They also gate away a good many people with their "bot protection". I am extremely worried about how so many seem to have outsourced the control over who can access their websites to a company, with no second thoughts whatsoever.
I think the Web is on its last legs, anyway. Generative AI and LLM-instead-of-search has destroyed what little value remained.
Bot protection with fingerprinting is just an illusion. Any signals like this which is on client side can be spoofed by an above average person. Fingerprinting is just way to consolidate the market for advertising business. Assigning Reputation to residential IP addresses and commercial blocks is is another approach to achieve the desired result. Providers would be a lot more careful to allow their IP addresses for misuses, however turns out that it would bring down the DDOS business on both sides, attackers and protectors.
Ironically, more than often its the same companies that invest in building their own bots and finding ways to stop bots from other companies.
More to the point, these systems actually help scraping because proof of work unlocks essentially unlimited scraping, in my experience.
That said - from my experience on the other side, sure you can’t stop people like me or you, but you can stop 99% of the others. That ’s more than worth it operationally.
Can you expand? I don't see a problem with some napkin math. 5W load for 2 seconds is 0.002Wh (we have to let smartphones pass and not by doing PoW for 10s of seconds). 8 billion checks a day for a year = 8GWh.
In any case, according to some napkin math done by Kimi 2.6 (which by itself is probably already consuming more than all of my PoW challenges for the upcoming 5 years) - the situation looks incredibly in favor of PoW: https://www.kimi.com/share/19e7ef40-a432-8912-8000-0000b4a71...
Which makes me wonder why CloudFlare isn't switching to this already
Firefox with a non-default profile can be created like that:
./firefox -CreateProfile "profile-name /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/profile-dir/"
# For, say, cloudflare that would be:
./firefox -CreateProfile "cloudflare /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/cloudflare/"
./firefox -profile "/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/profile-dir/"
# For cloudflare that would be:
./firefox -profile "/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/cloudflare/"
- create a copy of it, say, /usr/bin/firefox-cloudflare
- adjust the relevant line, adding the -profile argument
Of course, "./firefox" from examples above should be replaced with the actual path to executable. For default installation of Firefox the path would be in /usr/bin/firefox script.
So, you can have a separate profiles for something sensitive/invasive (linkedin, cloudflare, shops, banks, etc.) and then you can have a separate profile for everything else.
And each profile can have its own set of extensions.
(That said, I still keep separate machines. One for doing "official" things, the other for everything else)
I think this was as recent as 25 years ago?
Recently they added some new UI. There was and still is (I think) classic Profile Manager UI, which you can launch with
./firefox -ProfileManager
But you don't have to use any of those anyway - see my comment above (a response to parent).
does it? same binary, same machine, same display, same 781 other heuristics.