Cloudflare, Google, Bing Destroying the Infrastructure of the Free Web

The article has no substance at all. It’s like 150 words and just describes Cloudflare a bit and explains how captcha works.<p>Not what I’m used to seeing on HN frontpage.

Very click-baity title IMO.<p>I think they&#x27;re right about Cloudflare making legitimate scraping more difficult. There&#x27;s little reason to believe that it&#x27;s to protect the big players in search though.

&gt; Now, if you don&#x27;t retain that cookie for each subsequent access to that same website from that same IP address the delay is repeatedly increases until like around 30 seconds at which point you will be presented with a Turing test.<p>So retain the cookie they give you? Is that a problem?<p>(Honest question, I have not dabbled in writing crawlers...)

&gt; You have to be a non-blind person to pass the Turing test, as Cloudflare does not offer a handicap option.<p>(Edit: not sure if the above is true.)<p>I was quite surprised to see this. Much effort has been put into making the web more accessible; it’s a shame if an otherwise accessible site is blocked behind a non-accessible captcha wall.

hCaptcha (the service CF switched to after Google decided to start charging for reCAPTCHA for large-volume customers[0]) has an accessibility option that bypasses their captchas, and it&#x27;s available at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hcaptcha.com&#x2F;accessibility" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hcaptcha.com&#x2F;accessibility</a><p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch...</a> ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22812509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22812509</a> )

Sure the author may not win a Pulitzer, but the point re accessibility, and the big SEs being stakeholders, creating a moat for any new crawlers, is valid.

As others constantly show us, illegal is only illegal when someone actually enforces the law. Even if it weren&#x27;t illegal, if it only impedes a small subset of people, or if it impedes people without money &#x2F; resources, then Cloudflare won&#x27;t give the tiniest of a damn.<p>Their record is clear on this. They only care about those who give them money. Any attempts to give you things for free is to bait you in to becoming dependent on their platform.

This is a weird article - it looks like its pushing a conspiracy that cloud flare is secretly an agent for Google bing and Baidu simultaneously?

As others have said, this article is mostly nasty rhetoric with very little substance. I&#x27;m surprised that the CAPTCHA isn&#x27;t accessible, but that&#x27;s about it.<p>Websites opt-in to CloudFlare DDoS protection. If you want to be crawled, you don&#x27;t have to use it. But it&#x27;s very difficult to expose yourself to the open internet nowadays unless you&#x27;re hosted in a cloud or have something like CloudFlare.<p>I have stuff I don&#x27;t want crawled at all, I use CloudFlare, and it&#x27;s an awesome (free!) service that helps me maintain HTTPS certs and keep Chinese and Russian IPs from hammering my server.

What is it with this pseudo-doomsday clickbait &quot;the free and open web is dead&quot; type posts I keep seeing?<p>Is the web really dying or being destroyed? I don&#x27;t get how it is and this article doesn&#x27;t explain this either.

Is there no link to the post apart from the top-level link to the blog?

The solution is simple. Can some cloudflare engineers here grant this search engine the same access it gives the chinese ones?

So some bizarre and absolutely insignificant search engine is ranting about being irrelevant? Good for them.

Google seems to be destroying itself, fortunately. The search results got so bad after the recent changes that for the first time duckduckgo is superior, even for technical searches.<p>I&#x27;m slowly making the switch now.