Cloudflare's verified bots program is a terrible idea. They want to be the central chokepoint for agents, and they're doing it in shady ways like auto enrolling customers into blocking agents.

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threatofrain 4 days ago | parent [-]

That’s not shady, that’s awesome customer value! Bot blocking as Default option is a great choice for all of us.

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1gn15 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's discriminatory against robots and helps make the web even more locked down. DRM never works; the analog hole is always the nuclear option.

In the end, only people with non-mainstream browsers (or using VPN to escape country-level blocks, or Tor, or noJS) suffer.

It's like how anti-piracy measures only affect paying customers, while pirates ironically get a better experience. The best way to get around endless CAPTCHAs is to just use LLMs instead.

	▲	threatofrain 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It's discriminatory against robots You would... lead your response with that argument? This has nothing to do with DRM. When people talk about how bots suck, the focus is on billion or trillion dollar businesses making everyone on the web pay. There's also a reason why the bot conversation flared up; we've always had bots, but before the conversation centered on Google and SEO. Now the conversation centers on companies like OpenAI.
	▲	johneth 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> It's discriminatory against robots That's the entire point.