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Getting hit with "Prove you are a human" at every other website 52 points by shmde3 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 25 comments I click on websites posted here to read the articles and every other one of them requires me to solve some fking puzzle or click on a checkbox or some other bullshit. With cloudflare acting like a bouncer at almost 50-60% of the pages and the weird anime girl on 10-20% of the pages doing some fuck all calculations on my browser and google capctha requiring me to play the damn select crosswalks which is impossible to get correct in tbe first try. I am tired and sick of it. I dont even bother anymore I close the browser page and move on nowadays. Or just come back read the comments on hn for that article. I cannot even read an article in peace without these pesky bouncers at every other website. I'm tired boss. Do you folks feel the same or am I over reacting. Edit: forgot to add the classic google captcha help 
PaulHoule3 hours ago | next[–] Look, I want to see WCAG adopt "Any ad that covers content, a cookie banner, or Anubis or Cloudflare harassment is an immediate F grade" I'm a little more hopeful of that than to get a requirement like "you should actually have a disabled person test it" What the people who like Anubis don't get is that the cost for honest people is very real, the cost for crawlers is basically $0 because: most of the people who run crawlers are just idiots and aren't paying attention to what's happening and get crap data and don't even know they are getting bounced and probably don't even look at the crap data they collect, the worst of the crawlers are running botnets using stolen CPU, the real AI companies don't have any financial discipline and wouldn't care it if anubis wasted a CPU*hour per page. Or rather, those "click on the bus" images raise your blood pressure but are close to trivial for a bot to automate... It's all performative... We're good open source people who prove we are good open source people because we put Anubis on our page to shame those bad AI people. reply daxuak2 hours ago | parent | next[–] I did not use chatbot for search until Anubis, Cloudflare and recaptcha are so prevalent that chatbot literally parses through the pages faster than I can open any one of them, using my daily browser, with my own hands. It seems not only my choice does not matter, but most websites also do not care about human readers. At this point I just use chatbot as search engine out of vengeance. Also, optimized Anubis & other proof of work challenge solvers are much faster than a stock browser. reply Grombobulous34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next[–] What is the cost of Anubis for honest people? I’m legitimately confused by that one. I don’t like the cloudflare checkbox or click all the buses to access this website but Anubis you just sit there for a split second and do nothing. That’s what people like about Anubis. reply daxuak23 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] For me to open 5 pages, which is more than often when I search with google etc, that all have Anubis, will take more time for them to load than that I ask chatgpt and it generates an answer from web search, at least in some cases. It is 100% virtue signaling that has no technical fundamentals to deter scrappers, which likely implement better solvers and have virtually unlimited amount of time and compute to spare, it just punishes me who have a body and a limited time budget. Humiliating even for a split of a second. Now I just skip any website that I do not care enough and has Anubis; the ones I have to visit, I will remember their mindless choice forever. reply Grombobulous6 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] We can make up unrealistic scenarios all day long but I just don’t believe for a second that anyone is this inconvenienced by it. The idea that you’re in desperate need to get information from 5 web pages as quickly as possible like you’re a contestant on The Amazing Race is ridiculous. This is the definition of dramatic. Anubis finishes up in less time than takes to read this sentence. reply darepublic2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] I think thought user behaviour telemetry was a big part of the captcha recipe. Not so much the clicking of the right squares per se reply PaulHoule1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Can be faked. Record people doing it hundreds if not thousands of times and make a statistical model. Google and Facebook of course would love it if your were logged in and could look at the muddy footprints you leave all over the web. Yet another way to punish people for using the wrong browser or not logging in. reply heliomattress1 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] speaking of WCAG https://news.coffee/wcag.gif reply Dylan168071 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] We can call the captchas and lockouts harassment, but I don't think a 3 second delay is in the same category of problem. reply nikisweeting1 hour ago | prev | next[–] It's going to get worse before it gets better: - https://docs.sweeting.me/s/ai-scraping-will-force-us-towards... - https://docs.sweeting.me/s/so-you-want-to-build-a-social-net... I've worked at multiple AI browser companies at this point and I think the best way forward is to start paying for content again honestly. Brave and BAT were too early but we need more things like that with lower friction and more primitives baked into the browser. The AI bots that create value for people and have money will happily pay to get access to the content, keeping it alive in the process and paying for the maintenance cost of allowing good bots. DBSC, DPoP, and Google's latest "Google Cloud Fraud Defense" reCAPTCHA using phone are another approach where you use hardware secure enclaves to prevent cookies from leaving devices and attest to 1 visitor = 1 physical device. I don't like these because I want my personal agents to be able to access the things I can on my behalf. If I misbehave then block me & bots, not all bots, this is not as impossible as companies make it sound. The worst possible approach is to require biometric or government ID, that's the one we all need to push hard against, as it's bad for everyone involved. reply dlcarrier2 hours ago | prev | next[–] I call those bot-only web pages. Most of the time a web page reports an error or seems to be down, or it gives you another captcha no matter how many times you correctly answer it, it's just denying you access, but it's also trying to hide that from you. Whether there's captchas or an outright denial, those pages are guarded by bots that only allow other bots to proceed to the page. We've known for several years that captchas only deter humans (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2384228-bots-are-better...) so clearly anyone currently using them doesn't want humans visiting the page. Most of the time, the Gemini summary that Google includes in their search results isn't particularly useful, but extracting data from those bot-only pages is one thing it excels at. So, whenever a search result links to a page guarded by a bot, and it senses that I am a human and denies access, I go back to the Google search results page, and ask Gemini to scrape the page and provide the data I want from it. reply andyjohnson023 minutes ago | prev | next[–] I've noticed a lot more Cloudflare human checks recently. I kind of assumed it was sites trying to avoid being scraped to death for training data. Alternatively, I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger - so it might be that. reply WorldMaker1 hour ago | prev | next[–] I've been starting to feel this as well. I isolate tracking cookies from the big ad networks and it shows. Another one on the list now is Amazon adding amazon.com redirects around IMDB pages. I can't even follow IMDB links anymore without getting trapped in broken redirects, because my Amazon cookies are in another session and whatever challenge they are running on amazon.com is bad at completing redirects and keeps redirecting brokenly encoded addresses that are 404 pages instead. I have to search things from IMDB in an Amazon container to get it to take me to the same addresses the direct link should have and used to in any container. reply benoau3 hours ago | prev | next[–] It's even worse when you are traveling cause then you run into country-blocks on websites and videos on top of all of that, and you didn't even mention the forced logging-in or registration walls to continue browsing/shopping/etc! Feels like the whole internet is hitting that hockey stick growth... towards becoming shit. reply slyall43 minutes ago | prev | next[–] I'll ask it but what about your browsing setup is unusual? Because often these reports are from people using weird browsers, privacy plugins, VPNs, javascript off, etc It does happen to "normal" browsers but are you doing anything that look suspicious? reply colanderman2 hours ago | prev | next[–] Yes, I feel like there has been a sharp uptick in this the past couple months. Whatever magic is built into the CloudFlare checkbox and my motion to click on it, I really wish was just part of the browser and my motion to click on everything else. reply dieselgate1 hour ago | prev | next[–] I get the fatigue too but feel if cloudflare is effective then the benefits outweigh the concerns. Bots will spam everything so hard reply novia1 hour ago | prev | next[–] It really makes me feel like I'm back in the early 00's with dial-up again (derogatory) reply pmdr2 hours ago | prev | next[–] Once you get past that, it's on to the auth walls where you have to login every day or week. We have perfect the nagging modals to suit all anti-consumer patterns. This is the internet in 2026 and it sure as hell won't get any better. Kinda disappointing that this doesn't get daily attention on HN of all places. reply turtleyacht2 hours ago | prev | next[–] How long do you spend on the page? reply shmde1 hour ago | parent | next[–] If I dont get inside the page in 5-10 seconds tops I hit the back button and continue to read the HN comments ( about the article). I rather not give them traffic if they treat my network request like I am e-begging to read the article. reply turtleyacht1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] That sounds about right. Maybe they track that. The data gets fed up to Cloudflare general and diffuses back out to the operating sites. reply k3102 hours ago | prev | next[–] I have two Firefox extensions that solve captchas for me. They are just eye exams and most unwelcome. Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans [0] NopeCHA: CAPTCHA Solver [1] OF COURSE, these are band-aids on an internet under full assault. P.S. Paywall busters are a nuisance to run through. Often, a paywalled article is syndicated (MSN does this a lot) or available at arxiv, or an author's institution, so "Use the web search, Luke." [0] https://github.com/dessant/buster [1] https://nopecha.com/ reply jon1281 hour ago | prev | next[–] The original model for web content distribution wasn't designed with Cloudflare style reverse proxies and they weren't a thing until much later. The original model is for the most part dead, sans some quiet corners here and there. The original model for web didn't include REST style API calls. A new model designed holistically for content distribution, with a hardened standardized spec for the API calls part, something that by design entirely shirks today's daily challenges, is necessary. _ > Or just come back read the comments on hn for that article. Same lol reply nixonaddiction34 minutes ago | prev[–] i get that if i have a vpn on. so i keep my vpn off. which is bad. oopsie! reply
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