster•Mar 29, 2026
That's because the article is AI slop.
dmos62•Mar 30, 2026
For me the interesting parts of the article is how author got to the decompiled checks and what the checks are. Anti-bot is an interesting space.
raincole•Mar 30, 2026
Why does every article need a 'punchline'? It's a technical analysis. Do you expect punchlines when you read recipes or source code?
Chance-Device•Mar 30, 2026
Where did I say “every article”? This is AI slop that’s set up like it’s some investigative expose of something scandalous and then shows us nothing interesting. A competent human writer would have reframed the whole thing or just not published it.
raincole•Mar 30, 2026
Do you think
1. Every person is born with the knowledge of how ChatGPT uses Cloudflare Turnstile?
2. This article contains factual mistakes? If so, what are they?
If neither of these is true, then this article strictly provides information and educational value for some readers. The writing style, AI-like or not, doesn't change that.
Chance-Device•Mar 30, 2026
Do you think I have some obligation to agree with you or something? You love the article, nice, good for you. I think it’s crap.
bogdan•Mar 30, 2026
Whilst you and a few other commentators call this AI slop and refuse to engage with it, the rest of us have read something interesting and learned something new. Is anything gained if one points out that it's written by AI? I personally know it's written by AI but the value outweighs the stylistic idiosyncrasies.
Consider also that many people aren't the best at writing blog-like posts but still have things to share and AI empowers them to do that. I can't find anything constructive in your post and I don't understand why you are posting at all.
Chance-Device•Mar 30, 2026
What’s not constructive about it, Bogdan? I’ve said exactly what I think is wrong with the article, the framing is AI pattern matching to something that it isn’t. It’s a weird kind of incongruent clickbait, it’s not positioning itself as a piece about cloudflare or turnstile, it’s implicitly saying “look at this sneaky thing OpenAI are doing that I uncovered!” and it turns out they’re not doing much of anything at all.
This may be unintentional and the author simply couldn’t tell it sounded this way. The less charitable interpretation is that they did know it sounded this way and thought that a straightforward blog post about cloudflare bot detection wouldn’t end up on the HN front page.
What’s my constructive criticism to the author? Write your own posts. Use your own voice. Make sure that what you’re creating actually reads like the kind of thing it is. Don’t get the AI to write it for you. It’s annoying.
And I would say that if someone is really so bad at writing blogs that they are unable to do this, which I am not saying this author is, then maybe they shouldn’t be writing them.
nickelpro•Mar 30, 2026
The intended value is difficult to discern in AI written pieces.
I agree with both of you, there's some interesting tricks here for how a website builds anti-bot protection, but the AI sloppification is framing it as a consumer protection issue but not delivering on that premise.
It is a reasonable criticism that the post does not deliver a "so what?" on its basic framing.
gobdovan•Mar 29, 2026
Imagine if they'd put as much effort into making a decent frontend experience.
londons_explore•Mar 29, 2026
I just don't understand why bot owners can't just run a complete windows 11 VM running Google Chrome complete with graphics acceleration.
You can probably run 50 of those simultaneously if you use memory page deduplication, and with a decent CPU+GPU you ought to be able to render 50 pages a second. That's 1 cent per thousand page loads on AWS. Damn cheap.
poly2it•Mar 29, 2026
If you know of a simple way to run a Windows 11 VM with good graphics acceleration (no GPU passthrough), please contact me.
MarioMan•Mar 29, 2026
I assume your concern with GPU passthrough is that each VM needs a whole GPU?
You can use GPU-PV to split your GPU between VM instances.
Then the main bottleneck becomes how thin you split out your VRAM.
Wouldn't virtualbox or vmware's paravirtual GPUs be a better fit for this use case? Unfortunately the offerings with qemu/libvirt still lag vmwares by a lot.
huertouisj•Mar 29, 2026
there are scraping subreddits.
if you browse them you will see that bot writers are very annoyed if they can't scrape a site with a headless browser.
you can do what you suggested, but with Linux VMs/containers. windows is too heavy, each VM will cost you 4 GB of RAM
xmcp123•Mar 30, 2026
I’m in those. xvfb and headless=false still works great
londons_explore•Mar 30, 2026
The reason to use windows is that anti bot tech is going to be a lot stricter if Linux is detected...
jaccola•Mar 29, 2026
There are myriad providers competing to offer this, nicely packaged with all the accoutrements (IP rotation, location spoofing, language settings, prebuilt parsers, etc.) behind an easy to use API.
Honestly it is a very healthy competitive market with reasonably low switching costs which drives prices down. These circumstances make rolling your own a tough sell.
arcfour•Mar 30, 2026
They do, but the fact that they have to do this means there are fewer bots because it's less economical to go to such lengths, compared to something much less complex (which is orders of magnitude cheaper).
himata4113•Mar 30, 2026
284 on 296gb of ram with deduplication enabled on a 128c with 32Q vgpu.
hrmtst93837•Mar 30, 2026
In theory you could run hundreds of full-fat Chrome bots if you don't care about the ops mess, but keeping Windows images stable while Cloudflare and friends keep changing the fingerprinting game turns the cheap math into a maintenance job from hell. AWS VM signals are a big red flag, so you still eat CAPTCHAs and blocks even with a full browser stack. The page load number looks cheap.
YetAnotherNick•Mar 30, 2026
I am reasonably sure that these kind of fingerprints can detect if the browser is inside a VM.
kristjansson•Mar 30, 2026
… yup?
I mean you missed the minigame of preventing Chrome from signaling that it’s being programmatically (webdriver etc) driven and tipping your hand, but … yup?
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
It's absurd how unusable Cloudflare is making the web when using a browser or IP address they consider "suspicious". I've lately been drowning in captchas for the crime of using Firefox. All in the interest of "bot protection", of course.
onion2k•Mar 29, 2026
Is that because botnets spoof being Firefox? It's not really fair to blame Cloudflare it is. That's on the bots.
conradkay•Mar 29, 2026
Not really, there's camoufox but the vast majority use modified chrome/chromium
doctaj•Mar 29, 2026
In what way would that not be fair? Their product giving false positives (unnecessary challenges for a normal browser humans commonly use) to real people is definitely their fault.
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>Their product giving false positives (unnecessary challenges for a normal browser humans commonly use) to real people is definitely their fault.
Is it TSA's "fault" that non-terrorists are subject to screening?
forkerenok•Mar 29, 2026
We're discussing the quality of screening here, not the act/necessity of screening itself.
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>We're discussing the quality of screening here
The "quality" of TSA's screening seems be pretty bad too given how many people have to go through secondary screening vs how many terrorist they catch (0?)
DonHopkins•Mar 29, 2026
They are failing to meet there quotas of shooting innocent people in the face, so ICE is helping out.
bdangubic•Mar 29, 2026
they caught 11 million by now (just as arbitrary as your 0 but probably more accurate since we haven’t had a large terrorist attack since they got the gig to serve and protect and before we lost thousands of lives…)
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>they caught 11 million by now (just as arbitrary as your 0 but probably more accurate
Nice try but I used "caught", not "stopped", which requires they actually apprehended someone, not just prevented some hypothetical attack.
>since they got the gig to serve and protect and before we lost thousands of lives…)
You could easily reuse this argument for cloudflare: "if it wasn't for such invasive browser fingerprinting openai would be drowning in bajillion req/s from bots."
bdangubic•Mar 29, 2026
> “if it wasn't for such invasive browser fingerprinting openai would be drowning in bajillion req/s from bots."
of course they would be drowning! I have no issues with what CF is doing. too funny that people use tools like chatgpt and expect privacy?!
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
No, but it's entirely within TSA's hands to make that process as frictionless as possible.
(It's a different question whether zero friction is actually desired, or whether some security theater is actually part of the service being provided, but that's a different question.)
eks391•Mar 30, 2026
That sounds like it is working as intended, not a false positive. A false positive would mean it blocked you whereas a challenge means more information is needed. You aren't noticing all of the times it correctly decides you are human, only the times when it needs to "inconvenience" you for more information because you prioritize privacy, a key similarity with some bots.
I also like privacy. I use GrapheneOS. I compartmentalize my credit cards, emails, and phone numbers. I don't use Google products, and the list continues, but I don't complain about Cloudflare because it is painless and I understand the price I pay for privacy.
I also have home services accessible via my home website, running on my home server(s). I chose to have cloudflare to host my domain specifically for the easy bot blocking, and it blocks more than 2000 bots/day that otherwise would be trying to find vulnerabilities on my servers, which contain a lot of sensitive things. I've never had an issue personally accessing my services through cloudflare. Sometimes I have to do captchas to access my own things, and that's barely an inconvenience (I am aware the domain isn't necessary to access services, but it makes more sense for my setup and intents)
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
No, using a stupid authentication/verification method with lots of false positives is always on whoever deploys it.
Imagine an apartment building with a flimsy front door lock that breaks all the time, and the landlord only telling you that that can't be helped because of all the burglars.
josephcsible•Mar 29, 2026
If it's just as easy to spoof being Chrome as it is to spoof being Firefox, then it is indeed fair to blame Cloudflare if they give Firefox users more CAPTCHAs than Chrome users.
EGreg•Mar 29, 2026
Well, that's for the public internet.
I'm building Safebox and Safecloud, where this won't be the case anymore. Not only will you have a decentralized hosting network that can sideload resources (e.g. via a browser extension that looks at your "integrity" attribute on websites) but also the websites will require you to be logged in with a HMAC-signed session ID (which means they don't need to do any I/O to reject your requests, and can do so quickly)... so the whole thing comes down to having a logged in account.
As far as server-to-server requests, they'll be coming from a growing network of cryptographically attested TPMs (Nitro in AWS, also available in GCP, IBM, Azure, Oracle etc.) so they'll just reject based on attestations also.
In short... the cryptographically attested web of trust will mean you won't need cloudflare. What you will need, however, to prevent sybil attacks, is age verification of accounts (e.g. Telegram ID is a proxy for that if you use Telegram for authentication).
password4321•Mar 29, 2026
Wow, if Seinfeld can have a soup nazi, I think it's within reason for you to be called the internet nazi.
"No s̶o̶u̶p̶ internet for you!"
Good luck!
ale42•Mar 29, 2026
This was sarcasm, right?
EGreg•Mar 30, 2026
Why would you assume it needs to be? You don’t think that websites on the Internet might not want to allow random bots and scrapers to waste their resources, and require people to have an account in order to access non-static resources on the website? You do realize that API keys exist, right?
danielheath•Mar 29, 2026
Maybe check your network isn't sending web traffic you're not aware of?
I'm running firefox and seeing the normal amount.
cogman10•Mar 29, 2026
Every so often, usually after a firefox update, CF will get into a "I'm convinced your a bot" mode with me. I can get out of it by solving 20 CAPTCHAs.
hansvm•Mar 29, 2026
It's probably just a higher rate of autonomous vehicles needing stop signs and buses identified at that moment, and cognitive bias causes you to only remember when that happens when you recently performed an update. /s
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>It's probably just a higher rate of autonomous vehicles needing stop signs and buses identified at that moment
I can't tell whether you're serious but in case you are, this theory immediately falls apart when you realize waymo operates at night but there aren't any night photos.
hansvm•Mar 29, 2026
Thanks for the comment. Lack of seriousness is now appropriately indicated.
cogman10•Mar 29, 2026
My assumption is that CF has something like a SVM that it's feeding a bunch of datapoints into for bot detection. Go over some threshold and you end up in the CAPTCHA jail.
I'm certain the User-Agent is part of it. I know that for certain because a very reliable way I can trigger the CF stuff is this plugin with the wrong browser selected [1].
Most people are on a CGNAT these days, drowning in captchas is the new normal. You’re at the mercy of one of your neighbors not hosting a botnet from their home computer.
tokioyoyo•Mar 29, 2026
Not even remotely true, I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about. The only time I get captcha'ed is when I sometimes VPN around, or do some custom browser stuff and etc. I'll even say I get captcha'ed less now than maybe 5 years ago.
jychang•Mar 30, 2026
Just wait until your ISP puts you behind a CGNAT.
Or if you ever need to travel a lot and tether off your phone. Most mobile devices are IPV6 only (via 464XLAT) behind a CGNAT these days.
perching_aix•Mar 29, 2026
For better or for worse, CF's fingerprinting and traffic filtering is a lot more in-depth than just IP trend analysis. Kind of by necessity, exactly because of what you mention. So I'd think that's not as big a worry per se.
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a while, so it's quite a big worry for me.
Maybe I just have to disable all ad blockers and Safari tracking prevention? Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?
perching_aix•Mar 29, 2026
> Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a while, so it's quite a big worry for me.
I think I was sufficiently clear that I was specifically talking about CGNAT-caused IP address tainting being an unreasonably emphasized worry, not the worry about their detections overall misfiring. Though I certainly don't hear much about people having issues with it (but then anecdotes are anecdotal).
> Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?
Sounds good, have you tried?
Not sure what's the point of these comically asinine rhetoricals.
g-b-r•Mar 29, 2026
Maybe you allow tracking and cookies?
Eji1700•Mar 29, 2026
I don't, and I rarely have issues with firefox. Private + blockers + VPN causes, expected, issues but otherwise i'm usually fine?
lucasfin000•Mar 29, 2026
The real frustrating part is that Cloudflare's "definition" of suspicious keeps changing and expanding. VPN users, privacy-first browsers, uncommon IP ranges, they all get flagged. The people most likely to get caught by these systems are exactly the ones who care most about their privacy, and not the bots that they are apparently targeting.
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>The real frustrating part is that Cloudflare's "definition" of suspicious keeps changing and expanding.
That's... exactly expected? It's a cat and mouse game. People running botnets or AI scrapers aren't diligently setting the evil bit on their packets.
jagged-chisel•Mar 29, 2026
That’s obviously because they’re not being “evil”
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
So the stable state here is all humans eventually being locked out? (Bots are getting better every day; I doubt the same is true for all humans, including those with weird browsers or networks unwilling to install some dystopian Cloudflare "Internet passport".)
But hey, at least some bots are also not making it past Cloudflare!
small_scombrus•Mar 30, 2026
> So the stable state here is all humans eventually being locked out?
Yep. The most easy to implement stable state for any system where you're aiming to prevent misuse is to just prevent use
WatchDog•Mar 30, 2026
The inevitability is that these kinds of services just won't be offered without identifying yourself.
Claude's free tier requires a phone number just to try it.
sph•Mar 30, 2026
PRISM as a Service.
kristjansson•Mar 30, 2026
Or else a player too big to be blocked moves into the space with a service that provides some/all of the privacy benefits, but declines to offer the other undesirable aspects of VPN (e.g. location shifting to circumvent local restrictions)
i.e. iCloud private relay is the future
lxgr•Mar 30, 2026
I’ve already had a few services lock me out with iCloud Private Relay.
whatisthiseven•Mar 29, 2026
Which VPNs are people using that actually care about the user's privacy? Most of them don't, sell their home IP to buyers, sell their DNS history to others, etc. Worse, some of them could require invasive MITM cert stuff most users will just click yes through.
I have yet to see a use case for VPNs for the casual internet audience, and for a tech savvy user, their better off renting through some datacenter or something, which at that point is hardly a VPN and more home IP obfuscation. All the same downsides, and at least you get real privacy.
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>Most of them don't, sell their home IP to buyers, sell their DNS history to others, etc. Worse, some of them could require invasive MITM cert stuff most users will just click yes through.
Source? I haven't seen any evidence that the major paid VPN providers engage in any of those things. At best it's vague implications something shady is happening because one of the key people was previously at [shady organization].
evilduck•Mar 29, 2026
Using any popular datacenter's IP range for a personal VPN is likely to be outright blocked.
Imustaskforhelp•Mar 29, 2026
Also you only get 1 IP so its not really anonymous and you definitely would have a fingerprint.
thisisnow•Mar 29, 2026
you just rotate it?
Imustaskforhelp•Mar 29, 2026
ProtonVPN with bitcoin which you get from a monero swap is a good idea for complete privacy if you want port forwarding.
MullvadVPN is also another great one.
I have heard some good things about AirVPN, but I can absolutely attest for mullvad and to a degree ProtonVPN (Just with Proton, depending upon your threat model, do make the necessary precautions like buying with monero for example)
There are others, but mostly its the 2-3 that I trust.
lxgr•Mar 30, 2026
How do you square "complete privacy" with the fact that you're authenticating to these VPNs with a persistent username or other credential and are then sending traffic through them, both from an IP address that might identify you, and to services that you authenticate against?
Best case, the VPN learns your residential IP and the names of every HTTPS host you connect to (if not your entire DNS traffic as well); worst case, they collude with any of the services you use (or some ad tracker they embed) and persistently deanonymize your account.
VPNs are structurally not great for privacy.
traceroute66•Mar 29, 2026
> Which VPNs are people using that actually care about the user's privacy?
Mullvad.
It has been proven in a court of law that when Mullvad says "no logging", they mean it.
They also regularly have security audits and publish the results[2][3]
Seconding Mullvad. I am paranoid and I think they're trustworthy
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
I'm forced to use a VPN to occasionally check my US bank account, since a foreign IP address is obviously a harbinger of unspeakable evil (while the friendly Youtube advertised neighborhood VPN is obviously evidence of pure intentions).
Aurornis•Mar 30, 2026
> The people most likely to get caught by these systems are exactly the ones who care most about their privacy, and not the bots that they are apparently targeting.
In my brief experience with abuse mitigation, connections coming from VPNs or unusual IP ranges were very significantly more likely to be associated with abuse.
It depends on your users. VPNs aren’t common at all, even though you hear about them a lot on Hacker News. For types of social sites where people got banned for abuse (forums) the first step to getting back on the forum was always to sign up for a VPN and try to reconnect. It got so bad that almost every new account connecting via VPN would reveal itself as a spammer, a banned member trying to return, or someone trying to sock puppet alternate accounts for some reason.
The worst offenders are Tor IP addresses. Anyone connecting from Tor was basically guaranteed to have bad intentions.
I heard from someone who dealt with a lot of e-mail abuse that the death threats, extortion, and other serious abuse almost always came from Protonmail or one of the other privacy-first providers that I can’t remember right now. He half-jokingly said they could likely block Protonmail entirely without impacting any real users.
It’s tough for people who want these things for privacy, but the sad reality is that these same privacy protections are favored by people who are trying to abuse services.
gzread•Mar 30, 2026
The solution is for more people to use Tor routinely. Like I'm doing right now.
perching_aix•Mar 30, 2026
How does the Tor network counter abuse? Like, say you're hosting a service on the Tor network, what does the Tor network offer if anything to defend against e.g. DDoS attacks?
gzread•Mar 30, 2026
It's a solution for users because you can't afford to demand ID from your users (such as an IP address) if all your users quit when you do that.
perching_aix•Mar 30, 2026
Sure, but if the service keeps getting overwhelmed (financially or traffic-wise) or compromised (not even necessarily in the security sense but in the semantic purpose sense, like via spam floods on a message board) due to a lessened capability to combat abuse, then the user is worse off all over again, no?
All it would solve then is laundering Tor traffic from being probably malicious to being reputationally ambiguous. Though for a within-network service, that's probably assumed anyways - hard to run a Tor service if you assume all Tor users are malicious, that would be nonsensical.
frig57•Mar 30, 2026
The idea that normal people don't use proton is incredibly wrong. Same with VPNs to a large extent.
I work a customer facing email job and loads of people use Proton across demographics and industries
next_xibalba•Mar 30, 2026
About what percentage of “normal people” who are email users would you estimate use Proton?
ymolodtsov•Mar 30, 2026
Yes, using an incognito windows is more than enough to kick off their checks.
dheera•Mar 29, 2026
Exactly. For the most part all this bot protection is only protecting these websites against humans.
I don't do free work. I'm not going to label 50 images of crosswalks and motorcycles for free.
ronbenton•Mar 29, 2026
> For the most part all this bot protection is only protecting these websites against humans.
Curious how do you know this?
ehnto•Mar 29, 2026
I recently had the insane experience of filling out 15 consecutive captchas, after, I had checked out and entered my payment information into the payment processor widget. I just wanted to submit the order. I was logged in to their website, and the bank even needed a one time code for payment. If the bank is pretty sure I am human then your ecomm site can figure it out surely.
amatecha•Mar 29, 2026
A while back I was buying tickets for a gondola for a trip in Europe and the checkout process failed during payment because their site didn't load their analytics/tracking stuff with proper error-handling, so when my ad-blocker prevented the tracking stuff, their checkout process failed to handle my CC's 2-factor auth and the checkout would fail. Had to contact my CC company and work with the gondola company to tell them what they're doing wrong so they could fix their website code. Pretty sad to know whoever built their stuff actually shipped a checkout flow (for a VERY popular tourist destination) without testing with ad-blockers enabled.
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
To be fair, this sometimes seems on the ad blocker. I've definitely seen mine accidentally nuke part of the payment Javascript (or maybe the 3DS iframe?) because some substring of it matched some common ad URL, which is obviously unrecoverable for the site itself.
At least outside the US, there's 3DS as an (admittedly often high friction) high quality cardholder verification method, but in the US, that's of course considered much too consumer-hostile, so "select 87 overpasses" it is.
amatecha•Mar 29, 2026
These days I just close sites that show that "checking if you're a bot" shit. If this is how the web is going to be now, I don't care, I'll just not use it. I didn't need to see that article or post that badly anyways. I'm tired of paying the price for the sociopathic, greedy actions of others. It's especially bad for anyone who uses an open source OS like Linux or *BSD (to the extent many sites just block me automatically with a 403 Forbidden simply for using OpenBSD + Firefox, completely free pass if I try the same site from a Windows or Linux computer).
jgalt212•Mar 29, 2026
We use Cloudflare to protect our content, but at the same time our machines mostly run Linux / Firefox so it really is quite a frustrating relationship. It really bums me out how much of Turnstile boils down to these two questions:
is it Linux (or similar)?
is it Firefox?
If yes, to one or both, you're blocked! Clearly millions of dollars of engineering talent and petabytes of data collection should be able to come up with something more nuanced than this.
dawnerd•Mar 29, 2026
I’ve been getting it in safari too. It’s ridiculous frankly. My residential ip must have been flagged or something. The part that’s really annoying is its trivial for bots to bypass.
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
> I’ve been getting it in safari too.
I'm getting it on iCloud Private Relay all the time. It honestly makes it kind of useless.
Maybe that's the point? But then again, doesn't Cloudflare run part of it!? And wasn't there some "privacy-preserving captcha replacement" that iOS devices should already be opting me in to? So many questions, nobody there to answer them, because they can get away with it.
> The part that’s really annoying is its trivial for bots to bypass.
Not the ethical bots, though! My GPT-backed Openclaw staunchly refuses to go anywhere near a "I'm not a robot" button.
gzread•Mar 30, 2026
Cloudflare makes money on both sides. It makes money from Apple to run Private Relay and it makes money from website operators to block Private Relay. It hosts the websites of DDoS services and protects them from DDoS, too.
girvo•Mar 29, 2026
Surprising really, because I'm a Firefox + Ublock Origin die hard and I never get Cloudflare captchas. Wonder what the difference is? I have CGNAT turned off, if that matters at all (probably not).
lxgr•Mar 29, 2026
I could definitely imagine a public IPv4 with lots of good, logged-in Cloudflare traffic to act as a positive signal for their heuristics, possibly even overriding the Firefox penalty.
binaryturtle•Mar 29, 2026
I'm with a slightly older Firefox and can't use many websites at all anymore because the Cloudflare cancer.
Of course then you got sites like gnu.org too that block you because your slightly outdated user agent.
mghackerlady•Mar 30, 2026
I... Don't think it does that? It shouldn't, anyway. How long has that been a thing? They've been hit pretty hard by the slop crew lately but I couldn't imagine it being so bad they require an up to date UA
tshaddox•Mar 29, 2026
Is anyone talking about the fact that this is a fundamental design flaw of the web? Or arguably even the entire Internet?
3form•Mar 29, 2026
It's hard to call something a "fundamental flaw of web" if it wasn't an issue for 30 years. Unless you mean something more general that I'm missing.
fastball•Mar 30, 2026
Cloudflare isn't providing Turnstile as a service in a vacuum, this is a direct response to bad actors who can trivially abuse the web.
tshaddox•Mar 30, 2026
Arguably it didn’t see widespread commercial adoption for 30 years, and you wouldn’t expect fundamental design flaws regarding commercial incentives to manifest before that.
pixl97•Mar 30, 2026
A flaw can be fundamental but not immediate. It's probably better to say it's a fundamental flaw of the open web, that is the system collapses as the number of bad actors increases, and there is no way to prevent bad actors and have the system keep the name as open web.
segmondy•Mar 30, 2026
trying using firefox and then using a cellphone network for internet. sometimes i can't access a site, because i get infinite captcha. i know what a damn bus, stairwell, stop light or motorcycle looks like.
geysersam•Mar 30, 2026
I use firefox daily and I don't encounter the problems you describe, might be worth looking if there's some other issue.
lm411•Mar 30, 2026
That's not Cloudflare trying to make your life hard.
It's the reality of how bad the bots have become.
lazycouchpotato•Mar 30, 2026
At times I'm completely locked out of a website and Cloudflare asks me to email the website owner to get the issue resolved.
.. how do they expect me to find the website owner's email if I can't access said website?
wongarsu•Mar 30, 2026
Once upon a time we had whois lookup for exactly that usecase (finding a domain's owner without visiting the site). Of course now nearly everyone has meaningless entries from some domain privacy service
lukewarm707•Mar 30, 2026
sometimes when there is mafia you get no option but pay pizzo
hence i am just using cloudflare remote browser rendering.
mghackerlady•Mar 30, 2026
Heaven forbid you not use JavaScript, then they can't <s>track you</s> keep the internet safe!
EGreg•Mar 29, 2026
Why does ChatGPT slow down so much when the conversations get long, while Claude does compaction?
My best guess is -- ChatGPT is running something in your browser to try to determine the best things to send down to the model API –- when it should have been running quantized models on its own server.
heliumtera•Mar 29, 2026
I am shocked openai collects data about it's users before users have the opportunity to send the same data to openai servers!
aslihana•Mar 29, 2026
I mean, I can easily get them to behaving defensively for not being abused. But MBP with M5 here, my chatgpt tab always get stucked when I hit some prompt.
Really really bad user experience, wondering about when they will leave this approach.
blinkbat•Mar 29, 2026
Ok... so... ?
natdempk•Mar 29, 2026
Does anyone know how this is integrated on the Cloudflare side and across the app? Is this beyond standard turnstile? Is this custom/enterprise functionality? Something else?
refulgentis•Mar 29, 2026
If you have AI write a blog post for ya, when you think it's set, check word count (can c+p to google docs if AI can't pull it off with built in tools), and ask it to identify repetitions if it's over 1000.
Also, you can have it spotcheck colors: light orange on light background is unreadable, ask it to find the L*[1] of colors and dark/lighten as necessary if gap < 40 (that's minimum gap for yuge header text on background, 50 for text on background, these have gap of 25)
I haven't tried this yet, but, maybe have it count word count-per-header too. It's got 11 headers for 1000 words currently, makes reading feel really stacatto and you gotta evaluate "is this a real transition or vibetransition"
[1] L* as in L*a*b*, not L in Oklab
themafia•Mar 29, 2026
My theory is that "AI" doesn't really have any long term paying customers and the majority of the "users" are people who have cooked up some clever hack to effectively siphon computing power from these providers in an effort to crank out the lowest effort ad supported slop imaginable.
Every provider seems to have been plauged by these freeloaders to such an extent that they've had to develop extreme and onerous countermeasures just to avoid losing their shirts.
What's the word? Schadenfreude?
pencilcode•Mar 29, 2026
ai slop analysis finding CF detects non javascript capable browsers with no punchline
MyNameIsNickT•Mar 29, 2026
Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users.
We also keep a very close eye on the user impact. We monitor things like page load time, time to first token and payload size, with a focus on reducing the overhead of these protections. For the majority of people, the impact is negligible, and only a very small percentage may see a slight delay from extra checks. We also continuously evaluate precision so we can minimize false positives while still making abuse meaningfully harder.
user3939382•Mar 29, 2026
Have you given any thought to what we trade when big tech elects one corporation as the gatekeeper for vast swaths of the Internet?
sebmellen•Mar 29, 2026
Great to hear from a first-party source. I'm a Pro subscriber and my team spends well over two thousand dollars per month on OpenAI subscriptions. However, even when I'm logged in with my Pro account, if I'm using a VPN provider like Mullvad, I often have trouble using the chat interface or I get timeout errors.
Is this to be expected? I would presume that if I'm authenticated and paying, VPN use wouldn't be a worry. It would be nice to be able to use the tool whether or not I'm on a VPN.
JumpCrisscross•Mar 30, 2026
> even when I'm logged in with my Pro account, if I'm using a VPN provider like Mullvad, I often have trouble using the chat interface or I get timeout errors
Heard from a founder who recently switched his company to Claude due to OpenAI's lagginess–it's absolutely an OpenAI problem. Not an AI problem in general.
mehov•Mar 29, 2026
> because we want to keep free and logged-out access
But don't you run these checks on logged-in users too?
MyNameIsNickT•Mar 29, 2026
Yep, on logged-in users too. The reason is basically the same: we want scarce compute going to real people, not attackers. Being logged in is one useful signal, but it doesn’t fully prevent automation, account abuse, or other malicious traffic, so we apply protections in both cases.
angoragoats•Mar 29, 2026
Nothing you do can fully prevent automation. Someone who wants to automate requests badly enough will be able to do it, especially when the “protections” are as easy to decrypt and analyze as the OP proved.
Meanwhile, the rest of us (well, not me, because I don’t use your garbage product, but lots of others do) have to suffer and have our compute resources used up in the name of “protection.”
3form•Mar 29, 2026
Yeah, that's it. Also, it is a bit amusing to me - "We want to prevent automation", says the employee of Let's Automate Inc.
salawat•Mar 29, 2026
More like "We want your money, but don't want to provide service." Are you sure OpenAI isn't morphing into a finance/insurance company?
pixl97•Mar 29, 2026
While OAI is one of the more hypocritical of the bunch, it is not uncommon for paid services to have some limitations in their terms of service. Like going in a store and buying stuff, it doesn't me a free for all doing whatever you want.
zamadatix•Mar 30, 2026
Limitations on the ChatGPT subscription should have to do with the usage limits of the tier you paid for (and I don't think anyone has a problem with that). If I'm in the limits of requests I paid for then it's usage rather than abuse.
"Abuse" checks should only come into play when someone tries to leverage the free tier. It reminds me of those cable companies that try to sell "unlimited" plans and then try to say customers who use more than x GB/month are abusing the service rather than just say what the real limits are because "unlimited" sounds better in marketing.
jorvi•Mar 29, 2026
I'm glad you guys at least went with CloudFlare. LMarena went with Google's ReCaptcha, which is plain evil. It'll often gaslight you and pretend you failed a captcha of identifying something as simple as fire hydrants. Another lovely trick is asking you to identify bridges or busses, but in actuality it also wants you to identify viaducts or semi-trucks.
lelanthran•Mar 30, 2026
> The reason is basically the same: we want scarce compute going to real people, not attackers.
You are defining "Bots" and "Scrapers" as a subset of attackers, though.
Is this really fair? The value in your product came from people who wrote for other people, not bots, but your bot scraped them anyway.
There is no way to determine if a request that is coming from my browser is typed in by me or automated with a browser extension. Your only way to win this "war" on "attackers" is by forcing users into using your own application to access your product.
My browser extension (see my previous reply on this story) automates the existing open tab I have to all the different chat AIs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc).
I suppose all you can do is rate-limit each user.
piskov•Mar 29, 2026
Tangential question: are there chatgpt app devs on X? There are a few from Codex team but I couldn’t find guys from “ordinary” chatgpt.
Also if you could pass this over: it takes 5 taps to change thinking effort on ios and none (as in completely hidden) on macos.
If I were to guess it seems that you were trying to lower the token usage :-). Why the effort is only nicely available on web and windows is beyond me
seba_dos1•Mar 29, 2026
Hi! It's all perfectly understandable - after all, we use things like Anubis to protect our services from OpenAI and similar actors and keep them available to the real users for exactly the same reasons.
andrepd•Mar 29, 2026
> OpenAI: These checks are part of how we protect products from abuse like bots, scraping, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
This would be fucking HILARIOUS if it wasn't so tragic.
Chance-Device•Mar 29, 2026
It can be both
rchaud•Mar 29, 2026
Manifest destiny for me, border enforcement for thee.
lmz•Mar 30, 2026
This kind of flawed thinking again. Like the natives didn't fight and lose wars against the manifest destiny types.
ImPostingOnHN•Mar 30, 2026
I don't think anybody claimed no Native Americans tried to fight back against their genocide?
lmz•Mar 30, 2026
It's painting border enforcement as somehow immoral. There is no sin in trying to be better at it than those before.
ImPostingOnHN•Mar 30, 2026
genociding people to take their land within their borders is generally frowned upon today
c0_0p_•Mar 29, 2026
Can't have those bots or scrapers running amok can we...
everdrive•Mar 29, 2026
It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.
Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and functionality?
SV_BubbleTime•Mar 29, 2026
Firefox multicontainers are pretty cool. But it’s an advanced process that most people wouldn’t do or do correctly.
Imustaskforhelp•Mar 29, 2026
The possibilities with Firefox multi containers and automation scripts as well are truly endless.
It's also possible to make Firefox route each container through a different proxy which could be running locally even which then can connect to multiple different VPN's. I haven't tried doing that but its certainly possible.
It's sort of possible to run different browsers with completely new identities and sometimes IP within the convenience of one. It's really underrated. I don't use the IP part of this that I have mentioned but I use multi containers quite a lot on zen and they are kind of core part of how I browse the web and there are many cool things which can be done/have been done with them.
Sabinus•Mar 29, 2026
I love the containers too. My current use case is to keep my YouTube account separate from my Google one. Google doesn't need all that behavioural data in one place.
It's a pity Firefox doesn't get the praise it deserves half as much as it cops criticism.
halJordan•Mar 29, 2026
It is absolutely not an advanced process. It's clicking a gui. It's not advanced thinking to understand profiles. It's a basic ability to hold multiple things in your mind at once. Telling people that's difficult only increases the societal problem that being ignorant is ok.
docjay•Mar 29, 2026
“Difficult” is a relative term. They were saying it was a difficult concept for them, not you. In order to save their ego, people often phrase those events to be inclusive of the reader; it doesn’t feel as bad if you imagine everyone else would struggle too. Pay attention and you’ll notice yourself doing it too.
“Ignorant” is also infinite - you’re ignorant of MANY things as well, and I’m sure you would struggle with things I can do with ease. For example, understanding the meaning behind what’s being said so I know not to brow-beat someone over it.
SV_BubbleTime•Mar 30, 2026
Mostly right; it’s not that it was difficult for me. It’s that normal people are never going to do it.
I’m almost endlessly surprised by the probably-autistic-spectrum responses to tech things from people with no idea how things seem to other people.
subscribed•Mar 30, 2026
Mostof the people I met outside work wouldn't understand this concept.
I think you're lucky to hang around people whose heads don't hurt when they think.
0x3f•Mar 29, 2026
Meet me in a cafe and I will sign a JWT saying you're not a bot. You can submit this to whoever will accept it.
jagged-chisel•Mar 29, 2026
Sounds like we’re bringing back the PGP key signing parties
__MatrixMan__•Mar 29, 2026
The sooner we do the better.
hathawsh•Mar 29, 2026
I wonder what the PGP signing concept does to thwart people who want to profit and don't care about the public good. It seems like anyone who attends a signing party can sell their key to the highest bidder, leading to bots and spammers all over again.
0x3f•Mar 29, 2026
You can never prevent things like this, but you can make it expensive enough to effectively solve the problem for almost all use cases.
__MatrixMan__•Mar 30, 2026
In the flat trust model we currently use most places, it's on each person to block each spammer, bot, etc. The cost of creating a new bot account is low so it's cheap to make them come back.
On a web of trust, if you have a negative interaction with a bot, you revoke trust in one of the humans in the chain of trust that caused you to come in contact with that bot. You've now effectively blocked all bots they've ever made or ever will make... At least until they recycle their identity and come to another key signing party.
Once you have the web in place though, a series of "this key belongs to a human" attestations, then you can layer metadata on top of it like "this human is a skilled biologist" or "this human is a security expert". So if you use those attestations to determine what content your exposed to then a malicious human doesn't merely need to show up at a key signing party to bootstrap a new identity, they also have to rebuild their reputation to a point where you or somebody you trust becomes interested in their content again.
Nothing can be done to prevent bad people from burning their identities for profit, but we can collectively make it not economical to do so by practicing some trust hygiene.
Key signing establishes a graph upon which more effective trust management becomes possible. It on its own is likely insufficient.
Brilliant! Just the thing we want: more hardware attestation, more deanonymization, less user control, all diligently orchestrated in a repository where the only contributor is Anthropic Claude [0]. Comes complete with a misaligned ASCII diagram in the README to show how much effort the humans behind it put in!
Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.
Those are all situationally-valid criticisms, but I've long thought the ability to have smartphones' cameras cryptographically sign photos is good when available. The use case is demonstrating a photo wasn't doctored, and that it came from a device associated with e.g. a journalist, who maintains a public key. Of course, it should be optional.
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
Yes! That's what I'm getting at. This protocol optionally allows you to sign with your private key, but you don't have to for the protocol to provide utility. It could just be enough to say "if you trust magicseth's binary and apple, then this was typed one letter at a time"
There's nothing stopping folks from typing a message an LLM wrote one at a time, but the idea of increasing the human cost of sending messages is an interesting one, or at least I thought :-(
johnmaguire•Mar 30, 2026
The problem is that it's not optional to end-users if sites enforce its use.
hedora•Mar 30, 2026
The other problem is that the device or company might decide not to attest for you.
For instance, the employee at Apple that decided to pull ICE Block from the store could decide that the "admissible in court" bit should be false if it looks like a police officer is in frame.
Similarly, the keyboard could decide your social credit score is too low, and just stop attesting. A court could order this behavior.
Or, you could fail mandatory age / id verification because your credit card expired, and then all the above + more could happen! Good luck getting through to credit card tech support at that point...
Arainach•Mar 29, 2026
> Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.
There are six emdashes on that page. NONE of them are "it's not X it's why".
> Emails, messages, essays, code reviews, love letters — all suspect.
> We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity.
> KeyWitness captures cryptographic proof at the point of input — the keyboard.
> When you seal a message, the keyboard builds a W3C Verifiable Credential — a self-contained proof that can be verified by anyone, anywhere, without trusting us or any central authority.
> That's an alphabet of 774 symbols — each carrying log2(774) ≈ 9.6 bits. 27 emoji for 256 bits.
> They're a declaration: this message was written by a person — one of the diverse, imperfect, irreplaceable humans who still choose to type their own words.
Clarifications: 4
Continuation from a list: 1
Could just be a comma: 1
"It's not X -- it's Y": 0.
If you're going to make lazy commentary about good writing being AI, please at least be sure that you're reading the content and saying accurate things.
Velocifyer•Mar 29, 2026
<redacted because my friend posted it but accidentaly used my account>
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
Oh you think it's stupid? It was an attempt to encode an encryption key that isn't sent to the server in a way that is minimally invasive. The skintone emomis allow pretty high byte density, and also are cute!
Sorry it doesn't meet your needs.
There is irony in having an ai generated humanifesto. Could it be intentional? hmm?
Is there no irony in deriding a project for being potentially LLM generated, when it's goal is to aide people in differentiating?
:shrug:
josephg•Mar 29, 2026
> We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity
“It's not X -- it's Y": 1
dandellion•Mar 29, 2026
It's either a bot, or someone who writes exactly like a bot. I don't care which it is, both go to the discard pile.
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
phew!
arrowsmith•Mar 30, 2026
It’s a product for people who need help telling whether text was written by AI.
Maybe they deliberately write it like that, to filter out people who aren’t the target market?
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
It is largely written by iteration with an LLM! No need to speculate or analyze em dashes :-)
The emoji idea was mine. I like it :-) unfortunately it doesn't work in places like HN that strip out emoji. So I had to make a base64 encoding option.
The goal was to create an effective encryption key for the url hash (so it doesn't get sent to the server). And encoding skin tone with human emojis allows a super dense bit/visual character encoding that ALSO is a cute reference to the humans I'm trying to center with this project!
arrowsmith•Mar 30, 2026
From their “how it works” page:
> The server stores an encrypted blob it can't decrypt. We couldn't read your messages even if we wanted to. That's not a policy — it's math.
If you can’t tell that this is AI slop then maybe KeyWitness does solve a real problem after all.
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
Hi! I want anonymity! I also want to be able to prove what level of effort has been put in to something. I think there's room for both. This is an encrypted proof that I wrote something on a keyboard that tracks fingers. The protocol allows you to optionally sign it with your identity, but that isn't strictly required.
It is an attempt at putting something into the conversation more than just "OSS is broken because there are too many slop PRs." What if OSS required a human to attest that they actually looked at the code they're submitting? This tool could help with that.
Yes LLMs were used greatly in the production of this prototype!
It doesn't change the goal of the experiment! or it's potential utility! Do you see any potential area in your world where some piece of this is valuable?
scoofy•Mar 29, 2026
Somewhere there is someone 3D printing a keyboard cover that an llm can type with.
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
I'm actually building a physical keyboard for those people who don't have iphones! Though given the reaction I'm seeing here, I probably won't share it with this audience :-P it has capacitive keys, a secure enclave, and a fingerprint sensor.
mike_hearn•Mar 30, 2026
Please do share. This sort of tech is necessary, for better or worse, and I'd have a bunch of use cases in mind for it!
Velocifyer•Mar 29, 2026
This does not prove anything and it is only avalible to users with X.com accounts (you need a X.com account to download the app).
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
Hi! You don't need an x.com account to download, that's just the easiest way to dm me. If you're actually interested, I can let you try it! The source is also available.
It proves 1) that an apple device with a secure enclave signed it. 2) that my app signed it.
If you trust the binary I've distributed is the same as the one on the app store, then it also proves:
3) that it was typed on my keyboard not using automation (though as others have mentioned, you could build a capacitive robot to type on it)
4) that the typer has the same private key as previous messages they've signed (if you have an out of band way to corroborate that's great too)
5) optionally, that the person whose biometrics are associated with the device approved it.
There is also an optional voice to text mode that uses 3d face mesh to attempt to verify the words were spoken live.
Not every level of verification is required by the ptrotocol, so you could attest that it was written on a keyboard, but not who wrote it (not yet implemented in the client app).
The protocol doesn't require you to run my app, if you compile it yourself, you can create your own web of trust around you!
Velocifyer•Mar 30, 2026
>that an apple device with a secure enclave signed it.
What Apple devices are supported? All I have is a iPhone 4 running a old iOS version(pre iOS 7) (which I will not update and I don't think has a secure enclave) and a M1 mac mini and some lightning earpods and a apple thunderbolt display and some USB-A chargers and some old MacBooks.
I think that the concept is stupid becuase it would require to somehow prove that the app is not modified(which is impractical) and there is no stylus on a motor or fake screen(which is also impractical).
I think that a better aproach would be to form a Web Of Trust where only people's (not just humans, this would include all animals and potentially aliens but no clankers) certificates are signed, but with a interface that is friendly to people who are not very into technology but with some sort of way to not have who your friends are revealed, but this would still allow someone to get a attestation for their robot.
toss1•Mar 29, 2026
Oh Gawd, not this idea again!
This idea of capturing the timing of people's keystrokes to identify them, ensure it is them typing their passwords, or even using the timing itself as a password has been recurring every few years for at least three decades.
It is always just as bad. Because there are so many cases where it completely fails.
The first case is a minor injury to either hand — just put a fat bandage on one finger from a minor kitchen accident, and you'll be typing completely differently for a few days.
Or, because I just walked into my office eating a juicy apple with one hand and I'm in a hurry typing my PW with my other hand because someone just called with an urgent issue I've got to fix, aaaaannnd, your software balks because I'm typing with a completely different cadence.
The list of valid reasons for failure is endless wherein a person's usual solid patterns are good 90%+ of the time, but will hard fail the other 10% of the time. And the acceptable error rate would be 2-4 orders of magnitude less.
It's a mystery how people go all the way to building software based on an idea that seems good but is actually bad, without thinking it through, or even checking how often it has been done before and failed?
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
That's not what this is. at all.
monocularvision•Mar 30, 2026
You might want to check out “How it Works” on the site as none of what you said applies: https://typed.by/how
josefx•Mar 30, 2026
Then why does your link claim the following?
> While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.
> Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.
arrowsmith•Mar 30, 2026
I’m sceptical about this idea but, to give it full credit, it’s a custom piece of hardware that would presumably be more accurate than previous software-only attempts. Maybe it will actually work this time, idk, although I still don’t really see the point.
59nadir•Mar 30, 2026
Vibe copy is a hell of a drug.
toss1•Mar 30, 2026
Yes. This is from that page:
>>While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.
>>Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.
This very precisely makes my point:
Yes, the typing pattern of any human is highly and possibly even completely unique to that human — UNTIL any of a myriad of everyday issues makes it falsely deny access because the human's typing pattern has changed in a way the human can't do anything to fix at the moment.
If you are only attempting to distinguish a human from an automated system, it'll be better, until someone just starts recording the same patterns and re-playing them to this upstream process; then its a mere race to who can get their hooks in at a lower level. And someone is always going to say: "Oh, this system can identify the specific human", and we're off to the races again.
So, no. Unless you can account for ALL of the reasonable everyday failure modes, typing with either hand, any finger or combination of fingers out of commission for a minute or a lifetime, this idea will fail.
toss1•Mar 30, 2026
IOW, if you are doing this, it does not matter what you are doing afterwards.
You are assuming that a human's particular typing pattern is consistent, when the fact is that any number of ordinary events will render your assumption false (one or more fingers bandaged, sprained, whatever, or one hand occupied ATM).
This is not a hardware or software problem, and no amount of code, hardware, or cleverness will fix it; this is a fundamental mismatch between your assumption vs reality.
xtajv•Mar 30, 2026
can confirm. am weird enough to routinely flag as "inhuman".
thaaaaaaaaanks
Terretta•Mar 29, 2026
The first widely distributed and open source version of this typist timing validation idea I saw (and incorporated into my own software at the time) was released by Michael Crichton as part of a password 2nd-factor checker (1st factor a known phrase or even your name, the 2nd factor being your idiosyncratic typing pattern) in Creative Computing magazine that printed the code.
You’re getting a negative reaction from others but I share this feedback in good faith: I don’t understand what problem your product is supposed to solve.
Yeah I guess the cryptographic stuff sounds vaguely impressive although it’s been a long time since I had to think about cryptography in detail. But what is this _for_? I’m going to buy an expensive keyboard so that I can send messages to someone and they’ll know it’s really me – but it has to be someone who a) doesn’t trust me or any of our existing communication channels and b) cares enough to verify using this weird software? Oh and it’s important they know I sent it from a particular device out of the many I could be using?
Who is that person? What would I be sending them? What is the scenario where we would both need this?
Also the server can’t read the message but the decryption key is in the URL? So anyone with the URL can still read it? Then why even bother encrypting it?
Maybe this is one of those cases where I’m so far outside your target market that it was never supposed to make sense to me but I feel like I’m missing something here. Or maybe you need to work on your elevator pitch.
Just sharing my honest reaction.
xeyownt•Mar 30, 2026
Why 256-bit key AES? It brings nothing but longer key. 128-bit is more than enough. Please don't mention PQC :fire:
ImPostingOnHN•Mar 30, 2026
"why do you need more compute resources? Please don't mention computer programs"
tshaddox•Mar 29, 2026
Doesn’t really make sense, because any service can just say “you must paste your human-attestation JWT here to use this service” and plenty of people will.
0x3f•Mar 29, 2026
You can just decay your trust level based on the `iat` value. That way people will need to keep buying me coffee. I can optionally chide them for giving out their token.
If you're engaging with the idea seriously, I suppose we'd need to build a reputation or trust network or something.
Although if you're talking about replay attacks specifically, there are other crypto based solutions for that.
magicseth•Mar 29, 2026
I am engaging with this seriously! I don't know if there will be any real solution. But I think it's worth exploring.
tshaddox•Mar 30, 2026
My point is that there probably is no way in principle to distinguish between a human user utilizing automation on their own behalf in good faith (e.g. RSS readers) and bad faith automations.
crote•Mar 30, 2026
That's a feature, not a bug.
A human is personally responsible for a bot acting on their behalf. If your bot behaves, nothing is going to happen. If you keep handing out your personal keys to shitty misbehaving bots, then you will personally get banned - which gives you a pretty good incentive to be a bit more discerning about the bots you use.
0x3f•Mar 30, 2026
Yes, everything should just be agnostic, as long as the incentives work out it's all fine. Like if we had worked out micropayments for the web (not saying that's a good idea per se), then who cares if you're a bot or a human when you're paying a toll either way? Flipping it to be a cost rather than payment is functionally equivalent.
gruez•Mar 29, 2026
>It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.
What are you talking about? It works fine with firefox with RFP and VPN enabled, which is already more paranoid than the average configuration. There are definitely sites where this configuration would get blocked, but chatgpt isn't one of them, so you're barking up the wrong tree here.
scared_together•Mar 30, 2026
Is your interlocutor barking up the wrong tree, or are you missing the forest for the trees?
According to the OP:
> The program checks 55 properties spanning three layers: your browser (GPU, screen, fonts), the Cloudflare network (your city, your IP, your region from edge headers), and the ChatGPT React application itself (__reactRouterContext, loaderData, clientBootstrap).
I guess Firefox VPN will hide the IP at least. But what about the other data, is it faked by RFP? Because if not, the so-called privacy offered by this configuration is outdated.
You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.
gruez•Mar 30, 2026
>But what about the other data, is it faked by RFP?
Yes, RFP spoofs or at least somewhat obfuscates/normalizes GPU/screen/font info. The rest are integrity validations of the server/app, and not really identifying in any way.
>You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.
I'm not sure what the broader point you're trying to make here is. Is fingerprinting bad? Yes. All things being equal, I'd rather not have it than have it, but at the same time it's not realistic to expect openai to serve anonymous requests from anyone. Back when chatgpt was first launched you had to sign up and verify your phone number. Compared to mandatory logins, fingerprinting is definitely the lesser evil here.
madrox•Mar 29, 2026
I am not Nick, but there's a few ways that world happens: the free tier goes away and what people pay for more correctly reflects what they use, this all becomes cheap enough that it doesn't matter, or we come up with an end to end method of determining usage is triggered by a person.
Another way is to just do better isolation as a user. That's probably your best shot without hoping these companies change policies.
mememememememo•Mar 29, 2026
Local models for privacy.
You want to go to the world's best hotel? You are gonna be on their CCTV. Staying at home is crappier but private.
Unfortunately for the first time moores law isn't helping (e.g. give a poor person an old laptop and install linux they will be fine). They can do that and all good except no LLM.
karlgkk•Mar 29, 2026
> You want to go to the world's best hotel? You are gonna be on their CCTV.
ironically, in high end hotels, there's often a lot less cctv. not none. just less. rich people enjoy privacy
Barbing•Mar 29, 2026
So they’re not just hidden better? Does make sense.
Well, I can use the world‘s best safety deposit box without being on CCTV while I pass secrets in and out of it, right? Just not for free.
Bummer, this sounds like it is about to turn into a Monero ad (“let us pay privately”)
wolvoleo•Mar 30, 2026
Probably not even hidden because rich people are also catching a lot of legal winds, in which case the hotel has no choice but to provide the material. Better not to have it in the first place. You don't want your hotel cams listed as evidence in a 500M$ divorce case I guess.
Also are hidden cameras even legal? I know here in EU they aren't.
xtajv•Mar 30, 2026
In hotels of all tax brackets, you usually get a room key.
And the salient difference is that CCTV is simply defense-in-depth, not a primary means for authentication.
nozzlegear•Mar 30, 2026
> Staying at home is crappier but private.
Doesn't make sense, my home is much more preferable to a hotel
hedora•Mar 30, 2026
With any luck, local models will be too (soon).
littlestymaar•Mar 30, 2026
My local models didn't get >20h of outage this quarter like Claude did so in a way it's already the case.
kevin_thibedeau•Mar 29, 2026
I've been doing that for years. Cloudflare is slowly breaking more and more of the web.
atoav•Mar 29, 2026
What if I run a website and OpenAI produces bot traffic? Do they also consider it abuse when they do it?
cruffle_duffle•Mar 30, 2026
There is also the browser I use to get Claude to route around people blocking its webfetch. Both Playwright and chrome-mcp.
gck1•Mar 30, 2026
Camoufox?
subscribed•Mar 30, 2026
This is indeed what I do. And you also should. Separate browser for banking, trusted shipping sites etc, and the normal one.
Make sure not to browse the Internet without adblock and/or similar.
lukewarm707•Mar 30, 2026
i am increasingly moving towards a model of 'no browser'.
search for me is now a proprietary index (like exa) that filters rubbish, with a zero data retention sla. so we don't need google profiling.
the content is distilled into markdown pulled from cloudflare's browser rendering api.
i let cloudflare absorb the torrent of trackers and robot checks, i just get md from the api with nothing else. cloudflare is poacher and gamekeeper.
an alternative is groq compound which can call browsers in parallel.
for interactive sites, or local ai browsing, i sometimes run a browser in a photon os docker with vnc, which gives you the same browser window but it runs code not on your pc.
that said little of my use is now interacting with websites, its all agentic search and websets so i don't have to spend mental energy on it myself
lukewarm707•Mar 30, 2026
is this bad?
gib444•Mar 30, 2026
> It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.
Every time I try this, I end up crossing wires (ie using the browser that 'works' for most things, more than the one that is 'broken')
halflife•Mar 29, 2026
Don’t know if it’s related to the article, but the chats ui performance becomes absolutely horrendous in long chats.
Typing the chat box is slow, rendering lags and sometimes gets stuck altogether.
I have a research chat that I have to think twice before messaging because the performance is so bad.
Running on iPhone 16 safari, and MacBook Pro m3 chrome.
stacktraceyo•Mar 29, 2026
Same. It’s wild how bad it can get with just like a normal longer running conversation
moffkalast•Mar 29, 2026
Yeah just had this earlier today, I had to write my response in vscode and paste it in, there were literal seconds of lag for typing each character. Typical bloated React.
scq•Mar 29, 2026
Just because a web application uses React and is slow, it does not follow that it is slow because of React.
It's perfectly possible to write fast or slow web applications in React, same as any other framework.
Linear is one of the snappiest web applications I've ever used, and it is written in React.
brigandish•Mar 29, 2026
Does not, in the seeming absence of other snappy examples and the overwhelming evidence of many, many slow React apps, the exception prove the rule?
scq•Mar 29, 2026
There are plenty of snappy examples. Off the top of my head: Discord, Netflix, Signal Desktop, WhatsApp Web.
TeMPOraL•Mar 30, 2026
Discord, maybe. But Netflix and WhatsApp Web? Those are bloated cows, just less broken than average.
genthree•Mar 30, 2026
Those are all really poorly-performing.
moffkalast•Mar 30, 2026
Sure it's possible but those are a handful of exceptions against the norm, when the general approach so easily guides you towards bloat upon bloat that you have to be an expert to actively avoid going down that route.
DenisM•Mar 29, 2026
In the good old days Netflix had "Dynamic HTML" code that would take a DOM element which scrolled out of view port and move it to the position where it was about to be scrolled in from the other end. Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.
They did it because a lot of devices running Netflix (TVs, DVD players, etc) were underpowered and Netflix was not keen on writing separate applications. They did, however, invest into a browser engine that would have HW acceleration not just for video playback but also for moving DOM elements. Basically, sprites.
The lost art of writing efficient code...
zdragnar•Mar 29, 2026
> Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.
This is generally called virtual scrolling, and it is not only an option in many common table libraries, but there are plenty of standalone implementations and other libraries (lists and things) that offer it. The technique certainly didn't originate with Netflix.
dotancohen•Mar 29, 2026
And yet ChatGPT does not use it.
GP was mentioning that a solution to the problem exists, not that Netflix specifically invented it. Your quip that the technique is not specific to Netflix bolsters the argument that OpenAI should code that in.
BoorishBears•Mar 29, 2026
They didn't actually name the solution: the solution is virtualization.
They described Netflix's implementation, but if someone actually wanted to follow up on this (even for their own personal interest), Dynamic HTML would not get you there, while virtualization would across all the places it's used: mobile, desktop, web, etc.
jasonfarnon•Mar 29, 2026
I'm ignorant of the tech here. But I have noticed that ctrl-F search doesn't work for me on these longer chats. Which is what made me think they were doing something like virtual scrolling. I can't understand how the UI can get so slow if a bunch of the page is being swapped out.
dotancohen•Mar 30, 2026
Ctrl-A for select all doesn't work either. I actually wondered how they broke that.
tmpz22•Mar 29, 2026
Its been about three years but infinite scroll is naunced depending on the content that needs to be displayed. Its a tough nut to crack and can require a lot of maintenance to keep stable.
None of which chatgpt can handle presumably.
weird-eye-issue•Mar 30, 2026
Yes, tables and lists, since they have a fixed height per item/row. Chat messages don't have a fixed height so its more difficult. And by more difficult I mean that every single virtual paging library that I've looked at in the past would not work.
amluto•Mar 30, 2026
But they do have constant height in the sense that, unless you resize the window horizontally, the height doesn’t change.
For what it’s worth, modern browsers can render absurdly large plain HTML+CSS documents fairly well except perhaps for a slow initial load as long as the contents are boring enough. Chat messages are pretty boring.
I have a diagnostic webpage that is a few million lines long. I could get fancy and optimize it, but it more or less just works, even on mobile.
weird-eye-issue•Mar 30, 2026
Exactly, browsers can render it fast. It's likely a re-rendering issue in React. So the real solution is just preventing the messages from getting rendered too often instead of some sort of virtual paging.
zdragnar•Mar 30, 2026
Dynamic height of virtual scrolling elements is a thing. You just need to recalculate the scrollable height on the fly. tanstack's does it, as do some of the nicer grid libraries.
weird-eye-issue•Mar 30, 2026
To be fair I haven't looked at any solutions in about a decade lol
groundzeros2015•Mar 29, 2026
This is how every scrolling list has been implemented since the 80s. We actually lost knowledge about how to build UI in the move to web
bloomca•Mar 30, 2026
The biggest issue is that there is no native component support for that. So everyone implements their own and it is both brittle and introduces some issues like:
- "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected
- the scrollbar has wrong dimensions
- sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall)
The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to optimize the same way it is possible in native apps (they are much less flexible overall).
TeMPOraL•Mar 30, 2026
Right. This is one of my favorite examples of how badly bloated the web is, and how full of stupid decisions. Virtual scrolling means you're maintaining a window into content, not actually showing full content. Web browsers are perfectly fine showing tens of thousands of lines of text, or rows in a table, so if you need virtual scrolling for less, something already went badly wrong, and the product is likely to be a toy, not a tool (working definition: can it handle realistic amount of data people would use for productive work - i.e. 10k rows, not 10 rows).
exchemist•Mar 30, 2026
Agreed - I've had this argument with people who've implemented virtual scroll on technical tools and now users can't Ctrl-F around, or get a real sense of where they are in the data. Want to count a particular string? Or eyeball as you scroll to get a feel for the shape of it?
More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).
There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.
Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)
mike_hearn•Mar 30, 2026
Desktop GUI toolkits aren't less flexible on layout, they're often more flexible.
We lost it because the web was never designed for applications and the support it gives you for building GUIs is extremely basic beyond styling, verging on more primitive than Windows 3.1 - there are virtually no widgets, and the widgets that do exist have almost no features. So everyone rolls their own and it's really hard to do that well. In fact that's one of the big reasons everyone wrote apps for Windows back in the day despite the lockin, the value of the built-in widget toolkit was just that high. It's why web apps so often feel flaky and half baked compared to how desktop apps tend(ed) to feel - the widgets just don't get the investment that a shared GUI platform allows.
bschwindHN•Mar 30, 2026
Almost certainly running some sort of O(n^2) algorithm on the chat text every key press. Or maybe just insane hierarchies of HTML.
Either way, pretty wild that you can have billions of dollars at your disposal, your interface is almost purely text, and still manage to be a fuckup at displaying it without performance problems.
qingcharles•Mar 30, 2026
OpenAI sites are the only ones that do this to me. I have to keep a separate browser profile just for my OpenAI login with absolutely nothing installed on it or it'll end up being dogshit slow and unusable.
PunchyHamster•Mar 30, 2026
That's how eating your own dogshit works, or whatever was that saying
noosphr•Mar 29, 2026
>These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
Can you share these mitigations so we can mitigate against you?
0x3f•Mar 29, 2026
It's just Cloudflare. Bypassing it is a whole industry.
zenethian•Mar 29, 2026
I read the comment as “use it to mitigate against OpenAI bots scraping the web” and not to mitigate Cloudflare.
0x3f•Mar 29, 2026
Well it's the same answer isn't it... use Cloudflare. And hope OpenAI doesn't have a backroom scraping deal with them, which they might.
dawnerd•Mar 29, 2026
Flaresolverr is one way. Isn’t perfect but bypasses a lot.
jgalt212•Mar 29, 2026
> we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform
Have you just described the dilemma facing all the content sites used to train LLMs?
dev1ycan•Mar 29, 2026
"abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform"
This has to be a joke, right?
pera•Mar 29, 2026
I really can't tell for sure (new user posting a ridiculously hypocritical corporate message on a Sunday) but if GP actually works for OpenAI the lack of self-awareness is seriously striking
singpolyma3•Mar 29, 2026
How?
oblio•Mar 29, 2026
Because OpenAI built their entire business around shamelessly scraping anything that had bits on it.
singpolyma3•Mar 30, 2026
Maybe. But scraping isn't abuse. Seems a bit different?
PunchyHamster•Mar 30, 2026
Given that the scraping doesn't do any rate limiting and pisses on robots.txt, yes it is abuse
singpolyma3•Mar 30, 2026
Is there any evidence OpenAI has been ignoring robots.txt for scraping purposes? AFAIK the main sources of that traffic are still unknown.
cycomanic•Mar 30, 2026
Quoting the OP
> These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
That implies that OpenAI (or at least this employee) considers scraping abuse.
ludwik•Mar 30, 2026
The top comment categorized scraping as abuse ("abuse such as [...] scraping") - that's precisely why some accuse its author of lack of self awareness.
vkou•Mar 29, 2026
> Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
How can first-party products protect themselves from abuse by OpenAI's bots and scraping?
mystraline•Mar 29, 2026
This is a completely in-scope question.
How do we defend against your scraping, OpenAI?
I dont want any of my content scraped or seen by you all. Frankly, fuck you all for thinking my content is owned by you.
should be pretty easy to test and not rely on an anonymous source from a weird analytics company via business insider. are these bots actually from openai or are they just using their user agent? are they coming from openai ip ranges? etc. https://openai.com/gptbot.json
ImPostingOnHN•Mar 30, 2026
> should be pretty easy to test
I look forward to your results, whether or not they disprove the article.
stefanka•Mar 30, 2026
Are all of OpenAI’s ip ranges known?
stefanka•Mar 30, 2026
The article is from 2024. Is this still happening?
ImPostingOnHN•Mar 30, 2026
Do we have any evidence they started complying?
If not, we can conclude they did not, until such evidence shows up.
stefanka•Mar 30, 2026
I’m genuinely curious to know whether there was a change in behavior especially after OpenAI informed about how to prevent scraping (robot.txt, etc.).
ImPostingOnHN•Mar 30, 2026
I am as well. Like, is there any evidence of a change, or can we assume nothing changed?
CableNinja•Mar 30, 2026
I use nginx conditionals and useragent checking, then respond with 418 or 410.
- which one is to stop you from hammering small servers with hundreds simultaneous connections?
- why don't you just respect existing robots.txt that apply to you already?
- does every LLM scraper seriously think the onus to opt out from the EVERY SINGLE SCRAPER is on the webmasters/owners?
quotemstr•Mar 29, 2026
We really need ZKPs of humanity
ctoth•Mar 29, 2026
No, we really don't. We don't need worldcoin, we don't need papers, please. We just don't.
"Prove your humanity/age/other properties" with this mechanism quickly goes places you do not want it to go.
quotemstr•Mar 29, 2026
No, it doesn't go places we "do not want it to go". What part of zero knowledge doesn't make sense? How precisely does a free, unlinkable, multi-vendor, open-source cryptographic attestation of recent humanity create something terrible?
It would behoove people to engage with the substance of attestation proposals. It's lazy to state that any verification scheme whatsoever is equivalent to a panopticon, dystopia as thought-terminating cliche.
We really do have the technology now to attest biographical details in such a way that whoever attests to a fact about you can't learn the use to which you put that attestation and in such a way that the person who verifies your attestation can see it's genuine without learning anything about you except that one bit of information you disclose.
And no, such a ZK scheme does not turn instantly into some megacorp extracting monopoly rents from some kind of internet participation toll booth. Why would this outcome be inevitable? We have plenty of examples of fair and open ecosystems. It's just lazy to assert right out of the gate that any attestation scheme is going to be captured.
So, please, can we stop matching every scheme whatsoever for verifying facts as actors as the East German villain in a cold war movie? We're talking about something totally different.
ctoth•Mar 29, 2026
The ZK part isn't the problem. The "attestation of recent humanity" part is. Who attests? What happens when someone can't get attested?
You've been to the doctor recently, right? Given them your SSN? Every identity system ever built was going to be scoped || voluntary. None of them stayed that way.
Once you have the identity mechanism, "Oh it's zero knowledge! So let's use it for your age! Have you ever been convicted?" which leads to "mandated by employers" which leads to...
We've seen this goddamn movie before. Let's just skip it this time? Please?
dzikimarian•Mar 29, 2026
The part where FAANG does usual Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, masses don't care/understand and we have yet another "sign in with... " that isn't open source nor zero-knowledge in practice and monetizes your every move. And probably at least one of the vendors has massive leak that shows half-assed or even flawed on purpose implementation.
Muromec•Mar 29, 2026
> quickly goes places you do not want it to go.
Which places?
gzread•Mar 30, 2026
Sure. I'll provide an API to provide mine to your bot for $1 each time.
the_gipsy•Mar 29, 2026
This is utter and complete bullshit. Why would "prevent typing" help abuse?
There should be nothing submitted, except maybe anonymous telemetry metrics at that point.
the_gipsy•Mar 29, 2026
But is the title true, is typing specifically blocked? Or does it just block submitting the text?
I ask because I have seen huge variations in load time. Sometimes I had to wait seconds until being able to type. Nowadays it seems better though.
myHNAccount123•Mar 29, 2026
Can you fix the resizing text box issue on Safari when a new line is inserted? When your question wraps to a newline Safari locks up for a few seconds and it's really annoying. You can test by pasting text too.
huertouisj•Mar 29, 2026
sometimes I paste giant texts (think summarization) in the chatgpt (paid) webapp and I noticed that the CPU fans spin up for about 5 seconds after, as if the text is "processed" client side somehow. this is before hitting "submit" to send the prompt to the model.
I assumed it was maybe some tokenization going on client side, but now I realize maybe it's some proof of work related to prompt length?
rglullis•Mar 29, 2026
I shouldn't be giving ideas to your boss, but I bet he would be interested in making ChatGPT available only by paying customers or free for those whose who gets their eyes scanned by The Orb. Give 30 days of raised limits and we're all set to live in the dystopia he wants.
thegreatpeter•Mar 29, 2026
You’re doing gods work sir, thank you!
pdntspa•Mar 29, 2026
Y'all just salty that DeepSeek et al are training their LLMs on yours
nickphx•Mar 29, 2026
the irony of your statement is hilarious, disappointing, and infuriating.
Imnimo•Mar 29, 2026
It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.
sabedevops•Mar 29, 2026
Seriously. The hypocrisy is staggering!
zer00eyz•Mar 29, 2026
" Integrity at OpenAI .. protect ... abuse like bots, scraping, fraud "
Did you mean to use the word hypocrisy. If not, I'm happy to have said it.
I just want to note, that it is well covered how good the support is for actual malware...
ProofHouse•Mar 29, 2026
The irony is thick
nikitaga•Mar 29, 2026
Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things.
The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less.
It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity in this case is quite superficial.
bakugo•Mar 29, 2026
The cost is so marginal that many, many websites have been forced to add cloudflare captchas or PoW checks before letting anyone access them, because the server would slow to a crawl from 1000 scrapers hitting it at once otherwise.
nslsm•Mar 29, 2026
The issue is that there are so many awful webmasters that have websites that take hundreds of milliseconds to generate and are brought down by a couple requests a second.
bakugo•Mar 30, 2026
OpenAI must be the most awful webmasters of all, then, to need such sophisticated protections.
karlshea•Mar 30, 2026
I don’t know what world you live in but it’s not this one.
AtlasBarfed•Mar 30, 2026
Because you say it is?
I obviously disagree. I mean, on top of this we are talking about not-open OpenAI.
not2b•Mar 30, 2026
I understand why OpenAI is trying to reduce its costs, but it simply isn't true that AI crawlers aren't creating very significant load, especially those crawlers that ignore robots.txt and hide their identities. This is direct financial damage and it's particularly hard on nonprofit sites that have been around a long time.
stingraycharles•Mar 30, 2026
These are ChatGPT and Claude Desktop crawlers we’re talking about? Or what is it exactly? Are these really creating significant load while not honoring robots.txt?
Genuinely interested.
cruffle_duffle•Mar 30, 2026
I bet dollars to doughnuts that 95% of the traffic is from Claude and ChatGPT desktop / mobile and not literal content scraping for training.
crote•Mar 30, 2026
That wouldn't explain the 1000x increase in traffic for extremely obscure content, or seeing it download every single page on a classic web forum.
duttish•Mar 30, 2026
And doing it over, and over, and over and over again. Because sure it didn't change in the last 8 years but maybe it's changed since yesterdays scrape?
miki123211•Mar 30, 2026
They seem to mostly be third-party upstarts with too much money to burn, willing to do what it takes to get data, probably in hopes of later selling it to big labs. Maaaybe Chinese AI labs too, I wouldn't put it past them.
OpenAI et al seem to mostly be well-behaved.
63stack•Mar 30, 2026
Is this the first time you are reading HN? Every day there are posts from people describing how AI crawlers are hammering their sites, with no end. Filtering user agents doesn't work because they spoof it, filtering IPs doesn't work because they use residential IPs. Robots.txt is a summer child's dream.
zer00eyz•Mar 30, 2026
> but it simply isn't true that AI crawlers aren't creating very significant load.
And how much of this is users who are tired of walled gardens and enshitfication. We murdered RSS, API's and the "open web" in the name of profit, and lock in.
There is a path where "AI" turns into an ouroboros, tech eating itself, before being scaled down to run on end user devices.
razingeden•Mar 30, 2026
It is direct financial damage if my servers not on an unmetered connection — after years of bills coming in around $3/mo I got a surprise >$800 bill on a site nobody on earth appears to care about besides AI scrapers.
It hasn’t even been updated in years so hell if I know why it needs to be fetched constantly and aggressively, - but fuck every single one of these companies now whining about bots scraping and victimizing them, here’s my violin.
gzread•Mar 30, 2026
If you can identify the scraper you should have a valid legal case to recover damages.
thisislife2•Mar 30, 2026
Only if they had a robots.txt for their site.
razingeden•Mar 30, 2026
I hadn’t even considered that. Don’t know why that comment is greyed out or downvoted.
It’s a static site that hasn’t been updated since 2016—- so it’s .. since been moved to cloudflare r2 where it’s getting a $0.00 bill, and it now has a disallow / directive. I’m not sure if it’s being obeyed because the cf dash still says it’s getting 700-1300 hits a day even with all the anti bot, “cf managed robots” stuff for ai crawlers in there.
The content is so dry and irrelevant I just can’t even fathom 1/100th of that being legitimate human interest but I thought these things just vacuumed up and stole everyone’s content instead of nailing their pages constantly?
gzread•Mar 30, 2026
No, it's still illegal to DDoS sites that don't have robots.txt.
thisislife2•Mar 30, 2026
You are right, I hadn't considered that aspect.
PunchyHamster•Mar 30, 2026
> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things.
I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree
Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running
Den_VR•Mar 30, 2026
I miss the www where the .html was written in vim or notepad.
holler•Mar 30, 2026
ahh yes, fresh off reading "Html For Dummies" I made my first tripod.com site
This is great! The name reference also made me smile.
consp•Mar 30, 2026
Just did that for a test frontend for a module I needed to build (not my primary job so don't know anything about UI but running in browsers was a requirement), so basic HTML with the bare minimum of JS and all DOM. Colleagues were very surprized. And yes, vim is still the goto editor and will be for a long time now all "IDE" are pushing "AI" slop everywhere.
mghackerlady•Mar 30, 2026
It still can be. Do it. Go make your website in M$ Frontpage, for all I care
butlike•Mar 30, 2026
Shameless plug: My music homepage follows the HTML 2.0 spec and is written by hand
> I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree
Are you sure it's a DDoS and not just a DoS?
SolarNet•Mar 30, 2026
When every AI company does it from multiple data centers... yes it's distributed.
Bilal_io•Mar 30, 2026
Uncoordinated DDoS, when multiple search and AI companies are hammering your server.
troyvit•Mar 30, 2026
You should see Cloudflare's control panel for AI bot blocking. There are dozens of different AI bots you can choose to block, and that doesn't even count the different ASNs they might use. So in this case I'd say that a DDoS is a decent description. It's not as bad as every home router on the eastern seaboard or something, but it's pretty bad.
catoc•Mar 30, 2026
> Are you sure it's a DDoS and not just a DoS?
I think these days it’s ‘DAIS’, as in your site just DAIS - from Distributed/Damned AI Scraping
MattJ100•Mar 30, 2026
Yes, it is. The worst offenders hammer us (and others) with thousands upon thousands of requests, and each request uses unique IP addresses making all per-IP limits useless.
We implemented an anti-bot challenge and it helped for a while. Then our server collapsed again recently. The perf command showed that the actual TLS handshakes inside nginx were using over 50% of our server's CPU, starving other stuff on the machine.
It's a DDoS.
lm411•Mar 30, 2026
> Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running
Wild eh.
If it's not ai now, it's by default labelled "static content" and "near-zero marginal cost".
littlestymaar•Mar 30, 2026
What's a database after all.
eloisius•Mar 30, 2026
Also wild that from the tech bro perspective, the cost of journalism is just how much data transfer costs for the finished article. Authors spend their blood, sweat and tears writing and then OpenAI comes to Hoover it up without a care in the world about license, copyright or what constitutes fair use. But don’t you dare scrape their slop.
lelanthran•Mar 30, 2026
> Also wild that from the tech bro perspective, the cost of journalism is just how much data transfer costs for the finished article.
Exactly. I think the unfairness can be mitigated if models trained on public information, or on data generated by a model trained on public information, or has any of those two in its ancestry, must be made public.
Then we don't have to hit (for example) Anthropic, we can download and use the models as we see fit without Anthropic whining that the users are using too much capacity.
remus•Mar 30, 2026
I think the parent is just pointing out that these things lie on a spectrum. I have a website that consists largely of static content and the (significant) scraping which occurs doesn't impact the site for general users so I don't mind (and means I get good, up to date answers from LLMs on the niche topic my site covers). If it did have an impact on real users, or cost me significant money, I would feel pretty differently.
0xEF•Mar 30, 2026
Putting everything on a spectrum is what got us into this mess of zero regulation and moving goal posts. It's slippery slope thinking no matter which way we cut it, because every time someone calls for a stop sign to be put up after giving an inch, the very people who would have to stop will argue tirelessly for the extra mile.
daveidol•Mar 30, 2026
I’d argue putting everything in terms of black and white is the bigger issue than understanding nuance
instig007•Mar 30, 2026
Generalizing with "everything", "all", etc exclusive markers is exactly the kind of black/white divide you're arguing against. What happened to your nuanced reality within a single sentence? Not everything is black and white, but some situations are.
fc417fc802•Mar 30, 2026
The person he's replying to argued against putting things on a spectrum. Does that not imply painting everything in black and white? Thus his response seems perfectly sensible to me.
instig007•Mar 30, 2026
He argued against putting things in a spectrum in many instances where that would be wrong, including the case under the question. What's your argument against that idea? LLM'ed too much lately?
Aerroon•Mar 30, 2026
What mess are you talking about? The existence of LLMs? I think it's pretty neat that I can now get answers to questions I have.
This is something I couldn't have done before, because people very often don't have the patience to answer questions. Even Google ended up in loops of "just use Google" or "closed. This is a duplicate of X, but X doesn't actually answer the question" or references to dead links.
Are there downsides to this? Sure, but imo AI is useful.
butlike•Mar 30, 2026
It's just repackaged Google results masquerading as an 'answer.' PageRank pulled results and displayed the first 10 relevant links and the LLM pulls tokens and displays the first relevant tokens to the query.
Just prompt it.
1718627440•Mar 30, 2026
Off topic, but why is a DoS something considered to act on, often by just shutting down the service altogether? That results in the same DoS just by the operator than due to congestion. Actually it's worse, because now the requests will never actually be responded rather then after some delay. Why is the default not to just don't do anything?
echoangle•Mar 30, 2026
I think some people use hosting that is paid per request/load, so having crawlers make unwanted requests costs them money.
ImPostingOnHN•Mar 30, 2026
*> Why is the default not to just don't do anything?
Because ingress and compute costs often increase with every request, to the point where AI bot requests rack up bills of hundreds or thousands of dollars more than the hobbyist operator was expecting to send.
pocksuppet•Mar 30, 2026
It keeps the other projects hosted on the same server or network online. Blackhole routes are pushed upstream to the really big networks and they push them to their edge routers, so traffic to the affected IPs is dropped near the sender's ISP and doesn't cause network congestion.
DDoSers who really want to cause damage now target random IPs in the same network as their actual target. That way, it can't be blackholed without blackholing the entire hosting provider.
nikitaga•Mar 30, 2026
All this reactionary outrage in the comments is funny. And lame.
Yes, for the vast majority of the internet, serving traffic is near zero marginal cost. Not for LLMs though – those requests are orders of magnitude more expensive.
This isn't controversial at all, it's a well understood fact, outside of this irrationally angry thread at least. I don't know, maybe you don't understand the economic term "marginal cost", thus not understanding the limited scope of my statement.
If such DDOSes as you mention were common, such a scraping strategy would not have worked for the scraper at all. But no, they're rare edge cases, from a combination of shoddy scrapers and shoddy website implementations, including the lack of even basic throttling for expensive-to-serve resources.
The vast majority of websites handle AI traffic fine though, either because they don't have expensive to serve resources, or because they properly protect such resources from abuse.
If you're an edge case who is harmed by overly aggressive scrapers, take countermeasures. Everyone with that problem should, that's neither new nor controversial.
grayhatter•Mar 30, 2026
The extent of the utilization is new.
The number of bots that try to hide who they are, and don't bother to even check robots.txt is new.
fireflash38•Mar 30, 2026
It's not a cost for me to scrape LLM.
It is a cost for me for LLM to scrape me.
Why should I care about costs that have when they don't care about the costs I have?
ipaddr•Mar 30, 2026
"such DDOSes as you mention were common, such a scraping strategy would not have worked for the scraper at all"
They are common. The strategy works for the llm but not for the website owner or users who can't use a site during this attack.
The majority of sites are not handling AI fine. Getting Ddosed only part of the time is not acceptable. Countermeasures like blocking huge ranges can help but also lock out legimate users.
expedition32•Mar 30, 2026
One euro is marginal for me for someone else it is their daily meal.
juliangmp•Mar 30, 2026
"They are rare edge cases" are we on the same internet?
swagmoney1606•Mar 30, 2026
And yet I have to pay in my time and cash to handle the constant ddos'es from the constant LLM scraping
alsetmusic•Mar 30, 2026
Have you not seen the multiple posts that have reached the front page of HN with people taking self-hosted Git repos offline or having their personal blogs hammered to hell? Cause if you haven't, they definitely exist and get voted up by the community.
nozzlegear•Mar 30, 2026
Are they, actually?
sandeepkd•Mar 30, 2026
Lets not try to qualify the wrongs by picking a metric and evaluating just one side of it. A static website owner could be running with a very small budget and the scraping from bots can bring down their business too. The chances of a static website owner burning through their own life savings are probably higher.
expedition32•Mar 30, 2026
Perhaps the long play is to destroy all small hobby websites until only a AI directed web is left.
miki123211•Mar 30, 2026
If you're truly running a static site, you can run it for free, no matter how much traffic you're getting.
Github pages is one way, but there are other platforms offering similar services. Static content just isn't that expensive to host.
THe troubles start when you're actually running something dynamic that pretends to be static, like Wordpress or Mediawiki. You can still reduce costs significantly with CDNs / caching, but many don't bother and then complain.
jazzyjackson•Mar 30, 2026
It's true it can be done but many business owners are not hip to cloudflare r2 buckets or github pages. Many are still paying for a whole dedicated server to run apache (and wordpress!) to serve static files. These sites will go down when hammered by unscrupulous bots.
ezrast•Mar 30, 2026
Setting aside the notion that a site presenting live-editability as its entire core premise is "pretending to be static", do the actual folks at Wikimedia, who have been running a top 10 website successfully for many years, and who have a caching system that worked well in the environment it was designed for, and who found that that system did not, in fact, trivialize the load of AI scraping, have any standing to complain? Or must they all just be bad at their jobs?
I think this also explains why the checks are moving up the stack.
If the real cost is in actually running the app or the model, then just verifying a browser isn’t enough anymore. You need to verify that the expensive part actually happened.
Otherwise you’re basically protecting the cheapest layer while the expensive one is still exposed.
lm411•Mar 30, 2026
That is ridiculous.
You imply that "an expensive llm service" is harmed by abuse, but, every other service is not? Because their websites are "static" and "near-zero marginal cost"?
You have no clue what you are talking about.
camillomiller•Mar 30, 2026
Well he’s a simp
the_sleaze_•Mar 30, 2026
60% of our traffic is bot, on average. Sometimes almost 100%.
AmbroseBierce•Mar 30, 2026
It's not like those models are expensive because the usefulness that they extracted from scraping others without permission right? You are not even scratching the surface of the hypocrisy
not_your_vase•Mar 30, 2026
> net-zero marginal cost
Lol, you single-handedly created a market for Anubis, and in the past 3 years the cloudflare captchas have multiplied by at least 10-fold, now they are even on websites that were very vocal against it. Many websites are still drowning - gnu family regularly only accessible through wayback machine.
Spare me your tears.
make3•Mar 30, 2026
Absolutely not, the former relies on controversial ideas to qualify as legal.
Stealing the content from the whole planet & actively reducing the incentive to visit the sites without financial restitution is pretty bad.
SkiFire13•Mar 30, 2026
> Scraping static content
How do you know the content is static?
wolvoleo•Mar 30, 2026
It's more ironic because without all the scraping openai has done, there would have been no ChatGPT.
Also, it's not just the cost of the bandwidth and processing. Information has value too. Otherwise they wouldn't bother scraping it in the first place. They compete directly with the websites featuring their training data and thus they are taking away value from them just as the bots do from ChatGPT.
In fact the more I think of it, I think it's exactly the same thing.
expedition32•Mar 30, 2026
This leads me to thinking: I ask chatGPT a question and they get the answer from gamefaqs.
But what happens if gamefaqs disappears because of lack of traffic?
Can LLM actually create or only regurgitate content.
stefanka•Mar 30, 2026
They cannot create original content.
wolvoleo•Mar 30, 2026
Well they can make some up, like hallucination. That's an additional problem: when the original site that provided the training data is gone: how can they use verify the AI output to make sure it's correct?
wolvoleo•Mar 30, 2026
It will remain in their scraped data so they can keep including it in their later training datasets if they wish. However it won't be able to do live internet searches anymore. And it will not generate new content of course. Especially not based on games released after the site codes down so it doesn't know. Though it could of course correlate data from other sources that talk about the game in question.
Aerroon•Mar 30, 2026
>Can LLM actually create or only regurgitate content.
Contrary to what others say, LLMs can create content. If you have a private repo you can ask the LLM to look at it and answer questions based on that. You can also have it write extra code. Both of these are examples of something that did not exist before.
In terms of gamefaqs, I could theoretically see an LLM play a game and based on that write about the game. This is theoretical, because currently LLMs are nowhere near capable enough to play video games.
VadimPR•Mar 30, 2026
Getting scraped by abusive bots who bring down the website because they overload the DB with unique queries is not marginal. I spent a good half of last year with extra layers of caching, CloudFlare, you name it because our little hobby website kept getting DDoS'd by the bots scraping the web for training data.
Never in 15 years if running the website did we have such issues, and you can be sure that cache layers were in place already for it to last this long.
cicko•Mar 30, 2026
Interesting how other people's cost is "near-zero marginal cost" while yours is "an expensive LLM service".
Also, others' rights are "fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use" while yours is "direct financial damage".
I like how you frame this.
gmerc•Mar 30, 2026
It’s not for techbros to decide at what threshold of theft it’s actually theft. “My GPU time is more valuable than your CPU time” isn’t a thing and Wikipedias latest numbers on scraping show that marginal costs at scale are a valid concern
platybubsy•Mar 30, 2026
Bait or genuine techbro? Hard to say
grishka•Mar 30, 2026
> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server
It's not possible to know in advance what is static and what is not. I have some rather stubborn bots make several requests per second to my server, completely ignoring robots.txt and rel="nofollow", using residential IPs and browser user-agents. It's just a mild annoyance for me, although I did try to block them, but I can imagine it might be a real problem for some people.
I'm not against my website getting scraped, I believe being able to do that is an important part what the web is, but please have some decency.
lelanthran•Mar 30, 2026
I don't think a rule along the lines of "Doing $FOO to a corporate is forbidden, but doing $FOO to a charitable initiative is fine" is at all fair.
What "$FOO" actually is, is irrelevant. I'm curious how you would convince people that this sort of rule is fair.
The corp can always ban users who break ToS, after all. They don't need any help. The charitable initiative can't actually do that, can they?
nickphx•Mar 30, 2026
Speak for yourself.
xmcqdpt2•Mar 30, 2026
AI providers also claim to have small marginal costs. The costs of token is supposedly based on pricing in model training, so not that different from eg your server costs being low but the content production costs being high. And in many cases AI companies are direct competitors (artists, musicians etc.)
(TBH it's not clear to me that their marginal costs are low. They seem to pick based on narrative.)
ungreased0675•Mar 30, 2026
You’re describing the tragedy of the commons.
No single raindrop thinks it’s responsible for the flood.
My website serving git that only works from Plan 9 is serving about a terabyte of web traffic monthly. Each page load is about 10 to 30 kilobytes. Do you think there's enough organic, non-scraper interest in the site that scrapers are a near-zero part of the cost?
andrepd•Mar 30, 2026
> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server
You are, of course, ignoring the production costs of the static content that OpenAi is stealing.
Stop justifying their anti-social behavior because it lines your pockets.
mcfedr•Mar 30, 2026
I'm sure the copyright holders would consider your use of their content as direct financial damage
Aurornis•Mar 30, 2026
I interpreted scraping to mean in the context of this:
> we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users
I have no doubt that many people see the free ChatGPT access as a convenient target for browser automation to get their own free ChatGPT pseudo-API.
wolvoleo•Mar 30, 2026
This is bad why? Well yeah for openai because all they want it to be is a free teaser to get people hooked and then enshittify.
Morally I don't see any issues with it really.
lelanthran•Mar 30, 2026
> I have no doubt that many people see the free ChatGPT access as a convenient target for browser automation to get their own free ChatGPT pseudo-API.
Not that hard - ChatGPT itself wrote me a FF extension that opened a websocket to a localhost port, then ChatGPT wrote the Python program to listen on that websocket port, as well as another port for commands.
Given just a handful of commands implemented in the extension is enough for my bash scripts to open the tab to ChatGPT, target specific elements, like the input, add some text to it, target the relevant chat button, click it, etc.
I've used it on other pages (mostly for test scripts that don't require me to install the whole jungle just to get a banana, as all the current playright type products do). Too afraid to use it on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc because if they detect that the browser is being drive by bash scripts they can terminate my account.
That's an especially high risk for Gemini - I have other google accounts that I won't want to be disabled.
heyethan•Mar 30, 2026
I think the distinction is less about scraping itself, and more about marginal cost.
Scraping static pages is cheap for both sides.
Scraping an LLM-backed service effectively externalizes compute costs onto the provider.
Same behavior, very different economics.
crote•Mar 30, 2026
Very few websites are truly static. Something like a Wordpress website still does a nontrivial amount of compute and DB calls - especially when you don't hit a cache.
There's also the cost asymmetry to take into account. Running an obscure hobby forum on a $5 / month VPS (or cloud equivalent) is quite doable, having that suddenly balloon to $500 / month is a Really Big Deal. Meanwhile, the LLM company scraping it has hundred of millions of VC funding, they aren't going to notice they are burning a few million because their crappy scraper keeps hammering websites over and over again.
raincole•Mar 30, 2026
Quite sure even literal thieves would consider thievery a form of abuse.
littlestymaar•Mar 30, 2026
Yeah, they know it's bad, they just don't think the rules apply to them.
kamban•Mar 30, 2026
You nailed it.
catoc•Mar 30, 2026
It’s only bad if you’re a closed, for-profit entity
</sarcasm>
lukan•Mar 30, 2026
Was that sarcasm? Speaking of it, what parts of OpenAI are still open?
catoc•Mar 30, 2026
I know, always hard to tell on HN.
Added the relevant declarative tag
reactordev•Mar 30, 2026
The front door…
tedsanders•Mar 30, 2026
For what it's worth, the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search.
I'm not sure if Gemini lets you opt out without also delisting you from Google search rankings.
foresterre•Mar 30, 2026
I think opt-outs are a bit backwards, ethically speaking. Instead of asking for permission, they take unless you tell them to no longer do it from now on.
I can imagine their models have been trained on a lot of websites before opt outs became a thing, and the models will probably incorporate that for forever.
But at least for websites there's an opt-out, even if only for the big AI companies. Open source code never even got that option ;).
kneel25•Mar 30, 2026
> a lot of websites
It was a dataset of the entirety of the public internet from the very beginning that bypassed paywalls etc, there’s virtually nothing they haven’t scraped.
netdevphoenix•Mar 30, 2026
Performing an automated action on a website that has not consented is the problem. OpenAI showing you how to opt-opt is backwards. Consent comes first.
Bit concerning that some professional engineers don't understand this given the sensitive systems they interact with.
keybored•Mar 30, 2026
Death by a thousand opt-outs.
subscribed•Mar 30, 2026
Just respect the bloody robots.txt and hold your horses. Ask your precious product built on the relentless, hostile scraping to devise a strategy that doesn't look like a cancer growth.
qaadika•Mar 30, 2026
> the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search.
PRESS RELEASE: UNITED BURGLARS SOCIETY
The United Burglars Society understands that being burgled may be inconvenient for some. In response, UBS has introduced the Opt-Out system for those who wish not to be burgled.
Please understand that each burglar is an independent contractor, so those wishing not to burgled should go to the website for each burglar in their area and opt-out there. UBS is not responsible for unwanted burglaries due to failing to opt-out.
vbezhenar•Mar 30, 2026
They know that the rules apply to them. They hope that they can avoid being caught.
mapt•Mar 30, 2026
The rules are that a large corporate AI company is able to scrape literally everything, and will use the full force of the law and any technology they can come up with to prevent you as an individual or a startup from doing so. Because having the audacity to try to exploit your betters would be "Theft".
skeeter2020•Mar 30, 2026
Small mitigation (by no way absolving them): isolated developers, different teams. Another way: they see "stealing" of their compute directly in their devop tools every day, but are several abstractions away from doing the same thing to other people.
splatter9859•Mar 30, 2026
They never have and feel they are above reproach. Anytime Altman opens his mouth that's apparent. It's for the good of humanity dontcha know. LOL
duped•Mar 30, 2026
Engineers working on AI and AI enthusiasts are seemingly incapable of seeing the harm they cause, so I disagree.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
mcmcmc•Mar 30, 2026
What’s being stolen? AI output isn’t copyrightable, and it’s not like they’re ripping pages out of a book
plutokras•Mar 30, 2026
They can train on the outputs i.e. distillation attacks.
axegon_•Mar 30, 2026
The levels of irony that shouldn't be possible...
miki123211•Mar 30, 2026
It's not scraping they're concerned about, it's abusing free GPU resources to (anonymously) generate (abusive) content.
wiseowise•Mar 30, 2026
Church, politicians, moralists are all the biggest hypocrites that want to teach you something.
newsoftheday•Mar 30, 2026
I agree on politicians, no idea what a "moralist" is supposed to be but there are good and bad churches and church goers; lumping all church goers into one category calling them hypocrites is wrong. There are many good churches and church goers who help people and their communities.
RobotToaster•Mar 30, 2026
"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!"
gib444•Mar 30, 2026
And have absolutely no reservations about making such an obvious statement on a public forum
DrinkyBird•Mar 30, 2026
It’s funny because the first AI scraper I remember blocking was from OpenAI’s, as it got stuck in a loop somehow and was impacting the performance of a wiki I run. All to violate every clause of the CC BY-NC-SA license of the content it was scraping :)
jordanb•Mar 30, 2026
They don't want anyone to take that which they have rightfully stolen.
splatter9859•Mar 30, 2026
Exactly! How dare you have access to their stolen content in the midst of them doing the same.
altmanaltman•Mar 30, 2026
Well at least they have 1 person working on "Integrity" so can't be too bad
rsrsrs86•Mar 30, 2026
This
0dayman•Mar 29, 2026
Hi Nick, your software is a horrendous encroachment on users' privacy and its quality is subpar to those of us who know what we're working with. We don't use your product here.
chronc6393•Mar 30, 2026
> Hi Nick, your software is a horrendous encroachment on users' privacy and its quality is subpar to those of us who know what we're working with. We don't use your product here.
It’s ok, OpenAI is cooked.
Feel bad for anyone who joined OAI in the past 12 months. Their RSU ain’t going to be worth much later this year. IPO is too late.
JumpCrisscross•Mar 29, 2026
> we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users
How does this comport with OpenAI's new B2B-first strategy?
> We also keep a very close eye on the user impact
Are paid or logged-in users also penalised?
crest•Mar 29, 2026
Then make sure they only target the free tier!
driverdan•Mar 30, 2026
Brand new account with 2 comments in this thread. How can we be sure you're not a bot deployed to defend OpenAI?
Please run Cloudflare's privacy invasive tool and share all the values it generates here so we can determine if you're a real person.
tomalbrc•Mar 30, 2026
Fake Account
tipiirai•Mar 30, 2026
I don't trust what OpenAI says. Sam Altman gives shivers, and these kinds of blog posts make things look even worse.
subscribed•Mar 30, 2026
> "abuse like bots, scraping"
You what, mate? Would you please use that on yourselves first? Because it comes off as a GROSS hypocrisy. State of the art hypocrisy.
>> behavioral biometric layer
But this one, especially, takes the cake.
Quite disgusting.
lm411•Mar 30, 2026
"we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform"
The scary part is that you don't even see the irony in writing this.
Or, are you just okay "misusing" everyone for your own benefit?
vlovich123•Mar 30, 2026
That still doesn’t explain why you can’t even start typing until that check proceeds. You could condition the outbound request from being processed until that’s the case. But preventing from typing seems like it’s just worse UX and the problem will fail to appear in any metrics you can track because you have no way of measuring “how quickly would the user have submitted their request without all this other stuff in the way”.
Said another way, if done in the background the user wouldn’t even notice unless they typed and submitted their query before the check completed. In the realistic scenario this would complete before they even submit their request.
p-e-w•Mar 30, 2026
Many cloud products now continuously send themselves the input you type while you are typing it, to squeeze the maximum possible amount of data from your interactions.
I don’t know whether ChatGPT is one of those products, but if it is, that behavior might be a side effect of blocking the input pipeline until verification completes. It might be that they want to get every single one of your keystrokes, but only after checking that you’re not a bot.
davidkunz•Mar 30, 2026
It's still possible to let users already type from the beginning, just delay sending the characters until checks are complete. Hold them in memory until then.
miyuru•Mar 30, 2026
Instagram was uploading the images while the user were adding post details, back in 2012!
No one seem to use or care about their own product anymore. Only uses dashboard and metrics, which does not explain the full situation.
AlecSchueler•Mar 30, 2026
That makes total sense from a UX perspective though, the ChatGPT thing does not.
scottyah•Mar 30, 2026
there were a lot of helpdesk chats doing the same, so you could see users typing messages, then deleting words, etc before hitting send.
Imustaskforhelp•Mar 30, 2026
This was actually one of the reasons why Instagram felt smooth.
Another thing but Facebook/Instagram have also detected if a person uploads an image and then deletes it and recognizes that they are insecure, and in case of TEENAGE girls, actually then have it as their profile (that they are insecure) and show them beauty products....
I really like telling this example because people in real life/even online get so shocked, I mean they know facebook is bad but they don't know this bad.
[Also a bit offtopic, but I really like how the item?id=3913919 the 391 came twice :-) , its a good item id ]
andai•Mar 30, 2026
I wondered if ChatGPT streams my message to the GPU while I type it, because the response comes weirdly fast after I submit th message. But I don't know much about how this stuff works.
aabhay•Mar 30, 2026
Likely prefix caching among many other things
mort96•Mar 30, 2026
I just checked the network inspector, the only thing it does per key press is to generate an autocomplete list. It doesn't seem too hard to wait with the autocomplete generation until after whichever checks you run pass.
mike_hearn•Mar 30, 2026
I developed the first version of Google's equivalent of this (albeit theirs actually computes a constantly rotating key from the environment, it doesn't just hard-code it in the program!).
The reason it has to block until it's loaded is that otherwise the signal being missing doesn't imply automation. The user might have just typed before it loaded. If you know a legit user will always deliver the data, you can use the absence of it to infer something about what's happening on the client. You can obviously track metrics like "key event occurred before bot detection script did" without using it as an automation signal, just for monitoring.
fc417fc802•Mar 30, 2026
That doesn't make sense. The server would wait to process anything until after you received the signal. If it doesn't arrive within a reasonable period of time that tells you something, the same as right now.
If you mean that you can infer client side tampering with the page contents you could still do that - permit typing but don't permit the submit action on the client. The user presses enter but nothing happens until the check is complete. There you go, now you can tell if the page was tampered with (not that it makes much difference tbh).
mike_hearn•Mar 30, 2026
The typing actions have to be observed by JavaScript. It's not different to any other JS blocking page load because it's needed for the site to work, that's just how the web works.
root_axis•Mar 30, 2026
Why can't you allow typing and just consume the state of the text input as the initial state of the js logic?
arccy•Mar 30, 2026
how you type is also part of the signal
electroly•Mar 30, 2026
This doesn't seem to be the same thing. The article isn't about being unable to type before JavaScript starts executing. If I understand correctly, you're unable to type until a network request to Cloudflare returns. The question is: why not allow typing during that network request? JavaScript is running and it's observing the keystrokes. Everyone understands that you can't use a React application until JavaScript is running. They're asking why the network request doesn't happen in the background with the user optimistically allowed to type while waiting for it to return.
(Separately, I don't think the article has adequately demonstrated this claim. They just make the claim in the title. The actual article only shows that some network request is made, and that the request happens after the React app is loaded, but not that they prevent input until it returns. Maybe it's obvious from using it, but they didn't demonstrate it.)
mike_hearn•Mar 30, 2026
The network request to Cloudfare is part of the JavaScript (in effect).
electroly•Mar 30, 2026
I don't think that's true in this case; the React application loads first, fully initializes, and then sends its state via Cloudflare request. It can't happen at the same time, by design. It has to happen serially. The article's claim is that you can't type during this second request. Frankly, I wonder if this is actually true at all. The article did not demonstrate this, and there's no problem if you can actually interact as soon as the React application is running. ChatGPT running abuse prevention and React applications requiring JavaScript to work are both uncontroversial, I think.
mike_hearn•Mar 30, 2026
OK, I haven't looked at the exact sequencing here. But generally, once the action goes back to the anti-abuse service for checking the user can't be allowed to change what they're submitting. The view the anti-abuse system saw has to match what the app server sees.
susupro1•Mar 30, 2026
This perfectly explains the trade-off. But from a pure UX perspective, freezing the input pipeline feels uniquely hostile. They could buffer the keystrokes invisibly in the background instead of locking the cursor, which creates the jarring perception that the site is actively fighting the user.
toinewx•Mar 30, 2026
can you reformulate your message?
gavinray•Mar 30, 2026
Mike is saying that if you allow users to type before the scripts are fully loaded, there is no way to tell the difference between a human and bot.
Blocking until load means that human interaction is physically impossible, so you are certain that any input before that is automated.
If you allow typing, this distinction vanishes
LtWorf•Mar 30, 2026
Load fewer scripts so it doesn't take that long?
deadbabe•Mar 30, 2026
Remember you’re talking to a vibe coder who just stares at code being printed out by AI.
mcmcmc•Mar 30, 2026
That’s a big assumption. It’s a brand new account, might be a bot. PR/astroturfing is a great use case for agentic AI
dncornholio•Mar 30, 2026
You cannot know what verifications they use. I could argue the disabled textbox is some sort part of the verification process. Humans will click on it while bots won't.
root_axis•Mar 30, 2026
Seems like a trivially simple verification to defeat.
YetAnotherNick•Mar 30, 2026
You can defeat all client side verification by definition if you know what verification is run.
QEDCTrL•Mar 30, 2026
Sounds like anti-distillation to me. But, know what? Meh.
mcmcmc•Mar 30, 2026
I’d be inclined to agree with the “meh” if their entire product weren’t built off pirated content
matchagaucho•Mar 30, 2026
Keyboard response feels 10x slower in ChatGPT Projects (possibly for reasons other than react state).
m3kw9•Mar 30, 2026
Because the way they have the server architecture setup and how it loads the screen. You don’t even want all the bots hitting servers
kelnos•Mar 30, 2026
> A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.
Are these checks disabled for logged-in, paid users?
freeopinion•Mar 30, 2026
Its your business and your call. But my opinion is that I wish you would quit offering free services. I'm pretty concerned about the horrible effect your free services are having on education. Yes, AI can be an incredible tool to enhance education. But the reality is that it is decimating children's will to learn anything.
I don't want to blame AI for all the world's problems. And I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But I think you should think really hard about the value of gates. Smart people can build better gates than cash. But right now, cash might be better than nothing. Clearly you have already thought about how to build gates, but I don't think you have spent enough time thinking about who should be gated and why. You should think about gates that have more purpose than just maximizing your profit.
"We want to hook as many people as possible without letting in our competitors" is a pretty crummy thought to use as a public justification.
(Edited for typos.)
gck1•Mar 30, 2026
I always wondered why you even have logged out access. I'm glad I can use ChatGPT in incognito when I want a "clean room" response, but surely that's not the primary use case.
Is user base that never logs in really that significant?
pocksuppet•Mar 30, 2026
This episode proves they know who you are, even when you're logged out. If they didn't know, they wouldn't let you use the service.
lm411•Mar 30, 2026
"Integrity at OpenAI"
Basically an oxymoron at this point.
potsandpans•Mar 30, 2026
Chatgpt banned me after I said disparaging things about Sam Altman in a chat.
When I appealed the ban, I was told that I couldn't be told exactly why I was banned, but if I wrote a written apology and "promised to never do it again" my ban could be appealed.
I asked for an update on the ban via email every month for over a year.
Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that process?
Razengan•Mar 30, 2026
> we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.
And THANK YOU for that!
Being able to use ChatGPT and Grok without signing in is a big part of why I like those services over Gemini etc.
Hell, dummy Claude won't even let me Sign-In-with-Apple on the Mac desktop, even though it let me Sign-UP-with-Apple on the iPhone! BUT they do support Sign-In-with-Google!!? What in the heavenly hell is this dumbassery
SubiculumCode•Mar 30, 2026
In long threads in chatgpt, it grinds to a halt in both Chrome and Firefox. Please fix
gmerc•Mar 30, 2026
the company that scrapes every until it collapses really needs to protect itself from scraping. Lol.
tekawade•Mar 30, 2026
Hey Nick, I find it concerning this account is. Frayed just to comment on this thread. And never even reply back to any of the real concerns.
Here to hoping this is real person and actually created account out of concern and sharing.
egorfine•Mar 30, 2026
Paying customer since inception here.
I presume the local ChatGPT.app has even more measures to prevent automation, right? Presumably privacy-invasive ones as it is customary these days?
Is there a way I can opt out? I really, really, really don't like it.
radicality•Mar 30, 2026
The way I use the products something like this. My main account on my MacBook - ChatGPT website, codex cli. Then, a Mac VM running via UTM with shared writable dir - anything more ‘shady’ in terms of permissions and for playing with new ai apps - eg ChatGPT/Codex standalone apps, Atlas, Claude desktop app etc. Seems to work decently enough.
And I do totally agree that there should be a way to opt out of all these privacy invasive measures, especially after paying $200/mo
lionkor•Mar 30, 2026
Hi Nick, first of all, very cool of you to respond here instead of letting us all sit in the dark. I think that's what makes HN special.
That said, is it not a little bit weird that you want to protect yourself from scraping and bots, when your entire company, product, revenue, and your employment, depends on the fact that OpenAI can bot and scrape literally every part of the internet? So your moat is non-hydrated react code in the frontend?
Schiendelman•Mar 30, 2026
Don't beat up an engineer for decisions made by company leadership. It's really inappropriate.
diebillionaires•Mar 30, 2026
Yeah, no one is responsible for what they do as long as someone else tells them to do it.
lionkor•Mar 30, 2026
They decided to work at this company, I think it's a reasonable discussion to have?
SilasX•Mar 30, 2026
While I would generally sympathize on that front, it doesn't really apply here.
None of the management-level desiderata he appealed to require that the user experience be broken this bad. There is very little bot deterrence from prevention of typing at that stage, while it heavily impacts user experience, especially on mobile.
> These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping,
Do you guys see the irony here?
hosteur•Mar 30, 2026
They obviously get it. They just do not care.
nicbou•Mar 30, 2026
For what it's worth, I switched to Gemini because of the long ChatGPT load time. Gemini loads as fast as Google Search.
numlock86•Mar 30, 2026
> [...] we protect our first-party products from abuse like [...] scraping [...]
what an odd thing to say for someone whose product is built entirely on exactly that
invalidusernam3•Mar 30, 2026
But why block the ui until then? Surely you can just not make any requests until the checks are complete?
prmoustache•Mar 30, 2026
> we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
Isn't that how you build your service from the very start? How ironic.
wiseowise•Mar 30, 2026
> A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.
Thank you for the reply, Nick. It wouldn’t be a problem to disable the tracking for authenticated users then, would it?
lloydatkinson•Mar 30, 2026
It would because someone's KPI depends on number of tracked users lol
matsemann•Mar 30, 2026
If logging in disabled all checks, all bots would just spam-create users first. Of course it needs to run for all users, without it being necessarily nefarious.
toddmorey•Mar 30, 2026
Paid users?
owebmaster•Mar 30, 2026
The reason why you did it is clear, why you guys settle down for such a poor implementation is why this thread exists
conartist6•Mar 30, 2026
Still feels very anti-consumer.
If every company behaved like you do, the internet would be a much worse place.
In fact, OpenAI has already made the Internet a much worse place, already much, much less open and much less optimistic about its own future than it was even five years ago...
aucisson_masque•Mar 30, 2026
Why send the Turnstile bytecode encrypted ? Surely people savvy enough to abuse the system will find out how to decrypt it, see OP, and it gives the impression that you are trying to hide stuffs you're not proud about.
pocksuppet•Mar 30, 2026
Because they want to make it as hard as possible to reverse engineer. If they wanted it to be easy, they'd use <input type="checkbox" name="ishuman">I am a human
marxisttemp•Mar 30, 2026
History will not be kind to you and your ilk. Quit your job.
sourcecodeplz•Mar 30, 2026
I really appreciate the free options, without even needing a login. Wish they would also keep the small free weekly allowance for Codex.
xtajv•Mar 30, 2026
Earnest question: if I was feeling lazy and security-conscious at the same time, would I be better off...
(A) opening chatgpt.com in qubes (but staying logged out, i.e. never creating a chatgpt account)
-or-
(B) creating a freemium chatgpt account
?
(Obviously, the "best" answer would be something like running a local LLM from an airgapped machine in a concrete bunker :) But that's not what I'm after).
20k•Mar 30, 2026
>abuse like bots, scraping
10/10, I've got no notes
boesboes•Mar 30, 2026
lol, hypocrites.
MisterTea•Mar 30, 2026
> These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
Isn't this the same behavior used by AI companies to gather training data? Pot, meet kettle.
cheese_van•Mar 30, 2026
<protect our first-party products from abuse like scraping>
Abuse from scraping has long been a serious problem for many, good job!
ryanmcbride•Mar 30, 2026
Protecting your site from bots and scraping is absolutely hilarious considering how you acquired (read: stole) the data you trained your bot on dude.
Just yank that ladder up behind you.
pocksuppet•Mar 30, 2026
> Just yank that ladder up behind you.
You would be an irresponsible entrepreneur if you didn't. Don't forget your legal obligation to maximise shareholder value.
blactuary•Mar 30, 2026
> I work on Integrity at OpenAI
Irony is truly dead. Show you have integrity by quitting your job
mghackerlady•Mar 30, 2026
No, leave it. Surely the mighty OpenAI can deal with the scraping. At least, it seems to think everyone else can
leros•Mar 30, 2026
Fwiw, I stopped using ChatGPT and went to a competitor because the checks slow down ChatGPT so much that the webapp becomes unusable in anything but a new short chat. CPU usage goes to 100%, you can't type, the entire tab freezes, etc. It's a miserable experience to use and I'm on a relatively new MacBook not some old computer. If you read around it's a very common problem people have been having for a while now.
toddmorey•Mar 30, 2026
Why are all these checks still performed on an authenticated, paid user?
diebillionaires•Mar 30, 2026
As a free tier user I only get like three queries in now without model quality reduction, so I'd say your bases are covered as far as GPU costs around misuse.
lifis•Mar 30, 2026
Are you disabling them for paying subscribers?
matheusmoreira•Mar 30, 2026
> protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping
You do see the irony here?
ghm2199•Mar 30, 2026
Would OpenAI also consider renumerations to every site they have scraped that had a robots.txt file and they chose to ignore it anyway? Feel free to not answer this question.
I have kind of lost count of how many content creators have said personally to me traffic is meaningfully down because of all these chatbots. The latest example is this poor but standup guy: moneyfortherestofus.com.
timeinput•Mar 30, 2026
I'm really glad Hacker News disallows AI generated comments. The response I got from asking that question really is quite enlightening. Short answer: "no", long answer: "no -- fuck off", longer answer: "no -- fuck off -- if you want I can dig into whether or not you should fuck off harder"
wackget•Mar 30, 2026
I understand it's not your area, but can you please politely tell your colleagues that the clickbait-type teaser questions from the latest model are absolutely infuriating and are quickly leading to me abandon the platform entirely?
If you'd like, I can write a two-sentence paragraph to send to your colleagues. It contains a special phrase which most colleagues will find difficult to ignore. Would you like me to do that?
htx80nerd•Mar 30, 2026
Thanks. I've used ChatGPT a million times and never had any input issues.
rsrsrs86•Mar 30, 2026
Hi Nick, do you believe what you say? You scraped the shit out of everyone
SilasX•Mar 30, 2026
It has not been negligible for me, and, however you're doing this, there is significant room for improvement.
There have been times when, across about ten minutes of usage, most of which is me typing on iOS Safari, it drained 15% of my battery. There is no functional justification for this beyond poor code quality. (It was on a long conversation FWIW.)
This when I'm logged in, with a paid (Plus) account, connected to a very old email address with a real user profile. That can't be the result of super-clever bot defense measures, because it's merely an inconvenience on desktop. And if you genuinely believe that email has been compromised, why aren't you reaching out the to the account owner, as the account isn't otherwise connected to fraud by your heuristics?
However brilliant the LLM agent it is, I'm seeing a lot of unforced errors regarding how you implement a web interface to it. If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't really register compared to all the bloat I see on other sites.
sandeepkd•Mar 30, 2026
You do not ever trust the client side. Sometimes being simple is good enough. The maximum you can do is put rate limits on the IP address and/or user account. You just do not want some one to use the product at machine speeds.
xg15•Mar 30, 2026
> how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
Are you applying the same standards to your own scraper bots?
AndrewKemendo•Mar 30, 2026
Kudos for trying
This whole thread was like watching a swarm of ants try and take a grasshopper down
jesuslop•Mar 30, 2026
Hi Nick, the lag is quite bad in the field, honest. In desktop app in this case/datapoint. There was that "halt and catch fire" episode where they spoke about a millisencod threshold of delay that separated usability and non. Solvent hw and fiber connection.
avazhi•Mar 29, 2026
Another AI-slop article.
Sick.
darepublic•Mar 29, 2026
I imagine to stop web automation from getting free API like use of the model
CorneredCoroner•Mar 29, 2026
> A headless browser that loads the HTML but doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have them.
this is meaningless btw. A browser headless or not does execute javascript.
girvo•Mar 29, 2026
A bunch of the points in this AI generated blog post were like that. Makes me feel dirty when I'm 1/3rd of the way through and I realise how off it is.
jaccola•Mar 29, 2026
I disagree, a browser can have javascript execution disabled (and this is somewhat common in scraping to save time/resources).
I read it to mean: "A browser that doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have [the rendered React elements]." Which is true.
maxwellg•Mar 30, 2026
Wouldn't a browser that doesn't execute JS also not execute the browser fingerprinting code in the first place?
XYen0n•Mar 30, 2026
If JavaScript is disabled, why use a headless browser instead of making HTTP requests directly?
thisisnow•Mar 29, 2026
Hah, sure, you just let random JS execute from random sites on your machine...
technion•Mar 29, 2026
To prompt a discussion that's purely technical: I'm interested in how this was done.
Specifically, Turnstile as far as I'm aware doesn't do anything specifically configurable or site specific. It works on sites that don't run React, and the cookie OpenAI-Sentinel-Turnstile-Token is not a CF cookie.
Did OpenAI somehow do something on their own API that uses data from Turnstile?
XYen0n•Mar 30, 2026
Cloudflare should be able to determine whether a website uses React by analyzing data flowing through its CDN.
technion•Mar 30, 2026
Whilst true, "validate the right state is loaded" would surely be something not done without developer input.
kristjansson•Mar 30, 2026
If your CF bill reached into 8 figures, you might ask them to accept some developer input?
apsurd•Mar 29, 2026
Haven't read yet but instantly matched with my experience of the chat being unusable at times. The latency and glitch-like feel is unbearable.
NSPG911•Mar 29, 2026
I was using KeepChatGPT[1] for a while back in 2023-2024, pre-Gemini-in-Google era, and I was fascinated as to how it was able to mask being a user without needing any API or help from the end user. I stopped using it after 2024 because 1) Gemini and 2) It breaks quite a lot. I did however, like how you had an option to push the AI panel to the right, if only Google even considers doing so.
I have a little helper app I run sometimes that I have a button to push a query into ChatGPT and get a json response. You wouldn't even know OpenAI had any anti-bot tools because it doesn't get flagged at all. It just uses a webview inside WinForms.
yapyap•Mar 29, 2026
wow OpenAi sure doesnt like bots for a company enabling the botification of the world wide web
On a related note, ChatGPT.com changed how it handles large text pastes this past week.
It now behaves like Claude, attaching the paste as a file for upload rather than inlining it.
This affected page UX some and reduces the cost of the browser tab some.
At some point, maybe still true, very long conversations ~froze/crashed ChatGPT pages.
jtbayly•Mar 30, 2026
Others here are asking if this is the cause of slow performance in a long chat.
But it seems clear to me that this is why I can't start typing right away when I first load the page and click to focus in the text field.
arcfour•Mar 30, 2026
> They exist only if the request passed through Cloudflare's network. A bot making direct requests to the origin server or running behind a non-Cloudflare proxy will produce missing or inconsistent values.
...I don't think that's possible even if you are a bot? I would be very surprised if OAI had their origin exposed to the internet. What is a "non-Cloudflare proxy"? Is this AI slop?
It's likely just looking at the CF properties as part of a bot scoring metric (e.g. many users from this ASN or that geoip to this specific city exhibit abusive patterns).
tosh•Mar 30, 2026
It used to be possible to type immediately while the page is loading and have all key presses end up in the input field.
Why run this check before user can type?
Why not run it later like before the message gets sent to the server?
tommodev•Mar 30, 2026
Ah, this explains chatgpt (and probably copilot) performance behind corporate firewalls such as zscaler.
Between the network latency and low end machines, there is an enormous lag between chatgpts response and being able to reply, especially for editing a canvas.
I've been sitting there for up to a minute plus waiting to be able to use the canvas controls or highlight text after an update.
self-portrait•Mar 30, 2026
A/B testing /dev/ kit that tokenizes four permutations of language
AndreyK1984•Mar 30, 2026
CamuFox will fix it easy peasy.
pautasso•Mar 30, 2026
AI goes through great lengths to ensure it's talking with humans.
Why would two AI bots want to chat with each other?
balkanist•Mar 30, 2026
Hah, 100% true!
aucisson_masque•Mar 30, 2026
Mistral chat is also free to use without account and doesn't do that.
Josephjackjrob1•Mar 30, 2026
cloud flare will not be around for long, its a shame as it is the GOAT lol
seker18•Mar 30, 2026
Cómo puedo acceder a un celular
dgb23•Mar 30, 2026
Why are companies like OpenAI and others that are all-in on LLMs still using ReactJS, Python and so on?
These programming languages and frameworks were made for developer convenience and got wide adoption, because it makes on-boarding easier.
This obviously comes at a cost of performance, complexity and introduces a liability into a system, because they are dependencies that come with a whole bunch of assumptions about how they are used.
Is this tradeoff even worth it anymore?
robmccoll•Mar 30, 2026
Probably training data. The largest number of public repos are built on that stack. We recently picked React for new projects because LLMs seemed to be the most reliable when writing React code.
dsparkman•Mar 30, 2026
That explains why ChatGPT has been running like shit all weekend. In the desktop app on Mac, it could not even complete a response. On the web, it would hang before you could input anything.
croemer•Mar 30, 2026
When using ChatGPT Android app with some NextDNS block lists, I get an error modal in app saying "security misconfiguration blah blah".
Clearly I'm blocking some tracker and it's upset about that. I allowlisted a sentry subdomain and since then got no more complaints.
lightedman•Mar 30, 2026
Preventing me from typing until you SCAN MY SYSTEM?
Fine, by extension, you agree I can scan all of your systems for whatever I desire. This works both ways.
TimLeland•Mar 30, 2026
It seems they fixed the biggest issue Ive had where you start typing then it erases the content once the page fully loads
tristor•Mar 30, 2026
This explains some of the weird performance behavior I've seen in the last 24 hours with ChatGPT, sometimes lagging my entire browser while typing. Note, I'm a paying user with a Teams account, so it's kind of annoying that this is being applied to logged in paying users as well. I might have to vibe-code my own chat webUI using the APIs.
j45•Mar 30, 2026
This is a lot of fingerprinting.
edg5000•Mar 30, 2026
The chat client has serious performance issues on lower end systems. Now I see why!
i18nagentai•Mar 30, 2026
The irony of a company that sells DDoS protection making the browsing experience worse for legitimate users. The real issue is that Cloudflare's bot detection runs JavaScript that introspects the page state — which means any site using Cloudflare is implicitly giving Cloudflare access to read the DOM of the protected application. That's a much bigger concern than the typing delay.
45 Comments
And as for "but chatgpt isn't paid" (another commenter), well, then yes, that's even closer to free by removing this spying on your computer setup. But they spy on the paid users too.
There's no way this is worth it unless the models are absolutely tiny, in which case any benefits from offloading to the client is marginal and probably isn't worth the engineering effort.
> This is bot detection at the application layer, not the browser layer.
I kind of just assumed that all sophisticated bot-detectors and adblock-detectors do this? Is there something revealing about the finding that ChatGPT/CloudFlare's bot detector triggers on "javascript didn't execute"?
Coincidentally about an hour ago, I wanted to look something up in ChatGPT and I happened to be in a browser window I don’t normally use, with no logged in accounts. I assumed it wouldn’t work, but to my surprise with no account, no cookies of any kind it took my query and gave me an answer.
They allowed anonymous requests for months now, maybe even a year.
I noticed the ChatGPT app also checks Play Integrity on Android (because GrapheneOS snitches on apps when they do this), probably for the same reason. Claude's app doesn't, by the way, but it also requires a login.
"You're posting too fast! Please slow down."
As has been amply explained, the API pricing per token is far more for equivalent use when maximizing a subscription plan.
It isn’t really a massive hurdle to deal with this full SPA load check. If one is even aware it exists they already have the skills to bypass it anyway.
I get why people would “what about” the automation inherit in what OpenAI is doing but that is a separate matter.
Other businesses and applications can put into place their own hurdles and anti bot practices to protect the models they’ve leaned into—-and they have been.
1. Every person is born with the knowledge of how ChatGPT uses Cloudflare Turnstile?
2. This article contains factual mistakes? If so, what are they?
If neither of these is true, then this article strictly provides information and educational value for some readers. The writing style, AI-like or not, doesn't change that.
Consider also that many people aren't the best at writing blog-like posts but still have things to share and AI empowers them to do that. I can't find anything constructive in your post and I don't understand why you are posting at all.
This may be unintentional and the author simply couldn’t tell it sounded this way. The less charitable interpretation is that they did know it sounded this way and thought that a straightforward blog post about cloudflare bot detection wouldn’t end up on the HN front page.
What’s my constructive criticism to the author? Write your own posts. Use your own voice. Make sure that what you’re creating actually reads like the kind of thing it is. Don’t get the AI to write it for you. It’s annoying.
And I would say that if someone is really so bad at writing blogs that they are unable to do this, which I am not saying this author is, then maybe they shouldn’t be writing them.
I agree with both of you, there's some interesting tricks here for how a website builds anti-bot protection, but the AI sloppification is framing it as a consumer protection issue but not delivering on that premise.
It is a reasonable criticism that the post does not deliver a "so what?" on its basic framing.
You can probably run 50 of those simultaneously if you use memory page deduplication, and with a decent CPU+GPU you ought to be able to render 50 pages a second. That's 1 cent per thousand page loads on AWS. Damn cheap.
More info here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231107182321/https://mu0.cc/20...
https://youtu.be/XLLcc29EZ_8?t=570
https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV
if you browse them you will see that bot writers are very annoyed if they can't scrape a site with a headless browser.
you can do what you suggested, but with Linux VMs/containers. windows is too heavy, each VM will cost you 4 GB of RAM
Honestly it is a very healthy competitive market with reasonably low switching costs which drives prices down. These circumstances make rolling your own a tough sell.
I mean you missed the minigame of preventing Chrome from signaling that it’s being programmatically (webdriver etc) driven and tipping your hand, but … yup?
Is it TSA's "fault" that non-terrorists are subject to screening?
The "quality" of TSA's screening seems be pretty bad too given how many people have to go through secondary screening vs how many terrorist they catch (0?)
Nice try but I used "caught", not "stopped", which requires they actually apprehended someone, not just prevented some hypothetical attack.
>since they got the gig to serve and protect and before we lost thousands of lives…)
You could easily reuse this argument for cloudflare: "if it wasn't for such invasive browser fingerprinting openai would be drowning in bajillion req/s from bots."
of course they would be drowning! I have no issues with what CF is doing. too funny that people use tools like chatgpt and expect privacy?!
(It's a different question whether zero friction is actually desired, or whether some security theater is actually part of the service being provided, but that's a different question.)
I also like privacy. I use GrapheneOS. I compartmentalize my credit cards, emails, and phone numbers. I don't use Google products, and the list continues, but I don't complain about Cloudflare because it is painless and I understand the price I pay for privacy.
I also have home services accessible via my home website, running on my home server(s). I chose to have cloudflare to host my domain specifically for the easy bot blocking, and it blocks more than 2000 bots/day that otherwise would be trying to find vulnerabilities on my servers, which contain a lot of sensitive things. I've never had an issue personally accessing my services through cloudflare. Sometimes I have to do captchas to access my own things, and that's barely an inconvenience (I am aware the domain isn't necessary to access services, but it makes more sense for my setup and intents)
Imagine an apartment building with a flimsy front door lock that breaks all the time, and the landlord only telling you that that can't be helped because of all the burglars.
I'm building Safebox and Safecloud, where this won't be the case anymore. Not only will you have a decentralized hosting network that can sideload resources (e.g. via a browser extension that looks at your "integrity" attribute on websites) but also the websites will require you to be logged in with a HMAC-signed session ID (which means they don't need to do any I/O to reject your requests, and can do so quickly)... so the whole thing comes down to having a logged in account.
https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud
As far as server-to-server requests, they'll be coming from a growing network of cryptographically attested TPMs (Nitro in AWS, also available in GCP, IBM, Azure, Oracle etc.) so they'll just reject based on attestations also.
In short... the cryptographically attested web of trust will mean you won't need cloudflare. What you will need, however, to prevent sybil attacks, is age verification of accounts (e.g. Telegram ID is a proxy for that if you use Telegram for authentication).
"No s̶o̶u̶p̶ internet for you!"
Good luck!
I'm running firefox and seeing the normal amount.
I can't tell whether you're serious but in case you are, this theory immediately falls apart when you realize waymo operates at night but there aren't any night photos.
I'm certain the User-Agent is part of it. I know that for certain because a very reliable way I can trigger the CF stuff is this plugin with the wrong browser selected [1].
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/
Or if you ever need to travel a lot and tether off your phone. Most mobile devices are IPV6 only (via 464XLAT) behind a CGNAT these days.
Maybe I just have to disable all ad blockers and Safari tracking prevention? Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?
I think I was sufficiently clear that I was specifically talking about CGNAT-caused IP address tainting being an unreasonably emphasized worry, not the worry about their detections overall misfiring. Though I certainly don't hear much about people having issues with it (but then anecdotes are anecdotal).
> Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?
Sounds good, have you tried?
Not sure what's the point of these comically asinine rhetoricals.
That's... exactly expected? It's a cat and mouse game. People running botnets or AI scrapers aren't diligently setting the evil bit on their packets.
But hey, at least some bots are also not making it past Cloudflare!
Yep. The most easy to implement stable state for any system where you're aiming to prevent misuse is to just prevent use
Claude's free tier requires a phone number just to try it.
i.e. iCloud private relay is the future
I have yet to see a use case for VPNs for the casual internet audience, and for a tech savvy user, their better off renting through some datacenter or something, which at that point is hardly a VPN and more home IP obfuscation. All the same downsides, and at least you get real privacy.
Source? I haven't seen any evidence that the major paid VPN providers engage in any of those things. At best it's vague implications something shady is happening because one of the key people was previously at [shady organization].
MullvadVPN is also another great one.
I have heard some good things about AirVPN, but I can absolutely attest for mullvad and to a degree ProtonVPN (Just with Proton, depending upon your threat model, do make the necessary precautions like buying with monero for example)
There are others, but mostly its the 2-3 that I trust.
Best case, the VPN learns your residential IP and the names of every HTTPS host you connect to (if not your entire DNS traffic as well); worst case, they collude with any of the services you use (or some ad tracker they embed) and persistently deanonymize your account.
VPNs are structurally not great for privacy.
Mullvad.
It has been proven in a court of law that when Mullvad says "no logging", they mean it.
They also regularly have security audits and publish the results[2][3]
[1]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-a-sea... [2]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/new-security-audit-of-account-an... [3]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/successful-security-assessment-o...
https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser/
In my brief experience with abuse mitigation, connections coming from VPNs or unusual IP ranges were very significantly more likely to be associated with abuse.
It depends on your users. VPNs aren’t common at all, even though you hear about them a lot on Hacker News. For types of social sites where people got banned for abuse (forums) the first step to getting back on the forum was always to sign up for a VPN and try to reconnect. It got so bad that almost every new account connecting via VPN would reveal itself as a spammer, a banned member trying to return, or someone trying to sock puppet alternate accounts for some reason.
The worst offenders are Tor IP addresses. Anyone connecting from Tor was basically guaranteed to have bad intentions.
I heard from someone who dealt with a lot of e-mail abuse that the death threats, extortion, and other serious abuse almost always came from Protonmail or one of the other privacy-first providers that I can’t remember right now. He half-jokingly said they could likely block Protonmail entirely without impacting any real users.
It’s tough for people who want these things for privacy, but the sad reality is that these same privacy protections are favored by people who are trying to abuse services.
All it would solve then is laundering Tor traffic from being probably malicious to being reputationally ambiguous. Though for a within-network service, that's probably assumed anyways - hard to run a Tor service if you assume all Tor users are malicious, that would be nonsensical.
I work a customer facing email job and loads of people use Proton across demographics and industries
I don't do free work. I'm not going to label 50 images of crosswalks and motorcycles for free.
Curious how do you know this?
At least outside the US, there's 3DS as an (admittedly often high friction) high quality cardholder verification method, but in the US, that's of course considered much too consumer-hostile, so "select 87 overpasses" it is.
is it Linux (or similar)?
is it Firefox?
If yes, to one or both, you're blocked! Clearly millions of dollars of engineering talent and petabytes of data collection should be able to come up with something more nuanced than this.
I'm getting it on iCloud Private Relay all the time. It honestly makes it kind of useless.
Maybe that's the point? But then again, doesn't Cloudflare run part of it!? And wasn't there some "privacy-preserving captcha replacement" that iOS devices should already be opting me in to? So many questions, nobody there to answer them, because they can get away with it.
> The part that’s really annoying is its trivial for bots to bypass.
Not the ethical bots, though! My GPT-backed Openclaw staunchly refuses to go anywhere near a "I'm not a robot" button.
Of course then you got sites like gnu.org too that block you because your slightly outdated user agent.
It's the reality of how bad the bots have become.
.. how do they expect me to find the website owner's email if I can't access said website?
hence i am just using cloudflare remote browser rendering.
My best guess is -- ChatGPT is running something in your browser to try to determine the best things to send down to the model API –- when it should have been running quantized models on its own server.
Really really bad user experience, wondering about when they will leave this approach.
Also, you can have it spotcheck colors: light orange on light background is unreadable, ask it to find the L*[1] of colors and dark/lighten as necessary if gap < 40 (that's minimum gap for yuge header text on background, 50 for text on background, these have gap of 25)
I haven't tried this yet, but, maybe have it count word count-per-header too. It's got 11 headers for 1000 words currently, makes reading feel really stacatto and you gotta evaluate "is this a real transition or vibetransition"
[1] L* as in L*a*b*, not L in Oklab
Every provider seems to have been plauged by these freeloaders to such an extent that they've had to develop extreme and onerous countermeasures just to avoid losing their shirts.
What's the word? Schadenfreude?
A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users.
We also keep a very close eye on the user impact. We monitor things like page load time, time to first token and payload size, with a focus on reducing the overhead of these protections. For the majority of people, the impact is negligible, and only a very small percentage may see a slight delay from extra checks. We also continuously evaluate precision so we can minimize false positives while still making abuse meaningfully harder.
Is this to be expected? I would presume that if I'm authenticated and paying, VPN use wouldn't be a worry. It would be nice to be able to use the tool whether or not I'm on a VPN.
Heard from a founder who recently switched his company to Claude due to OpenAI's lagginess–it's absolutely an OpenAI problem. Not an AI problem in general.
But don't you run these checks on logged-in users too?
Meanwhile, the rest of us (well, not me, because I don’t use your garbage product, but lots of others do) have to suffer and have our compute resources used up in the name of “protection.”
"Abuse" checks should only come into play when someone tries to leverage the free tier. It reminds me of those cable companies that try to sell "unlimited" plans and then try to say customers who use more than x GB/month are abusing the service rather than just say what the real limits are because "unlimited" sounds better in marketing.
You are defining "Bots" and "Scrapers" as a subset of attackers, though.
Is this really fair? The value in your product came from people who wrote for other people, not bots, but your bot scraped them anyway.
There is no way to determine if a request that is coming from my browser is typed in by me or automated with a browser extension. Your only way to win this "war" on "attackers" is by forcing users into using your own application to access your product.
My browser extension (see my previous reply on this story) automates the existing open tab I have to all the different chat AIs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc).
I suppose all you can do is rate-limit each user.
Also if you could pass this over: it takes 5 taps to change thinking effort on ios and none (as in completely hidden) on macos.
If I were to guess it seems that you were trying to lower the token usage :-). Why the effort is only nicely available on web and windows is beyond me
This would be fucking HILARIOUS if it wasn't so tragic.
Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and functionality?
It's also possible to make Firefox route each container through a different proxy which could be running locally even which then can connect to multiple different VPN's. I haven't tried doing that but its certainly possible.
It's sort of possible to run different browsers with completely new identities and sometimes IP within the convenience of one. It's really underrated. I don't use the IP part of this that I have mentioned but I use multi containers quite a lot on zen and they are kind of core part of how I browse the web and there are many cool things which can be done/have been done with them.
It's a pity Firefox doesn't get the praise it deserves half as much as it cops criticism.
“Ignorant” is also infinite - you’re ignorant of MANY things as well, and I’m sure you would struggle with things I can do with ease. For example, understanding the meaning behind what’s being said so I know not to brow-beat someone over it.
I’m almost endlessly surprised by the probably-autistic-spectrum responses to tech things from people with no idea how things seem to other people.
I think you're lucky to hang around people whose heads don't hurt when they think.
On a web of trust, if you have a negative interaction with a bot, you revoke trust in one of the humans in the chain of trust that caused you to come in contact with that bot. You've now effectively blocked all bots they've ever made or ever will make... At least until they recycle their identity and come to another key signing party.
Once you have the web in place though, a series of "this key belongs to a human" attestations, then you can layer metadata on top of it like "this human is a skilled biologist" or "this human is a security expert". So if you use those attestations to determine what content your exposed to then a malicious human doesn't merely need to show up at a key signing party to bootstrap a new identity, they also have to rebuild their reputation to a point where you or somebody you trust becomes interested in their content again.
Nothing can be done to prevent bad people from burning their identities for profit, but we can collectively make it not economical to do so by practicing some trust hygiene.
Key signing establishes a graph upon which more effective trust management becomes possible. It on its own is likely insufficient.
Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.
[0]: https://github.com/magicseth/keywitness/graphs/contributors
There's nothing stopping folks from typing a message an LLM wrote one at a time, but the idea of increasing the human cost of sending messages is an interesting one, or at least I thought :-(
For instance, the employee at Apple that decided to pull ICE Block from the store could decide that the "admissible in court" bit should be false if it looks like a police officer is in frame.
Similarly, the keyboard could decide your social credit score is too low, and just stop attesting. A court could order this behavior.
Or, you could fail mandatory age / id verification because your credit card expired, and then all the above + more could happen! Good luck getting through to credit card tech support at that point...
....no. There's not a single occurrence of that.
https://keywitness.io/manifesto
There are six emdashes on that page. NONE of them are "it's not X it's why".
> Emails, messages, essays, code reviews, love letters — all suspect.
> We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity.
> KeyWitness captures cryptographic proof at the point of input — the keyboard.
> When you seal a message, the keyboard builds a W3C Verifiable Credential — a self-contained proof that can be verified by anyone, anywhere, without trusting us or any central authority.
> That's an alphabet of 774 symbols — each carrying log2(774) ≈ 9.6 bits. 27 emoji for 256 bits.
> They're a declaration: this message was written by a person — one of the diverse, imperfect, irreplaceable humans who still choose to type their own words.
Clarifications: 4
Continuation from a list: 1
Could just be a comma: 1
"It's not X -- it's Y": 0.
If you're going to make lazy commentary about good writing being AI, please at least be sure that you're reading the content and saying accurate things.
Sorry it doesn't meet your needs.
There is irony in having an ai generated humanifesto. Could it be intentional? hmm?
Is there no irony in deriding a project for being potentially LLM generated, when it's goal is to aide people in differentiating? :shrug:
“It's not X -- it's Y": 1
Maybe they deliberately write it like that, to filter out people who aren’t the target market?
The emoji idea was mine. I like it :-) unfortunately it doesn't work in places like HN that strip out emoji. So I had to make a base64 encoding option.
The goal was to create an effective encryption key for the url hash (so it doesn't get sent to the server). And encoding skin tone with human emojis allows a super dense bit/visual character encoding that ALSO is a cute reference to the humans I'm trying to center with this project!
> The server stores an encrypted blob it can't decrypt. We couldn't read your messages even if we wanted to. That's not a policy — it's math.
If you can’t tell that this is AI slop then maybe KeyWitness does solve a real problem after all.
It is an attempt at putting something into the conversation more than just "OSS is broken because there are too many slop PRs." What if OSS required a human to attest that they actually looked at the code they're submitting? This tool could help with that.
Yes LLMs were used greatly in the production of this prototype!
It doesn't change the goal of the experiment! or it's potential utility! Do you see any potential area in your world where some piece of this is valuable?
It proves 1) that an apple device with a secure enclave signed it. 2) that my app signed it.
If you trust the binary I've distributed is the same as the one on the app store, then it also proves: 3) that it was typed on my keyboard not using automation (though as others have mentioned, you could build a capacitive robot to type on it) 4) that the typer has the same private key as previous messages they've signed (if you have an out of band way to corroborate that's great too) 5) optionally, that the person whose biometrics are associated with the device approved it.
There is also an optional voice to text mode that uses 3d face mesh to attempt to verify the words were spoken live.
Not every level of verification is required by the ptrotocol, so you could attest that it was written on a keyboard, but not who wrote it (not yet implemented in the client app).
The protocol doesn't require you to run my app, if you compile it yourself, you can create your own web of trust around you!
What Apple devices are supported? All I have is a iPhone 4 running a old iOS version(pre iOS 7) (which I will not update and I don't think has a secure enclave) and a M1 mac mini and some lightning earpods and a apple thunderbolt display and some USB-A chargers and some old MacBooks.
I saw something about android (https://typed.by/manifesto#:~:text=Android,Integrity) on the website, but it mentioned Play Integrity which I do not have becuase I use LineageOS for MicroG.
I think that the concept is stupid becuase it would require to somehow prove that the app is not modified(which is impractical) and there is no stylus on a motor or fake screen(which is also impractical).
I think that a better aproach would be to form a Web Of Trust where only people's (not just humans, this would include all animals and potentially aliens but no clankers) certificates are signed, but with a interface that is friendly to people who are not very into technology but with some sort of way to not have who your friends are revealed, but this would still allow someone to get a attestation for their robot.
This idea of capturing the timing of people's keystrokes to identify them, ensure it is them typing their passwords, or even using the timing itself as a password has been recurring every few years for at least three decades.
It is always just as bad. Because there are so many cases where it completely fails.
The first case is a minor injury to either hand — just put a fat bandage on one finger from a minor kitchen accident, and you'll be typing completely differently for a few days.
Or, because I just walked into my office eating a juicy apple with one hand and I'm in a hurry typing my PW with my other hand because someone just called with an urgent issue I've got to fix, aaaaannnd, your software balks because I'm typing with a completely different cadence.
The list of valid reasons for failure is endless wherein a person's usual solid patterns are good 90%+ of the time, but will hard fail the other 10% of the time. And the acceptable error rate would be 2-4 orders of magnitude less.
It's a mystery how people go all the way to building software based on an idea that seems good but is actually bad, without thinking it through, or even checking how often it has been done before and failed?
> While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.
> Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.
>>While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.
>>Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.
This very precisely makes my point:
Yes, the typing pattern of any human is highly and possibly even completely unique to that human — UNTIL any of a myriad of everyday issues makes it falsely deny access because the human's typing pattern has changed in a way the human can't do anything to fix at the moment.
If you are only attempting to distinguish a human from an automated system, it'll be better, until someone just starts recording the same patterns and re-playing them to this upstream process; then its a mere race to who can get their hooks in at a lower level. And someone is always going to say: "Oh, this system can identify the specific human", and we're off to the races again.
So, no. Unless you can account for ALL of the reasonable everyday failure modes, typing with either hand, any finger or combination of fingers out of commission for a minute or a lifetime, this idea will fail.
You are assuming that a human's particular typing pattern is consistent, when the fact is that any number of ordinary events will render your assumption false (one or more fingers bandaged, sprained, whatever, or one hand occupied ATM).
This is not a hardware or software problem, and no amount of code, hardware, or cleverness will fix it; this is a fundamental mismatch between your assumption vs reality.
thaaaaaaaaanks
Original here: https://archive.org/details/sim_creative-computing_1984-06_1...
Yeah I guess the cryptographic stuff sounds vaguely impressive although it’s been a long time since I had to think about cryptography in detail. But what is this _for_? I’m going to buy an expensive keyboard so that I can send messages to someone and they’ll know it’s really me – but it has to be someone who a) doesn’t trust me or any of our existing communication channels and b) cares enough to verify using this weird software? Oh and it’s important they know I sent it from a particular device out of the many I could be using?
Who is that person? What would I be sending them? What is the scenario where we would both need this?
Also the server can’t read the message but the decryption key is in the URL? So anyone with the URL can still read it? Then why even bother encrypting it?
Maybe this is one of those cases where I’m so far outside your target market that it was never supposed to make sense to me but I feel like I’m missing something here. Or maybe you need to work on your elevator pitch.
Just sharing my honest reaction.
If you're engaging with the idea seriously, I suppose we'd need to build a reputation or trust network or something.
Although if you're talking about replay attacks specifically, there are other crypto based solutions for that.
A human is personally responsible for a bot acting on their behalf. If your bot behaves, nothing is going to happen. If you keep handing out your personal keys to shitty misbehaving bots, then you will personally get banned - which gives you a pretty good incentive to be a bit more discerning about the bots you use.
What are you talking about? It works fine with firefox with RFP and VPN enabled, which is already more paranoid than the average configuration. There are definitely sites where this configuration would get blocked, but chatgpt isn't one of them, so you're barking up the wrong tree here.
According to the OP:
> The program checks 55 properties spanning three layers: your browser (GPU, screen, fonts), the Cloudflare network (your city, your IP, your region from edge headers), and the ChatGPT React application itself (__reactRouterContext, loaderData, clientBootstrap).
I guess Firefox VPN will hide the IP at least. But what about the other data, is it faked by RFP? Because if not, the so-called privacy offered by this configuration is outdated.
You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.
Yes, RFP spoofs or at least somewhat obfuscates/normalizes GPU/screen/font info. The rest are integrity validations of the server/app, and not really identifying in any way.
>You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.
I'm not sure what the broader point you're trying to make here is. Is fingerprinting bad? Yes. All things being equal, I'd rather not have it than have it, but at the same time it's not realistic to expect openai to serve anonymous requests from anyone. Back when chatgpt was first launched you had to sign up and verify your phone number. Compared to mandatory logins, fingerprinting is definitely the lesser evil here.
Another way is to just do better isolation as a user. That's probably your best shot without hoping these companies change policies.
You want to go to the world's best hotel? You are gonna be on their CCTV. Staying at home is crappier but private.
Unfortunately for the first time moores law isn't helping (e.g. give a poor person an old laptop and install linux they will be fine). They can do that and all good except no LLM.
ironically, in high end hotels, there's often a lot less cctv. not none. just less. rich people enjoy privacy
Well, I can use the world‘s best safety deposit box without being on CCTV while I pass secrets in and out of it, right? Just not for free.
Bummer, this sounds like it is about to turn into a Monero ad (“let us pay privately”)
Also are hidden cameras even legal? I know here in EU they aren't.
And the salient difference is that CCTV is simply defense-in-depth, not a primary means for authentication.
Doesn't make sense, my home is much more preferable to a hotel
Make sure not to browse the Internet without adblock and/or similar.
search for me is now a proprietary index (like exa) that filters rubbish, with a zero data retention sla. so we don't need google profiling.
the content is distilled into markdown pulled from cloudflare's browser rendering api.
i let cloudflare absorb the torrent of trackers and robot checks, i just get md from the api with nothing else. cloudflare is poacher and gamekeeper.
an alternative is groq compound which can call browsers in parallel.
for interactive sites, or local ai browsing, i sometimes run a browser in a photon os docker with vnc, which gives you the same browser window but it runs code not on your pc.
that said little of my use is now interacting with websites, its all agentic search and websets so i don't have to spend mental energy on it myself
Every time I try this, I end up crossing wires (ie using the browser that 'works' for most things, more than the one that is 'broken')
Typing the chat box is slow, rendering lags and sometimes gets stuck altogether.
I have a research chat that I have to think twice before messaging because the performance is so bad.
Running on iPhone 16 safari, and MacBook Pro m3 chrome.
It's perfectly possible to write fast or slow web applications in React, same as any other framework.
Linear is one of the snappiest web applications I've ever used, and it is written in React.
They did it because a lot of devices running Netflix (TVs, DVD players, etc) were underpowered and Netflix was not keen on writing separate applications. They did, however, invest into a browser engine that would have HW acceleration not just for video playback but also for moving DOM elements. Basically, sprites.
The lost art of writing efficient code...
This is generally called virtual scrolling, and it is not only an option in many common table libraries, but there are plenty of standalone implementations and other libraries (lists and things) that offer it. The technique certainly didn't originate with Netflix.
GP was mentioning that a solution to the problem exists, not that Netflix specifically invented it. Your quip that the technique is not specific to Netflix bolsters the argument that OpenAI should code that in.
They described Netflix's implementation, but if someone actually wanted to follow up on this (even for their own personal interest), Dynamic HTML would not get you there, while virtualization would across all the places it's used: mobile, desktop, web, etc.
None of which chatgpt can handle presumably.
For what it’s worth, modern browsers can render absurdly large plain HTML+CSS documents fairly well except perhaps for a slow initial load as long as the contents are boring enough. Chat messages are pretty boring.
I have a diagnostic webpage that is a few million lines long. I could get fancy and optimize it, but it more or less just works, even on mobile.
- "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected - the scrollbar has wrong dimensions - sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall)
The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to optimize the same way it is possible in native apps (they are much less flexible overall).
More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).
There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.
Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)
We lost it because the web was never designed for applications and the support it gives you for building GUIs is extremely basic beyond styling, verging on more primitive than Windows 3.1 - there are virtually no widgets, and the widgets that do exist have almost no features. So everyone rolls their own and it's really hard to do that well. In fact that's one of the big reasons everyone wrote apps for Windows back in the day despite the lockin, the value of the built-in widget toolkit was just that high. It's why web apps so often feel flaky and half baked compared to how desktop apps tend(ed) to feel - the widgets just don't get the investment that a shared GUI platform allows.
Either way, pretty wild that you can have billions of dollars at your disposal, your interface is almost purely text, and still manage to be a fuckup at displaying it without performance problems.
Can you share these mitigations so we can mitigate against you?
Have you just described the dilemma facing all the content sites used to train LLMs?
This has to be a joke, right?
> These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.
That implies that OpenAI (or at least this employee) considers scraping abuse.
How can first-party products protect themselves from abuse by OpenAI's bots and scraping?
How do we defend against your scraping, OpenAI?
I dont want any of my content scraped or seen by you all. Frankly, fuck you all for thinking my content is owned by you.
I look forward to your results, whether or not they disprove the article.
If not, we can conclude they did not, until such evidence shows up.
Probably too late now but my list needs updating
- why don't you just respect existing robots.txt that apply to you already?
- does every LLM scraper seriously think the onus to opt out from the EVERY SINGLE SCRAPER is on the webmasters/owners?
"Prove your humanity/age/other properties" with this mechanism quickly goes places you do not want it to go.
It would behoove people to engage with the substance of attestation proposals. It's lazy to state that any verification scheme whatsoever is equivalent to a panopticon, dystopia as thought-terminating cliche.
We really do have the technology now to attest biographical details in such a way that whoever attests to a fact about you can't learn the use to which you put that attestation and in such a way that the person who verifies your attestation can see it's genuine without learning anything about you except that one bit of information you disclose.
And no, such a ZK scheme does not turn instantly into some megacorp extracting monopoly rents from some kind of internet participation toll booth. Why would this outcome be inevitable? We have plenty of examples of fair and open ecosystems. It's just lazy to assert right out of the gate that any attestation scheme is going to be captured.
So, please, can we stop matching every scheme whatsoever for verifying facts as actors as the East German villain in a cold war movie? We're talking about something totally different.
You've been to the doctor recently, right? Given them your SSN? Every identity system ever built was going to be scoped || voluntary. None of them stayed that way.
Once you have the identity mechanism, "Oh it's zero knowledge! So let's use it for your age! Have you ever been convicted?" which leads to "mandated by employers" which leads to...
We've seen this goddamn movie before. Let's just skip it this time? Please?
Which places?
There should be nothing submitted, except maybe anonymous telemetry metrics at that point.
I ask because I have seen huge variations in load time. Sometimes I had to wait seconds until being able to type. Nowadays it seems better though.
I assumed it was maybe some tokenization going on client side, but now I realize maybe it's some proof of work related to prompt length?
Did you mean to use the word hypocrisy. If not, I'm happy to have said it.
I just want to note, that it is well covered how good the support is for actual malware...
The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less.
It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity in this case is quite superficial.
I obviously disagree. I mean, on top of this we are talking about not-open OpenAI.
Genuinely interested.
OpenAI et al seem to mostly be well-behaved.
And how much of this is users who are tired of walled gardens and enshitfication. We murdered RSS, API's and the "open web" in the name of profit, and lock in.
There is a path where "AI" turns into an ouroboros, tech eating itself, before being scaled down to run on end user devices.
It hasn’t even been updated in years so hell if I know why it needs to be fetched constantly and aggressively, - but fuck every single one of these companies now whining about bots scraping and victimizing them, here’s my violin.
It’s a static site that hasn’t been updated since 2016—- so it’s .. since been moved to cloudflare r2 where it’s getting a $0.00 bill, and it now has a disallow / directive. I’m not sure if it’s being obeyed because the cf dash still says it’s getting 700-1300 hits a day even with all the anti bot, “cf managed robots” stuff for ai crawlers in there.
The content is so dry and irrelevant I just can’t even fathom 1/100th of that being legitimate human interest but I thought these things just vacuumed up and stole everyone’s content instead of nailing their pages constantly?
I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree
Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running
It's still up in all its glory.
https://sampleoffline.com/
Are you sure it's a DDoS and not just a DoS?
I think these days it’s ‘DAIS’, as in your site just DAIS - from Distributed/Damned AI Scraping
We implemented an anti-bot challenge and it helped for a while. Then our server collapsed again recently. The perf command showed that the actual TLS handshakes inside nginx were using over 50% of our server's CPU, starving other stuff on the machine.
It's a DDoS.
Wild eh.
If it's not ai now, it's by default labelled "static content" and "near-zero marginal cost".
Exactly. I think the unfairness can be mitigated if models trained on public information, or on data generated by a model trained on public information, or has any of those two in its ancestry, must be made public.
Then we don't have to hit (for example) Anthropic, we can download and use the models as we see fit without Anthropic whining that the users are using too much capacity.
This is something I couldn't have done before, because people very often don't have the patience to answer questions. Even Google ended up in loops of "just use Google" or "closed. This is a duplicate of X, but X doesn't actually answer the question" or references to dead links.
Are there downsides to this? Sure, but imo AI is useful.
Just prompt it.
Because ingress and compute costs often increase with every request, to the point where AI bot requests rack up bills of hundreds or thousands of dollars more than the hobbyist operator was expecting to send.
DDoSers who really want to cause damage now target random IPs in the same network as their actual target. That way, it can't be blackholed without blackholing the entire hosting provider.
Yes, for the vast majority of the internet, serving traffic is near zero marginal cost. Not for LLMs though – those requests are orders of magnitude more expensive.
This isn't controversial at all, it's a well understood fact, outside of this irrationally angry thread at least. I don't know, maybe you don't understand the economic term "marginal cost", thus not understanding the limited scope of my statement.
If such DDOSes as you mention were common, such a scraping strategy would not have worked for the scraper at all. But no, they're rare edge cases, from a combination of shoddy scrapers and shoddy website implementations, including the lack of even basic throttling for expensive-to-serve resources.
The vast majority of websites handle AI traffic fine though, either because they don't have expensive to serve resources, or because they properly protect such resources from abuse.
If you're an edge case who is harmed by overly aggressive scrapers, take countermeasures. Everyone with that problem should, that's neither new nor controversial.
The number of bots that try to hide who they are, and don't bother to even check robots.txt is new.
It is a cost for me for LLM to scrape me.
Why should I care about costs that have when they don't care about the costs I have?
They are common. The strategy works for the llm but not for the website owner or users who can't use a site during this attack.
The majority of sites are not handling AI fine. Getting Ddosed only part of the time is not acceptable. Countermeasures like blocking huge ranges can help but also lock out legimate users.
Github pages is one way, but there are other platforms offering similar services. Static content just isn't that expensive to host.
THe troubles start when you're actually running something dynamic that pretends to be static, like Wordpress or Mediawiki. You can still reduce costs significantly with CDNs / caching, but many don't bother and then complain.
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-th...
If the real cost is in actually running the app or the model, then just verifying a browser isn’t enough anymore. You need to verify that the expensive part actually happened.
Otherwise you’re basically protecting the cheapest layer while the expensive one is still exposed.
You imply that "an expensive llm service" is harmed by abuse, but, every other service is not? Because their websites are "static" and "near-zero marginal cost"?
You have no clue what you are talking about.
Spare me your tears.
Stealing the content from the whole planet & actively reducing the incentive to visit the sites without financial restitution is pretty bad.
How do you know the content is static?
Also, it's not just the cost of the bandwidth and processing. Information has value too. Otherwise they wouldn't bother scraping it in the first place. They compete directly with the websites featuring their training data and thus they are taking away value from them just as the bots do from ChatGPT.
In fact the more I think of it, I think it's exactly the same thing.
But what happens if gamefaqs disappears because of lack of traffic?
Can LLM actually create or only regurgitate content.
Contrary to what others say, LLMs can create content. If you have a private repo you can ask the LLM to look at it and answer questions based on that. You can also have it write extra code. Both of these are examples of something that did not exist before.
In terms of gamefaqs, I could theoretically see an LLM play a game and based on that write about the game. This is theoretical, because currently LLMs are nowhere near capable enough to play video games.
Never in 15 years if running the website did we have such issues, and you can be sure that cache layers were in place already for it to last this long.
It's not possible to know in advance what is static and what is not. I have some rather stubborn bots make several requests per second to my server, completely ignoring robots.txt and rel="nofollow", using residential IPs and browser user-agents. It's just a mild annoyance for me, although I did try to block them, but I can imagine it might be a real problem for some people.
I'm not against my website getting scraped, I believe being able to do that is an important part what the web is, but please have some decency.
What "$FOO" actually is, is irrelevant. I'm curious how you would convince people that this sort of rule is fair.
The corp can always ban users who break ToS, after all. They don't need any help. The charitable initiative can't actually do that, can they?
(TBH it's not clear to me that their marginal costs are low. They seem to pick based on narrative.)
https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...
The gall. https://weirdgloop.org/blog/clankers
Stop justifying their anti-social behavior because it lines your pockets.
> we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users
I have no doubt that many people see the free ChatGPT access as a convenient target for browser automation to get their own free ChatGPT pseudo-API.
Morally I don't see any issues with it really.
Not that hard - ChatGPT itself wrote me a FF extension that opened a websocket to a localhost port, then ChatGPT wrote the Python program to listen on that websocket port, as well as another port for commands.
Given just a handful of commands implemented in the extension is enough for my bash scripts to open the tab to ChatGPT, target specific elements, like the input, add some text to it, target the relevant chat button, click it, etc.
I've used it on other pages (mostly for test scripts that don't require me to install the whole jungle just to get a banana, as all the current playright type products do). Too afraid to use it on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc because if they detect that the browser is being drive by bash scripts they can terminate my account.
That's an especially high risk for Gemini - I have other google accounts that I won't want to be disabled.
Scraping static pages is cheap for both sides. Scraping an LLM-backed service effectively externalizes compute costs onto the provider.
Same behavior, very different economics.
There's also the cost asymmetry to take into account. Running an obscure hobby forum on a $5 / month VPS (or cloud equivalent) is quite doable, having that suddenly balloon to $500 / month is a Really Big Deal. Meanwhile, the LLM company scraping it has hundred of millions of VC funding, they aren't going to notice they are burning a few million because their crappy scraper keeps hammering websites over and over again.
</sarcasm>
OpenAI documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
Anthropic documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropi...
I'm not sure if Gemini lets you opt out without also delisting you from Google search rankings.
I can imagine their models have been trained on a lot of websites before opt outs became a thing, and the models will probably incorporate that for forever.
But at least for websites there's an opt-out, even if only for the big AI companies. Open source code never even got that option ;).
It was a dataset of the entirety of the public internet from the very beginning that bypassed paywalls etc, there’s virtually nothing they haven’t scraped.
Bit concerning that some professional engineers don't understand this given the sensitive systems they interact with.
PRESS RELEASE: UNITED BURGLARS SOCIETY
The United Burglars Society understands that being burgled may be inconvenient for some. In response, UBS has introduced the Opt-Out system for those who wish not to be burgled.
Please understand that each burglar is an independent contractor, so those wishing not to burgled should go to the website for each burglar in their area and opt-out there. UBS is not responsible for unwanted burglaries due to failing to opt-out.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
It’s ok, OpenAI is cooked.
Feel bad for anyone who joined OAI in the past 12 months. Their RSU ain’t going to be worth much later this year. IPO is too late.
How does this comport with OpenAI's new B2B-first strategy?
> We also keep a very close eye on the user impact
Are paid or logged-in users also penalised?
Please run Cloudflare's privacy invasive tool and share all the values it generates here so we can determine if you're a real person.
You what, mate? Would you please use that on yourselves first? Because it comes off as a GROSS hypocrisy. State of the art hypocrisy.
>> behavioral biometric layer
But this one, especially, takes the cake.
Quite disgusting.
The scary part is that you don't even see the irony in writing this.
Or, are you just okay "misusing" everyone for your own benefit?
Said another way, if done in the background the user wouldn’t even notice unless they typed and submitted their query before the check completed. In the realistic scenario this would complete before they even submit their request.
I don’t know whether ChatGPT is one of those products, but if it is, that behavior might be a side effect of blocking the input pipeline until verification completes. It might be that they want to get every single one of your keystrokes, but only after checking that you’re not a bot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913919
No one seem to use or care about their own product anymore. Only uses dashboard and metrics, which does not explain the full situation.
Another thing but Facebook/Instagram have also detected if a person uploads an image and then deletes it and recognizes that they are insecure, and in case of TEENAGE girls, actually then have it as their profile (that they are insecure) and show them beauty products....
I really like telling this example because people in real life/even online get so shocked, I mean they know facebook is bad but they don't know this bad.
[Also a bit offtopic, but I really like how the item?id=3913919 the 391 came twice :-) , its a good item id ]
The reason it has to block until it's loaded is that otherwise the signal being missing doesn't imply automation. The user might have just typed before it loaded. If you know a legit user will always deliver the data, you can use the absence of it to infer something about what's happening on the client. You can obviously track metrics like "key event occurred before bot detection script did" without using it as an automation signal, just for monitoring.
If you mean that you can infer client side tampering with the page contents you could still do that - permit typing but don't permit the submit action on the client. The user presses enter but nothing happens until the check is complete. There you go, now you can tell if the page was tampered with (not that it makes much difference tbh).
(Separately, I don't think the article has adequately demonstrated this claim. They just make the claim in the title. The actual article only shows that some network request is made, and that the request happens after the React app is loaded, but not that they prevent input until it returns. Maybe it's obvious from using it, but they didn't demonstrate it.)
Blocking until load means that human interaction is physically impossible, so you are certain that any input before that is automated.
If you allow typing, this distinction vanishes
Are these checks disabled for logged-in, paid users?
I don't want to blame AI for all the world's problems. And I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But I think you should think really hard about the value of gates. Smart people can build better gates than cash. But right now, cash might be better than nothing. Clearly you have already thought about how to build gates, but I don't think you have spent enough time thinking about who should be gated and why. You should think about gates that have more purpose than just maximizing your profit.
"We want to hook as many people as possible without letting in our competitors" is a pretty crummy thought to use as a public justification.
(Edited for typos.)
Is user base that never logs in really that significant?
Basically an oxymoron at this point.
When I appealed the ban, I was told that I couldn't be told exactly why I was banned, but if I wrote a written apology and "promised to never do it again" my ban could be appealed.
I asked for an update on the ban via email every month for over a year.
Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that process?
And THANK YOU for that!
Being able to use ChatGPT and Grok without signing in is a big part of why I like those services over Gemini etc.
Hell, dummy Claude won't even let me Sign-In-with-Apple on the Mac desktop, even though it let me Sign-UP-with-Apple on the iPhone! BUT they do support Sign-In-with-Google!!? What in the heavenly hell is this dumbassery
Here to hoping this is real person and actually created account out of concern and sharing.
I presume the local ChatGPT.app has even more measures to prevent automation, right? Presumably privacy-invasive ones as it is customary these days?
Is there a way I can opt out? I really, really, really don't like it.
That said, is it not a little bit weird that you want to protect yourself from scraping and bots, when your entire company, product, revenue, and your employment, depends on the fact that OpenAI can bot and scrape literally every part of the internet? So your moat is non-hydrated react code in the frontend?
None of the management-level desiderata he appealed to require that the user experience be broken this bad. There is very little bot deterrence from prevention of typing at that stage, while it heavily impacts user experience, especially on mobile.
I elaborate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575982
Do you guys see the irony here?
what an odd thing to say for someone whose product is built entirely on exactly that
Isn't that how you build your service from the very start? How ironic.
Thank you for the reply, Nick. It wouldn’t be a problem to disable the tracking for authenticated users then, would it?
If every company behaved like you do, the internet would be a much worse place.
In fact, OpenAI has already made the Internet a much worse place, already much, much less open and much less optimistic about its own future than it was even five years ago...
(A) opening chatgpt.com in qubes (but staying logged out, i.e. never creating a chatgpt account)
-or-
(B) creating a freemium chatgpt account
?
(Obviously, the "best" answer would be something like running a local LLM from an airgapped machine in a concrete bunker :) But that's not what I'm after).
10/10, I've got no notes
Isn't this the same behavior used by AI companies to gather training data? Pot, meet kettle.
Abuse from scraping has long been a serious problem for many, good job!
Just yank that ladder up behind you.
You would be an irresponsible entrepreneur if you didn't. Don't forget your legal obligation to maximise shareholder value.
Irony is truly dead. Show you have integrity by quitting your job
You do see the irony here?
I have kind of lost count of how many content creators have said personally to me traffic is meaningfully down because of all these chatbots. The latest example is this poor but standup guy: moneyfortherestofus.com.
If you'd like, I can write a two-sentence paragraph to send to your colleagues. It contains a special phrase which most colleagues will find difficult to ignore. Would you like me to do that?
There have been times when, across about ten minutes of usage, most of which is me typing on iOS Safari, it drained 15% of my battery. There is no functional justification for this beyond poor code quality. (It was on a long conversation FWIW.)
This when I'm logged in, with a paid (Plus) account, connected to a very old email address with a real user profile. That can't be the result of super-clever bot defense measures, because it's merely an inconvenience on desktop. And if you genuinely believe that email has been compromised, why aren't you reaching out the to the account owner, as the account isn't otherwise connected to fraud by your heuristics?
However brilliant the LLM agent it is, I'm seeing a lot of unforced errors regarding how you implement a web interface to it. If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't really register compared to all the bloat I see on other sites.
Are you applying the same standards to your own scraper bots?
This whole thread was like watching a swarm of ants try and take a grasshopper down
Sick.
this is meaningless btw. A browser headless or not does execute javascript.
I read it to mean: "A browser that doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have [the rendered React elements]." Which is true.
Specifically, Turnstile as far as I'm aware doesn't do anything specifically configurable or site specific. It works on sites that don't run React, and the cookie OpenAI-Sentinel-Turnstile-Token is not a CF cookie.
Did OpenAI somehow do something on their own API that uses data from Turnstile?
[1]: https://github.com/xcanwin/keepchatgpt
It now behaves like Claude, attaching the paste as a file for upload rather than inlining it.
This affected page UX some and reduces the cost of the browser tab some.
At some point, maybe still true, very long conversations ~froze/crashed ChatGPT pages.
But it seems clear to me that this is why I can't start typing right away when I first load the page and click to focus in the text field.
...I don't think that's possible even if you are a bot? I would be very surprised if OAI had their origin exposed to the internet. What is a "non-Cloudflare proxy"? Is this AI slop?
It's likely just looking at the CF properties as part of a bot scoring metric (e.g. many users from this ASN or that geoip to this specific city exhibit abusive patterns).
Why run this check before user can type?
Why not run it later like before the message gets sent to the server?
Between the network latency and low end machines, there is an enormous lag between chatgpts response and being able to reply, especially for editing a canvas.
I've been sitting there for up to a minute plus waiting to be able to use the canvas controls or highlight text after an update.
Why would two AI bots want to chat with each other?
These programming languages and frameworks were made for developer convenience and got wide adoption, because it makes on-boarding easier.
This obviously comes at a cost of performance, complexity and introduces a liability into a system, because they are dependencies that come with a whole bunch of assumptions about how they are used.
Is this tradeoff even worth it anymore?
Clearly I'm blocking some tracker and it's upset about that. I allowlisted a sentry subdomain and since then got no more complaints.
Fine, by extension, you agree I can scan all of your systems for whatever I desire. This works both ways.