The problem is the bots. The captchas are just a symptom.
Josh Reynolds Chief Technology Officer | SPITwSPOTS On Tue, Jul 1, 2025, 9:04 PM Constantine A. Murenin via NANOG < [email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 at 09:15, Brandon Butterworth via NANOG > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On 01/07/2025 15:05:16, "Johannes Müller Aguilar via NANOG" > > <[email protected]> wrote: > > >For about a month, users behind IP addresses we announce have been > prompted to solve captchas when accessing Cloudflare-proxied sites. > > > > I've seen that increase and now regularly get it on home > > broadband services, others have reported this too. I suspect > > many are getting it and assumed this is the new normal. > > I'm seeing this on StackOverflow / StackExchange on my home broadband as > well. > > Having to wait half a minute to glance at a search result completely > ruins the use-case for said result. If your time is worth $120/h, > that's a $1 for each StackOverflow visit just to open the page, > obviously it's cheaper to use AI at that point, so, no idea what > they're thinking killing their own market. > > I wish Google Search would let people blacklist StackOverflow as long > as they're a Cloudflare user; or, heck, anything with these captchas. > It's effectively just search spam with all those captchas. > > But the "best" part about the security industry, is that because I do > close the window in less than a second, Cloudflare probably reports my > visit attempt as saving StackOverflow from yet another bot! "Look how > many bots we've saved you from!" > > I'd like to see the metrics from Cloudflare and the other captcha > vendors on how they justify wasting billions of dollars in lost > productivity. It probably costs way-way-way-way less than $0.01 to > serve a page for which the legitimate users must now waste $1 in lost > income. There's probably a 10000x amplification factor for real users > wasting resources compared to how much resources are saved from the > most basic bots that can't get through, bravo! All for what? > > Did anyone think of the environment, how much computing resources are > wasted by everyone proving that they're not a bot? > > C. > _______________________________________________ > NANOG mailing list > > https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/ROWRSJDJKROFAH54DJ3ATVMTG4JTQGFL/ _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/JH2MTCKJWRGILR2RY2UPAGOJGJCTLSRC/
