[HN Gopher] ChatGPT Won't Let You Type Until Cloudflare Reads Yo...
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ChatGPT Won't Let You Type Until Cloudflare Reads Your React State
Author : alberto-m
Score : 227 points
Date : 2026-03-29 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.buchodi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.buchodi.com)
| beering wrote:
| So are you able to get free inference now that you decrypted
| this?
| superkuh wrote:
| It doesn't look like it in the full sense of "free". But part
| of how one pays these services is by running a permissive
| modern browser which allows the corporation to spy on you even
| when you already paid in currency. In a sense by depriving them
| of the ability to easily spy on your this workaround is closer
| to "free".
| voxic11 wrote:
| But isn't ChatGPT access free through the browser? What do
| you mean already paid in currency?
| beering wrote:
| They already see everything I'm doing because I send my
| prompts to them. What "workaround" are you referring to?
| superkuh wrote:
| They see everything your doing because you send the text.
| But this is talking about everything about your computer
| system. You would not normally be sending this to them or
| having it involved at all. This workaround allows you to
| not involve unneeded information about your computer setup.
| It is not about avoiding sending prompt text.
|
| And as for "but chatgpt isn't paid" (another commenter),
| well, then yes, that's even closer to free by removing this
| spying on your computer setup. But they spy on the paid
| users too.
| gruez wrote:
| >My best guess is -- ChatGPT is running something in your
| browser to try to determine the best things to send down to
| the model API
|
| There's no way this is worth it unless the models are
| absolutely tiny, in which case any benefits from offloading
| to the client is marginal and probably isn't worth the
| engineering effort.
| tripdout wrote:
| AI-written article?
| avazhi wrote:
| Yep. I flag these as spam at this point.
| petcat wrote:
| > These properties only exist if the ChatGPT React application
| has fully rendered and hydrated. A headless browser that loads
| the HTML but doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have
| them. A bot framework that stubs out browser APIs but doesn't
| actually run React won't have them.
|
| > This is bot detection at the application layer, not the browser
| layer.
|
| I kind of just assumed that all sophisticated bot-detectors and
| adblock-detectors do this? Is there something revealing about the
| finding that ChatGPT/CloudFlare's bot detector triggers on
| "javascript didn't execute"?
| ripbozo wrote:
| and chatgpt was then used to write this article. at least try to
| clean it up a bit
| hx8 wrote:
| Ah yes, the timeless hallmark of web blogs: a draft so messy
| even a language model would ask for a second pass.
| simonw wrote:
| Presumably this is all because OpenAI offers free ChatGPT to
| logged out users and don't want that being abused as a free API
| endpoint.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| Yup.
|
| Coincidentally about an hour ago, I wanted to look something up
| in ChatGPT and I happened to be in a browser window I don't
| normally use, with no logged in accounts. I assumed it wouldn't
| work, but to my surprise with no account, no cookies of any
| kind it took my query and gave me an answer.
| gruez wrote:
| >I assumed it wouldn't work, but to my surprise with no
| account, no cookies of any kind it took my query and gave me
| an answer.
|
| They allowed anonymous requests for months now, maybe even a
| year.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I used to mostly use chatgpt in an incognito tab, logged out.
| Until I notice it seems to have some context of my logged in
| session, and of the logged out as well. It may be paranoia or
| prompt deduction as well but that felt strange.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Yeah it works but it's a dumber model. Prob mini
| NotPractical wrote:
| But do they do it whether you're logged in or not?
|
| I noticed the ChatGPT app also checks Play Integrity on Android
| (because GrapheneOS snitches on apps when they do this),
| probably for the same reason. Claude's app doesn't, by the way,
| but it also requires a login.
| Gander5739 wrote:
| Because accounts are free, and could still be used to abuse
| as a free endpoint, with a little trickiness.
| thisisnow wrote:
| Its probably same for copilot.microsoft.com and their cloudfart
| usage
| darepublic wrote:
| Using 5.2 at 20 a month would also be a steal. Other shoe will
| drop on codex sooner or later
| Chance-Device wrote:
| Perhaps the author should have made it clearer why we should care
| about any of this. OpenAI want you to use their real react app.
| That's... ok? I skimmed the article looking for the punchline and
| there doesn't seem to be one.
| elwebmaster wrote:
| That's because the article is AI slop.
| gobdovan wrote:
| Imagine if they'd put as much effort into making a decent
| frontend experience.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I just don't understand why bot owners can't just run a complete
| windows 11 VM running Google Chrome complete with graphics
| acceleration.
|
| You can probably run 50 of those simultaneously if you use memory
| page deduplication, and with a decent CPU+GPU you ought to be
| able to render 50 pages a second. That's 1 cent per thousand page
| loads on AWS. Damn cheap.
| poly2it wrote:
| If you know of a simple way to run a Windows 11 VM with good
| graphics acceleration (no GPU passthrough), please contact me.
| MarioMan wrote:
| I assume your concern with GPU passthrough is that each VM
| needs a whole GPU? You can use GPU-PV to split your GPU
| between VM instances. Then the main bottleneck becomes how
| thin you split out your VRAM.
|
| More info here:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231107182321/https://mu0.cc/20.
| ..
|
| https://youtu.be/XLLcc29EZ_8?t=570
|
| https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV
| huertouisj wrote:
| there are scraping subreddits.
|
| if you browse them you will see that bot writers are very
| annoyed if they can't scrape a site with a headless browser.
|
| you can do what you suggested, but with Linux VMs/containers.
| windows is too heavy, each VM will cost you 4 GB of RAM
| jaccola wrote:
| There are myriad providers competing to offer this, nicely
| packaged with all the accoutrements (IP rotation, location
| spoofing, language settings, prebuilt parsers, etc.) behind an
| easy to use API.
|
| Honestly it is a very healthy competitive market with
| reasonably low switching costs which drives prices down. These
| circumstances make rolling your own a tough sell.
| lxgr wrote:
| It's absurd how unusable Cloudflare is making the web when using
| a browser or IP address they consider "suspicious". I've lately
| been drowning in captchas for the crime of using Firefox. All in
| the interest of "bot protection", of course.
| onion2k wrote:
| Is that because botnets spoof being Firefox? It's not really
| fair to blame Cloudflare it is. That's on the bots.
| conradkay wrote:
| Not really, there's camoufox but the vast majority use
| modified chrome/chromium
| doctaj wrote:
| In what way would that not be fair? Their product giving
| false positives (unnecessary challenges for a normal browser
| humans commonly use) to real people is definitely their
| fault.
| gruez wrote:
| >Their product giving false positives (unnecessary
| challenges for a normal browser humans commonly use) to
| real people is definitely their fault.
|
| Is it TSA's "fault" that non-terrorists are subject to
| screening?
| forkerenok wrote:
| We're discussing the quality of screening here, not the
| act/necessity of screening itself.
| gruez wrote:
| >We're discussing the quality of screening here
|
| The "quality" of TSA's screening seems be pretty bad too
| given how many people have to go through secondary
| screening vs how many terrorist they catch (0?)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| They are failing to meet there quotas of shooting
| innocent people in the face, so ICE is helping out.
| bdangubic wrote:
| they caught 11 million by now (just as arbitrary as your
| 0 but probably more accurate since we haven't had a large
| terrorist attack since they got the gig to serve and
| protect and before we lost thousands of lives...)
| lxgr wrote:
| No, but it's entirely within TSA's hands to make that
| process as frictionless as possible.
|
| (It's a different question whether zero friction is
| actually desired, or whether some security theater is
| actually part of the service being provided, but that's a
| different question.)
| lxgr wrote:
| No, using a stupid authentication/verification method with
| lots of false positives is always on whoever deploys it.
|
| Imagine an apartment building with a flimsy front door lock
| that breaks all the time, and the landlord only telling you
| that that can't be helped because of all the burglars.
| josephcsible wrote:
| If it's just as easy to spoof being Chrome as it is to spoof
| being Firefox, then it is indeed fair to blame Cloudflare if
| they give Firefox users more CAPTCHAs than Chrome users.
| EGreg wrote:
| Well, that's for the public internet.
|
| I'm building Safebox and Safecloud, where this won't be the
| case anymore. Not only will you have a decentralized hosting
| network that can sideload resources (e.g. via a browser
| extension that looks at your "integrity" attribute on websites)
| but also the websites will require you to be logged in with a
| HMAC-signed session ID (which means they don't need to do any
| I/O to reject your requests, and can do so quickly)... so the
| whole thing comes down to having a logged in account.
|
| https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud
|
| As far as server-to-server requests, they'll be coming from a
| growing network of cryptographically attested TPMs (Nitro in
| AWS, also available in GCP, IBM, Azure, Oracle etc.) so they'll
| just reject based on attestations also.
|
| In short... the cryptographically attested web of trust will
| mean you won't need cloudflare. What you will need, however, to
| prevent sybil attacks, is age verification of accounts (e.g.
| Telegram ID is a proxy for that if you use Telegram for
| authentication).
| password4321 wrote:
| Wow, if Seinfeld can have a soup nazi, I think it's within
| reason for you to be called the internet nazi.
|
| "No soup internet for you!"
|
| Good luck!
| ale42 wrote:
| This was sarcasm, right?
| danielheath wrote:
| Maybe check your network isn't sending web traffic you're not
| aware of?
|
| I'm running firefox and seeing the normal amount.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Every so often, usually after a firefox update, CF will get
| into a "I'm convinced your a bot" mode with me. I can get out
| of it by solving 20 CAPTCHAs.
| hansvm wrote:
| It's probably just a higher rate of autonomous vehicles
| needing stop signs and buses identified at that moment, and
| cognitive bias causes you to only remember when that
| happens when you recently performed an update. /s
| gruez wrote:
| >It's probably just a higher rate of autonomous vehicles
| needing stop signs and buses identified at that moment
|
| I can't tell whether you're serious but in case you are,
| this theory immediately falls apart when you realize
| waymo operates at night but there aren't any night
| photos.
| hansvm wrote:
| Thanks for the comment. Lack of seriousness is now
| appropriately indicated.
| cogman10 wrote:
| My assumption is that CF has something like a SVM that
| it's feeding a bunch of datapoints into for bot
| detection. Go over some threshold and you end up in the
| CAPTCHA jail.
|
| I'm certain the User-Agent is part of it. I know that for
| certain because a very reliable way I can trigger the CF
| stuff is this plugin with the wrong browser selected [1].
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/
| jychang wrote:
| Most people are on a CGNAT these days, drowning in captchas
| is the new normal. You're at the mercy of one of your
| neighbors not hosting a botnet from their home computer.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Not even remotely true, I genuinely have no idea what
| you're talking about. The only time I get captcha'ed is
| when I sometimes VPN around, or do some custom browser
| stuff and etc. I'll even say I get captcha'ed less now than
| maybe 5 years ago.
| perching_aix wrote:
| For better or for worse, CF's fingerprinting and traffic
| filtering is a lot more in-depth than just IP trend
| analysis. Kind of by necessity, exactly because of what you
| mention. So I'd think that's not as big a worry per se.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a while,
| so it's quite a big worry for me.
|
| Maybe I just have to disable all ad blockers and Safari
| tracking prevention? Or I guess I could send a link to a
| scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like
| X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?
| perching_aix wrote:
| > Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a
| while, so it's quite a big worry for me.
|
| I think I was sufficiently clear that I was specifically
| talking about CGNAT-caused IP address tainting being an
| unreasonably emphasized worry, not the worry about their
| detections overall misfiring. Though I certainly don't
| hear much about people having issues with it (but then
| anecdotes are anecdotal).
|
| > Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID
| in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-
| I-Use-Your-Open-Web?
|
| Sounds good, have you tried?
|
| Not sure what's the point of these comically asinine
| rhetoricals.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Maybe you allow tracking and cookies?
| Eji1700 wrote:
| I don't, and I rarely have issues with firefox. Private +
| blockers + VPN causes, expected, issues but otherwise i'm
| usually fine?
| lucasfin000 wrote:
| The real frustrating part is that Cloudflare's "definition" of
| suspicious keeps changing and expanding. VPN users, privacy-
| first browsers, uncommon IP ranges, they all get flagged. The
| people most likely to get caught by these systems are exactly
| the ones who care most about their privacy, and not the bots
| that they are apparently targeting.
| gruez wrote:
| >The real frustrating part is that Cloudflare's "definition"
| of suspicious keeps changing and expanding.
|
| That's... exactly expected? It's a cat and mouse game. People
| running botnets or AI scrapers aren't diligently setting the
| evil bit on their packets.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| That's _obviously_ because they're not being "evil"
| lxgr wrote:
| So the stable state here is all humans eventually being
| locked out? (Bots are getting better every day; I doubt the
| same is true for all humans, including those with weird
| browsers or networks unwilling to install some dystopian
| Cloudflare "Internet passport".)
|
| But hey, at least _some_ bots are also not making it past
| Cloudflare!
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| Which VPNs are people using that actually care about the
| user's privacy? Most of them don't, sell their home IP to
| buyers, sell their DNS history to others, etc. Worse, some of
| them could require invasive MITM cert stuff most users will
| just click yes through.
|
| I have yet to see a use case for VPNs for the casual internet
| audience, and for a tech savvy user, their better off renting
| through some datacenter or something, which at that point is
| hardly a VPN and more home IP obfuscation. All the same
| downsides, and at least you get real privacy.
| gruez wrote:
| >Most of them don't, sell their home IP to buyers, sell
| their DNS history to others, etc. Worse, some of them could
| require invasive MITM cert stuff most users will just click
| yes through.
|
| Source? I haven't seen any evidence that the major _paid_
| VPN providers engage in any of those things. At best it 's
| vague implications something shady is happening because one
| of the key people was previously at [shady organization].
| evilduck wrote:
| Using any popular datacenter's IP range for a personal VPN
| is likely to be outright blocked.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Also you only get 1 IP so its not really anonymous and
| you definitely would have a fingerprint.
| thisisnow wrote:
| you just rotate it?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| ProtonVPN with bitcoin which you get from a monero swap is
| a good idea for complete privacy if you want port
| forwarding.
|
| MullvadVPN is also another great one.
|
| I have heard some good things about AirVPN, but I can
| absolutely attest for mullvad and to a degree ProtonVPN
| (Just with Proton, depending upon your threat model, do
| make the necessary precautions like buying with monero for
| example)
|
| There are others, but mostly its the 2-3 that I trust.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Which VPNs are people using that actually care about the
| user's privacy?
|
| Mullvad.
|
| It has been proven in a court of law that when Mullvad says
| "no logging", they mean it.
|
| They also regularly have security audits and publish the
| results[2][3]
|
| [1]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-
| a-sea... [2]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/new-security-audit-
| of-account-an... [3]https://mullvad.net/en/blog/successful-
| security-assessment-o...
| thisisnow wrote:
| Second for Mullvad, I am quite distrusting in general but
| more I know about Mullvad, more I am convinced they
| really are serious about user privacy
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm forced to use a VPN to occasionally check my US bank
| account, since a foreign IP address is obviously a
| harbinger of unspeakable evil (while the friendly Youtube
| advertised neighborhood VPN is obviously evidence of pure
| intentions).
| dheera wrote:
| Exactly. For the most part all this bot protection is only
| protecting these websites against humans.
|
| I don't do free work. I'm not going to label 50 images of
| crosswalks and motorcycles for free.
| ronbenton wrote:
| > For the most part all this bot protection is only
| protecting these websites against humans.
|
| Curious how do you know this?
| andy99 wrote:
| Yes they've successfully made us regress back 20+ years in
| terms of wait times. Like reCaptcha and other user hostile
| stuff, I try not to frequent and certainly not buy anything
| from websites that treat me like this. I actually cancelled my
| chat GPT subscription almost two years ago now because they
| were making me solve puzzles instead of letting me use the
| software I paid for.
|
| It's worth remembering how replaceable basically all websites
| and software are and how little value they add. There's no
| reason to reward or tolerate those that noticeably degrade
| performance with couldflare et al
| ehnto wrote:
| I recently had the insane experience of filling out 15
| consecutive captchas, after, I had checked out and entered my
| payment information into the payment processor widget. I just
| wanted to submit the order. I was logged in to their website,
| and the bank even needed a one time code for payment. If the
| bank is pretty sure I am human then your ecomm site can figure
| it out surely.
| amatecha wrote:
| A while back I was buying tickets for a gondola for a trip in
| Europe and the checkout process failed during payment because
| their site didn't load their analytics/tracking stuff with
| proper error-handling, so when my ad-blocker prevented the
| tracking stuff, their checkout process failed to handle my
| CC's 2-factor auth and the checkout would fail. Had to
| contact my CC company and work with the gondola company to
| tell them what they're doing wrong so they could fix their
| website code. Pretty sad to know whoever built their stuff
| actually shipped a checkout flow (for a VERY popular tourist
| destination) without testing with ad-blockers enabled.
| lxgr wrote:
| To be fair, this sometimes seems on the ad blocker. I've
| definitely seen mine accidentally nuke part of the payment
| Javascript (or maybe the 3DS iframe?) because some
| substring of it matched some common ad URL, which is
| obviously unrecoverable for the site itself.
| lxgr wrote:
| That's my favorite combination: Shitty bot detection meeting
| shitty payment security systems.
|
| At least outside the US, there's 3DS as an (admittedly often
| high friction) high quality cardholder verification method,
| but in the US, that's of course considered much too consumer-
| hostile, so "select 87 overpasses" it is.
| amatecha wrote:
| These days I just close sites that show that "checking if
| you're a bot" shit. If this is how the web is going to be now,
| I don't care, I'll just not use it. I didn't need to see that
| article or post that badly anyways. I'm tired of paying the
| price for the sociopathic, greedy actions of others. It's
| especially bad for anyone who uses an open source OS like Linux
| or *BSD (to the extent many sites just block me automatically
| with a 403 Forbidden simply for using OpenBSD + Firefox,
| completely free pass if I try the same site from a Windows or
| Linux computer).
| jgalt212 wrote:
| We use Cloudflare to protect our content, but at the same
| time our machines mostly run Linux / Firefox so it really is
| quite a frustrating relationship. It really bums me out how
| much of Turnstile boils down to these two questions:
|
| is it Linux (or similar)?
|
| is it Firefox?
|
| If yes, to one or both, you're blocked! Clearly millions of
| dollars of engineering talent and petabytes of data
| collection should be able to come up with something more
| nuanced than this.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I've been getting it in safari too. It's ridiculous frankly. My
| residential ip must have been flagged or something. The part
| that's really annoying is its trivial for bots to bypass.
| lxgr wrote:
| > I've been getting it in safari too.
|
| I'm getting it on iCloud Private Relay all the time. It
| honestly makes it kind of useless.
|
| Maybe that's the point? But then again, doesn't Cloudflare
| run part of it!? And wasn't there some "privacy-preserving
| captcha replacement" that iOS devices should already be
| opting me in to? So many questions, nobody there to answer
| them, because they can get away with it.
|
| > The part that's really annoying is its trivial for bots to
| bypass.
|
| Not the ethical bots, though! My GPT-backed Openclaw
| staunchly refuses to go anywhere near a "I'm not a robot"
| button.
| girvo wrote:
| Surprising really, because I'm a Firefox + Ublock Origin die
| hard and I never get Cloudflare captchas. Wonder what the
| difference is? I have CGNAT turned off, if that matters at all
| (probably not).
| lxgr wrote:
| I could definitely imagine a public IPv4 with lots of good,
| logged-in Cloudflare traffic to act as a positive signal for
| their heuristics, possibly even overriding the Firefox
| penalty.
| binaryturtle wrote:
| I'm with a slightly older Firefox and can't use many websites
| at all anymore because the Cloudflare cancer.
|
| Of course then you got sites like gnu.org too that block you
| because your slightly outdated user agent.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Is anyone talking about the fact that this is a fundamental
| design flaw of the web? Or arguably even the entire Internet?
| 3form wrote:
| It's hard to call something a "fundamental flaw of web" if it
| wasn't an issue for 30 years. Unless you mean something more
| general that I'm missing.
| EGreg wrote:
| Why does ChatGPT slow down so much when the conversations get
| long, while Claude does compaction?
|
| My best guess is -- ChatGPT is running something in your browser
| to try to determine the best things to send down to the model API
| -- when it should have been running quantized models on its own
| server.
| heliumtera wrote:
| I am shocked openai collects data about it's users before users
| have the opportunity to send the same data to openai servers!
| aslihana wrote:
| I mean, I can easily get them to behaving defensively for not
| being abused. But MBP with M5 here, my chatgpt tab always get
| stucked when I hit some prompt.
|
| Really really bad user experience, wondering about when they will
| leave this approach.
| blinkbat wrote:
| Ok... so... ?
| natdempk wrote:
| Does anyone know how this is integrated on the Cloudflare side
| and across the app? Is this beyond standard turnstile? Is this
| custom/enterprise functionality? Something else?
| refulgentis wrote:
| If you have AI write a blog post for ya, when you think it's set,
| check word count (can c+p to google docs if AI can't pull it off
| with built in tools), and ask it to identify repetitions if it's
| over 1000.
|
| Also, you can have it spotcheck colors: light orange on light
| background is unreadable, ask it to find the L*[1] of colors and
| dark/lighten as necessary if gap < 40 (that's minimum gap for
| yuge header text on background, 50 for text on background, these
| have gap of 25)
|
| I haven't tried this yet, but, maybe have it count word count-
| per-header too. It's got 11 headers for 1000 words currently,
| makes reading feel really stacatto and you gotta evaluate "is
| this a real transition or vibetransition"
|
| [1] L* as in L*a*b*, not L in Oklab
| themafia wrote:
| My theory is that "AI" doesn't really have any long term paying
| customers and the majority of the "users" are people who have
| cooked up some clever hack to effectively siphon computing power
| from these providers in an effort to crank out the lowest effort
| ad supported slop imaginable.
|
| Every provider seems to have been plauged by these freeloaders to
| such an extent that they've had to develop extreme and onerous
| countermeasures just to avoid losing their shirts.
|
| What's the word? Schadenfreude?
| pencilcode wrote:
| ai slop analysis finding CF detects non javascript capable
| browsers with no punchline
| MyNameIsNickT wrote:
| Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks
| are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse
| like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the
| platform.
|
| A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free
| and logged-out access available for more users. My team's goal is
| to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real
| users.
|
| We also keep a very close eye on the user impact. We monitor
| things like page load time, time to first token and payload size,
| with a focus on reducing the overhead of these protections. For
| the majority of people, the impact is negligible, and only a very
| small percentage may see a slight delay from extra checks. We
| also continuously evaluate precision so we can minimize false
| positives while still making abuse meaningfully harder.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Have you given any thought to what we trade when big tech
| elects one corporation as the gatekeeper for vast swaths of the
| Internet?
| sebmellen wrote:
| Great to hear from a first-party source. I'm a Pro subscriber
| and my team spends well over two thousand dollars per month on
| OpenAI subscriptions. However, even when I'm logged in with my
| Pro account, if I'm using a VPN provider like Mullvad, I often
| have trouble using the chat interface or I get timeout errors.
|
| Is this to be expected? I would presume that if I'm
| authenticated and paying, VPN use wouldn't be a worry. It would
| be nice to be able to use the tool whether or not I'm on a VPN.
| mehov wrote:
| > because we want to keep free and logged-out access
|
| But don't you run these checks on logged-in users too?
| MyNameIsNickT wrote:
| Yep, on logged-in users too. The reason is basically the
| same: we want scarce compute going to real people, not
| attackers. Being logged in is one useful signal, but it
| doesn't fully prevent automation, account abuse, or other
| malicious traffic, so we apply protections in both cases.
| angoragoats wrote:
| Nothing you do can fully prevent automation. Someone who
| wants to automate requests badly enough will be able to do
| it, especially when the "protections" are as easy to
| decrypt and analyze as the OP proved.
|
| Meanwhile, the rest of us (well, not me, because I don't
| use your garbage product, but lots of others do) have to
| suffer and have our compute resources used up in the name
| of "protection."
| 3form wrote:
| Yeah, that's it. Also, it is a bit amusing to me - "We
| want to prevent automation", says the employee of Let's
| Automate Inc.
| salawat wrote:
| More like "We want your money, but don't want to provide
| service." Are you sure OpenAI isn't morphing into a
| finance/insurance company?
| piskov wrote:
| Tangential question: are there chatgpt app devs on X? There are
| a few from Codex team but I couldn't find guys from "ordinary"
| chatgpt.
|
| Also if you could pass this over: it takes 5 taps to change
| thinking effort on ios and none (as in completely hidden) on
| macos.
|
| If I were to guess it seems that you were trying to lower the
| token usage :-). Why the effort is only nicely available on web
| and windows is beyond me
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Hi! It's all perfectly understandable - after all, we use
| things like Anubis to protect our services from OpenAI and
| similar actors and keep them available to the real users for
| exactly the same reasons.
| andrepd wrote:
| > OpenAI: These checks are part of how we protect products from
| abuse _like bots, scraping_ , and other attempts to misuse the
| platform.
|
| This would be _fucking HILARIOUS_ if it wasn 't so tragic.
| Chance-Device wrote:
| It can be both
| rchaud wrote:
| Manifest destiny for me, border enforcement for thee.
| c0_0p_ wrote:
| Can't have those bots or scrapers running amok can we...
| everdrive wrote:
| It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two
| browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so
| that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to
| prevent tracking users across the web.
|
| Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd
| need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a
| world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and
| functionality?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Firefox multicontainers are pretty cool. But it's an advanced
| process that most people wouldn't do or do correctly.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| The possibilities with Firefox multi containers and
| automation scripts as well are truly endless.
|
| It's also possible to make Firefox route each container
| through a different proxy which could be running locally
| even which then can connect to multiple different VPN's. I
| haven't tried doing that but its certainly possible.
|
| It's sort of possible to run different browsers with
| completely new identities and sometimes IP within the
| convenience of one. It's really underrated. I don't use the
| IP part of this that I have mentioned but I use multi
| containers quite a lot on zen and they are kind of core
| part of how I browse the web and there are many cool things
| which can be done/have been done with them.
| Sabinus wrote:
| I love the containers too. My current use case is to keep
| my YouTube account separate from my Google one. Google
| doesn't need all that behavioural data in one place.
|
| It's a pity Firefox doesn't get the praise it deserves half
| as much as it cops criticism.
| halJordan wrote:
| [delayed]
| 0x3f wrote:
| Meet me in a cafe and I will sign a JWT saying you're not a
| bot. You can submit this to whoever will accept it.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Sounds like we're bringing back the PGP key signing parties
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The sooner we do the better.
| hathawsh wrote:
| I wonder what the PGP signing concept does to thwart
| people who want to profit and don't care about the public
| good. It seems like anyone who attends a signing party
| can sell their key to the highest bidder, leading to bots
| and spammers all over again.
| magicseth wrote:
| If apple approves it, ive got a solution: A keyboardthat
| attests to your humanity https://typed.by/magicseth/2451#2N
| yGLfAQxmqRiAOTlaX7ma3G4d1o...
| mzajc wrote:
| Brilliant! Just the thing we want: more hardware
| attestation, more deanonymization, less user control, all
| diligently orchestrated in a repository where the only
| contributor is Anthropic Claude [0]. Comes complete with
| a misaligned ASCII diagram in the README to show how much
| effort the humans behind it put in!
|
| Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is
| written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash>
| it's Y" style.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/magicseth/keywitness/graphs/contr
| ibutors
| delish wrote:
| Those are all situationally-valid criticisms, but I've
| long thought the ability to have smartphones' cameras
| cryptographically sign photos is good when available. The
| use case is demonstrating a photo wasn't doctored, and
| that it came from a device associated with e.g. a
| journalist, who maintains a public key. Of course, it
| should be optional.
| Arainach wrote:
| > Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is
| written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash>
| it's Y" style.
|
| ....no. There's not a single occurrence of that.
|
| https://keywitness.io/manifesto
|
| There are six emdashes on that page. NONE of them are
| "it's not X it's why".
|
| > Emails, messages, essays, code reviews, love letters --
| all suspect.
|
| > We believe this can be solved -- not by detecting AI,
| but by proving humanity.
|
| > KeyWitness captures cryptographic proof at the point of
| input -- the keyboard.
|
| > When you seal a message, the keyboard builds a W3C
| Verifiable Credential -- a self-contained proof that can
| be verified by anyone, anywhere, without trusting us or
| any central authority.
|
| > That's an alphabet of 774 symbols -- each carrying
| log2(774) [?] 9.6 bits. 27 emoji for 256 bits.
|
| > They're a declaration: this message was written by a
| person -- one of the diverse, imperfect, irreplaceable
| humans who still choose to type their own words.
|
| Clarifications: 4
|
| Continuation from a list: 1
|
| Could just be a comma: 1
|
| "It's not X -- it's Y": 0.
|
| If you're going to make lazy commentary about good
| writing being AI, please at least be sure that _you 're_
| reading the content and saying accurate things.
| scoofy wrote:
| Somewhere there is someone 3D printing a keyboard cover
| that an llm can type with.
| Velocifyer wrote:
| This does not prove anything and it is only avalible to
| users with X.com accounts (you need a X.com account to
| download the app).
| tshaddox wrote:
| Doesn't really make sense, because any service can just say
| "you must paste your human-attestation JWT here to use this
| service" and plenty of people will.
| 0x3f wrote:
| You can just decay your trust level based on the `iat`
| value. That way people will need to keep buying me
| coffee. I can optionally chide them for giving out their
| token.
|
| If you're engaging with the idea seriously, I suppose
| we'd need to build a reputation or trust network or
| something.
| gruez wrote:
| >It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two
| browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so
| that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to
| prevent tracking users across the web.
|
| What are you talking about? It works fine with firefox with
| RFP and VPN enabled, which is already more paranoid than the
| average configuration. There are definitely sites where this
| configuration would get blocked, but chatgpt isn't one of
| them, so you're barking up the wrong tree here.
| madrox wrote:
| I am not Nick, but there's a few ways that world happens: the
| free tier goes away and what people pay for more correctly
| reflects what they use, this all becomes cheap enough that it
| doesn't matter, or we come up with an end to end method of
| determining usage is triggered by a person.
|
| Another way is to just do better isolation as a user. That's
| probably your best shot without hoping these companies change
| policies.
| mememememememo wrote:
| Local models for privacy.
|
| You want to go to the world's best hotel? You are gonna be on
| their CCTV. Staying at home is crappier but private.
|
| Unfortunately for the first time moores law isn't helping
| (give a poor person an old laptop anf install linux). They
| can do that and all good except no LLM.
| halflife wrote:
| Don't know if it's related to the article, but the chats ui
| performance becomes absolutely horrendous in long chats.
|
| Typing the chat box is slow, rendering lags and sometimes gets
| stuck altogether.
|
| I have a research chat that I have to think twice before
| messaging because the performance is so bad.
|
| Running on iPhone 16 safari, and MacBook Pro m3 chrome.
| stacktraceyo wrote:
| Same. It's wild how bad it can get with just like a normal
| longer running conversation
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah just had this earlier today, I had to write my response
| in vscode and paste it in, there were literal seconds of lag
| for typing each character. Typical bloated React.
| scq wrote:
| Just because a web application uses React and is slow, it
| does not follow that it is slow _because of_ React.
|
| It's perfectly possible to write fast or slow web
| applications in React, same as any other framework.
|
| Linear is one of the snappiest web applications I've ever
| used, and it is written in React.
| DenisM wrote:
| In the good old days Netflix had "Dynamic HTML" code that
| would take a DOM element which scrolled out of view port and
| move it to the position where it was about to be scrolled in
| from the other end. Hence he number of DOM elements stayed
| constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that
| grows is the Y coordinate.
|
| They did it because a lot of devices running Netflix (TVs,
| DVD players, etc) were underpowered and Netflix was not keen
| on writing separate applications. They did, however, invest
| into a browser engine that would have HW acceleration not
| just for video playback but also for moving DOM elements.
| Basically, sprites.
|
| The lost art of writing efficient code...
| zdragnar wrote:
| > Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter
| how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y
| coordinate.
|
| This is generally called virtual scrolling, and it is not
| only an option in many common table libraries, but there
| are plenty of standalone implementations and other
| libraries (lists and things) that offer it. The technique
| certainly didn't originate with Netflix.
| noosphr wrote:
| >These checks are part of how we protect our first-party
| products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other
| attempts to misuse the platform.
|
| Can you share these mitigations so we can mitigate against you?
| 0x3f wrote:
| It's just Cloudflare. Bypassing it is a whole industry.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Flaresolverr is one way. Isn't perfect but bypasses a lot.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| "abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse
| the platform"
|
| This has to be a joke, right?
| pera wrote:
| I really can't tell for sure (new user posting a ridiculously
| hypocritical corporate message on a Sunday) but if GP
| actually works for OpenAI the lack of self-awareness is
| seriously striking
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| How?
| vkou wrote:
| > Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These
| checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from
| abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse
| the platform.
|
| How can first-party products protect themselves from abuse by
| OpenAI's bots and scraping?
| mystraline wrote:
| This is a completely in-scope question.
|
| How do we defend against your scraping, OoenAI?
| quotemstr wrote:
| We really need ZKPs of humanity
| ctoth wrote:
| No, we really don't. We don't need worldcoin, we don't need
| papers, please. We just don't.
|
| "Prove your humanity/age/other properties" with this
| mechanism quickly goes places you do not want it to go.
| quotemstr wrote:
| No, it doesn't go places we "do not want it to go". What
| part of zero knowledge doesn't make sense? How precisely
| does a free, unlinkable, multi-vendor, open-source
| cryptographic attestation of recent humanity create
| something terrible?
| ctoth wrote:
| The ZK part isn't the problem. The "attestation of recent
| humanity" part is. Who attests? What happens when someone
| can't get attested?
|
| You've been to the doctor recently, right? Given them
| your SSN? Every identity system ever built was going to
| be scoped || voluntary. None of them stayed that way.
|
| Once you have the identity mechanism, "Oh it's zero
| knowledge! So let's use it for your age! Have you ever
| been convicted?" which leads to "mandated by employers"
| which leads to...
|
| We've seen this goddamn movie before. Let's just skip it
| this time? Please?
| dzikimarian wrote:
| The part where FAANG does usual Embrace, Extend,
| Extinguish, masses don't care/understand and we have yet
| another "sign in with... " that isn't open source nor
| zero-knowledge in practice and monetizes your every move.
| And probably at least one of the vendors has massive leak
| that shows half-assed or even flawed on purpose
| implementation.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| This is utter and complete bullshit. Why would "prevent typing"
| help abuse?
|
| There should be nothing submitted, except maybe anonymous
| telemetry metrics at that point.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| But is the title true, is typing specifically blocked? Or does
| it just block submitting the text?
|
| I ask because I have seen huge variations in load time.
| Sometimes I had to wait seconds until being able to type.
| Nowadays it seems better though.
| myHNAccount123 wrote:
| Can you fix the resizing text box issue on Safari when a new
| line is inserted? When your question wraps to a newline Safari
| locks up for a few seconds and it's really annoying. You can
| test by pasting text too.
| huertouisj wrote:
| sometimes I paste giant texts (think summarization) in the
| chatgpt (paid) webapp and I noticed that the CPU fans spin up
| for about 5 seconds after, as if the text is "processed" client
| side somehow. this is before hitting "submit" to send the
| prompt to the model.
|
| I assumed it was maybe some tokenization going on client side,
| but now I realize maybe it's some proof of work related to
| prompt length?
| rglullis wrote:
| I shouldn't be giving ideas to your boss, but I bet he would be
| interested in making ChatGPT available only by paying customers
| or free for those whose who gets their eyes scanned by The Orb.
| Give 30 days of raised limits and we're all set to live in the
| dystopia he wants.
| thegreatpeter wrote:
| You're doing gods work sir, thank you!
| pdntspa wrote:
| Y'all just salty that DeepSeek et al are training their LLMs on
| yours
| nickphx wrote:
| the irony of your statement is hilarious, disappointing, and
| infuriating.
| Imnimo wrote:
| It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a
| form of abuse.
| sabedevops wrote:
| Seriously. The hypocrisy is staggering!
| 0dayman wrote:
| Hi Nick, your software is a horrendous encroachment on users'
| privacy and its quality is subpar to those of us who know what
| we're working with. We don't use your product here.
| avazhi wrote:
| Another AI-slop article.
|
| Sick.
| darepublic wrote:
| I imagine to stop web automation from getting free API like use
| of the model
| CorneredCoroner wrote:
| > A headless browser that loads the HTML but doesn't execute the
| JavaScript bundle won't have them.
|
| this is meaningless btw. A browser headless or not does execute
| javascript.
| girvo wrote:
| A bunch of the points in this AI generated blog post were like
| that. Makes me feel dirty when I'm 1/3rd of the way through and
| I realise how off it is.
| jaccola wrote:
| I disagree, a browser _can_ have javascript execution disabled
| (and this is somewhat common in scraping to save time
| /resources).
|
| I read it to mean: "A browser that doesn't execute the
| JavaScript bundle won't have [the rendered React elements]."
| Which is true.
| thisisnow wrote:
| Hah, sure, you just let random JS execute from random sites on
| your machine...
| technion wrote:
| To prompt a discussion that's purely technical: I'm interested in
| how this was done.
|
| Specifically, Turnstile as far as I'm aware doesn't do anything
| specifically configurable or site specific. It works on sites
| that don't run React, and the cookie OpenAI-Sentinel-Turnstile-
| Token is not a CF cookie.
|
| Did OpenAI somehow do something on their own API that uses data
| from Turnstile?
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