Comment by jsheard
They're pretty reviled by people who go out of their way to be private via things like VPNs and locked down browsers, because that constantly trips their bot detection and makes using the web miserable.
They're pretty reviled by people who go out of their way to be private via things like VPNs and locked down browsers, because that constantly trips their bot detection and makes using the web miserable.
And in places where CGNAT is in use, so that many people are on the same IP address, and botnets are active on that address.
I live in India in such a situation, and most of the time it’s not too bad, but I still encounter Cloudflare CAPTCHAs pretty frequently. At times, it’s been almost half the web is blocking you. And occasionally, it actually is blocking you, not just a CAPTCHA. It’s also not rare, when being more aggressively blocked, for a site to break because it tries loading scripts from another domain, which is then CAPTCHAing so that scripts just won’t load.
Back when I lived in Australia, I practically never got Cloudflare blocks.
The mechanism may be understandable and even justifiable to a considerable extent, but the poor definitely end up suffering more from Cloudflare than the rich.