Jul 7, 2025 Current Resources

Re: Captchas on Cloudflare-Proxied Sites

nanog mailing list archives

From: nanog--- via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:42:48 +0200

I've never tried it, but allegedly, if you want to block sites from your search results, Kagi can do this.

It's a paid product. Hopefully that results in better incentive alignment. Google has been caught showing worse results 
on purpose, so you'll view more pages of results and therefore more ads.


On 2 July 2025 4:03:52 am GMT+02:00, "Constantine A. Murenin via NANOG" <nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:

On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 at 09:15, Brandon Butterworth via NANOG
<nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:


On 01/07/2025 15:05:16, "Johannes Müller Aguilar via NANOG"
<nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:

For about a month, users behind IP addresses we announce have been prompted to solve captchas when accessing 
Cloudflare-proxied sites.


I've seen that increase and now regularly get it on home
broadband services, others have reported this too. I suspect
many are getting it and assumed this is the new normal.

I'm seeing this on StackOverflow / StackExchange on my home broadband as well.

Having to wait half a minute to glance at a search result completely
ruins the use-case for said result. If your time is worth $120/h,
that's a $1 for each StackOverflow visit just to open the page,
obviously it's cheaper to use AI at that point, so, no idea what
they're thinking killing their own market.

I wish Google Search would let people blacklist StackOverflow as long
as they're a Cloudflare user; or, heck, anything with these captchas.
It's effectively just search spam with all those captchas.

But the "best" part about the security industry, is that because I do
close the window in less than a second, Cloudflare probably reports my
visit attempt as saving StackOverflow from yet another bot! "Look how
many bots we've saved you from!"

I'd like to see the metrics from Cloudflare and the other captcha
vendors on how they justify wasting billions of dollars in lost
productivity. It probably costs way-way-way-way less than $0.01 to
serve a page for which the legitimate users must now waste $1 in lost
income. There's probably a 10000x amplification factor for real users
wasting resources compared to how much resources are saved from the
most basic bots that can't get through, bravo! All for what?

Did anyone think of the environment, how much computing resources are
wasted by everyone proving that they're not a bot?

C.
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