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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: 0s | 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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lucb1e ◴[29 Aug 25 19:03 UTC] No.45068078[source]▶
The first article of our constitution says people shall be treated equally in equal situations. I presume that most countries have similar clauses but, beyond legalese, it's also simply in line with my ethics to treat everyone equally

There are people behind those connection requests. I don't try to guess on my server who is a bot and who is not; I'll make mistakes and probably bias against people who use uncommon setups (those needing accessibility aids or using e.g. experimental software that improves some aspect like privacy or functionality)

Sure, I have rights as a website owner. I can take the whole thing offline; I can block every 5th request; I can allow each /16 block to make 1000 requests per day; I can accept requests only from clients that have a Firefox user agent string. So long as it's equally applied to everyone and it's not based on a prohibited category such as gender or religious conviction, I am free to decide on such cuts and I'd encourage everyone to apply a policy that they believe is fair

Cloudflare and its competitors, as far as I can tell, block arbitrary subgroups of people based on secret criteria. It does not appear to be applied fairly, such as allowing everyone to make the same number of requests per unit time. I'm probably bothered even more because I happen to be among the blocked subgroup regularly (but far from all the time, just little enough to feel the pain)

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1. remich ◴[29 Aug 25 19:38 UTC] No.45068457[source]▶
If by "our constitution" you mean the U.S. Constitution then no, it says nothing of the sort. The first article of the U.S. Constitution concerns the organization of the legislative branch. You may be referencing the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses, in the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, but neither of those applies in this situation either since there are no laws or governmental actions at issue here, and random sites on the internet are not universally considered to be public accommodations. Even in the ADA context, the law isn't actually clear, since websites aren't specified anywhere in the text at the federal level and there's no SCOTUS precedent on point.

Some states are more stringent with their own disability regulations or state constitutions, but no state anywhere in the U.S. has a law that says every visitor to a website has to be treated equally.

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2. lucb1e ◴[29 Aug 25 20:02 UTC] No.45068749[source]▶
You can assume it's the USA and that I'm just dead wrong, but the third word of my profile specifies where I'm from and you'd find that this Dutch constitution matches the comment's contents

Equal protection is indeed not the same as equal treatment. No, it really does say that everyone shall be treated equally so long as the circumstances are equal (gelijke behandeling in gelijke gevallen)

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3. remich ◴[30 Aug 25 01:27 UTC] No.45071141[source]▶
I didn't assume, that's why I started my comment with "if by what you mean." Good to know that you were referencing a different place, but it's unrealistic to expect people to delve into your account bio to understand what you intended by "our constitution," especially when the parent comment also contained no geographic or cultural references. Perhaps you know the parent commenter and know that they share your geography? If so, that would also have been helpful context.

As an aside, I'm curious by how that language in the Dutch constitution actually works in practice. Is it just a game of distinguishing between situations or people to excuse disparate conduct? It seems like it would be unworkable if interpreted literally.