Web Bot Auth

Cloudflare's verified bots program is a terrible idea. They want to be the central chokepoint for agents, and they're doing it in shady ways like auto enrolling customers into blocking agents.

That’s not shady, that’s awesome customer value! Bot blocking as Default option is a great choice for all of us.

It's discriminatory against robots and helps make the web even more locked down. DRM never works; the analog hole is always the nuclear option.

In the end, only people with non-mainstream browsers (or using VPN to escape country-level blocks, or Tor, or noJS) suffer.

It's like how anti-piracy measures only affect paying customers, while pirates ironically get a better experience. The best way to get around endless CAPTCHAs is to just use LLMs instead.