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The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

(positiveblue.substack.com)
454 points positiveblue | 3 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.408s | source
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dlcarrier ◴[29 Aug 25 17:20 UTC] No.45066858[source]▶
I use uncommon web browsers that don't leak a lot of information. To Cloudflare, I am indistingushable from a bot.

Privacy cannot exist in an environment where the host gets to decide who access the web page. I'm okay with rate limiting or otherwise blocking activity that creates too much of a load, but trying to prevent automated access is impossible withou preventing access from real people.

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verdverm ◴[29 Aug 25 17:27 UTC] No.45066957[source]▶
The website owner has rights too. Are you arguing they cannot choose to implement such gatekeeping to keep their site operating in a financially viable manner?
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SoftTalker ◴[29 Aug 25 17:41 UTC] No.45067158[source]▶
If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how. If you want to make money from it, put up a paywall.

If you want the best of both worlds, i.e. just post freely but make money from ads, or inserting hidden pixels to update some profile about me, well good luck. I'll choose whether I want to look at ads, or load tracking pixels, and my answer is no.

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1. rustc ◴[29 Aug 25 17:49 UTC] No.45067241[source]▶
> If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how.

Does this only apply to "information" or should we treat all open source code as public domain?

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2. pessimizer ◴[29 Aug 25 18:21 UTC] No.45067646[source]▶
All "open source" code was already pretty much public domain. All they'd have to do was put a page of OSI-approved licenses up on the site, right? An index of Open Source projects and their authors? Is this more than a weeks work to comply?

Free Software is the only place where this is a real abridgement of rights and intention, and it's over. They've already been trained on all of it, and no judge will tell them to stop, and no congressman will tell them to stop.

3. somerandom2407 ◴[30 Aug 25 06:09 UTC] No.45072286[source]▶
In a lot of circumstances, that is exactly the case. What the open source license stops is redistribution under terms that violate the license, not usage itself. An individual can very well take your open source code, make any changes they want, compile and use it for their own purposes without adhering to the terms of your license - as long as they don't redistribute it.