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

(positiveblue.substack.com)
454 points positiveblue | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.238s | 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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1. opan ◴[30 Aug 25 19:31 UTC] No.45077330[source]▶
Thank you. I've been telling people this for years and mostly get treated like I'm crazy or told to try other browsers, but browsers are pretty personal and lived-in, I consider it quite uncomfortable to use a different one even to temporarily access a given site, and it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I am very comfortable in qutebrowser and I feel a bit disabled when I have to load up LibreWolf or Ungoogled Chromium. The vim addons don't help, they're not even half as good. Plus most sites I use regularly work fine, so when something I don't use often doesn't work right, I'm definitely blaming cloudflare or the site operator, not my browser that works fine otherwise.

Honestly, just let the bots or whatever through. It's absolutely ridiculous locking out real people who did nothing wrong.