They are advantageous to leverage in certain situations but essential they are not. We're used to, in the technology industry, looking for or creating problems to solve with services we are aware of. Moving back to necessity and need, do we really? Are we being objective? Most of the time, no.
Theres a few alternatives, but at a minimum yes you probably need their or a competitor's Name Servers and their public DNS. Rolling your own isn't very feasible.
For any one of their product there is a good opportunity to build an open source alternative or something like it! Can be hard to work around they have the benefit of being able to have negative unit economics on lots of infra products... But people succesfully built tons of alternatives to google analytics and similar.
The complaint is that the offer is a great deal with no downsides for consumers, and this is likely to result in Cloudflare having a lot of power (which they currently don't have) as a market maker. This position as market maker would grant them the power to extract economic rent from the web economy by charging both sides of the web provider and web consumer market to get access to the other.
Cool product launch, though it feels a little weird to me that Cloudflare sells agentic products alongside this new service that seems designed to block agentic usage of the web?
I expect there's much more going on than just mouse path detection but I can imagine that this is already tricky for touchscreens and for people using non-traditional mouse inputs (the thinkpad nub comes to mind - but it would also be bad optics to accidentally block people using accessibility mouse tools as bot users, though then this becomes a loophole for agentic browsing!)
In general though I think this is almost definitely a good thing to reduce agentic bot abuse & spam.
It’s less weird if you think there’s a difference between good bots and bad bots. They can provide services for good bots to use while helping people keep out the bad ones.
If a bot is simulating mouse movement but doing it badly then that’s a strong signal of shenanigans. A good bot will obey robots.txt and do nothing to hide that it’s a bot.
> Cool product launch, though it feels a little weird to me that Cloudflare sells agentic products alongside this new service that seems designed to block agentic usage of the web?
Feels a little bit like the mob selling "protection" to shop keepers.
I'm guessing it's going to lock the non-sighted//keyboard only users out of the anonymous Internet. I'm guessing if you log in and give up your anonymity they'll consider you not a bot.
just like how smartphone developers, engineers locked people with no smartphone.Some of the users that can no longer get services are really old people, disabled. In some well developed places on earth, you can't even check in flights without a smartphone, it's not even possible to travel for them.
I mean CF already forces 5 minutes of motorbike identification on anyone not in a whitelisted western country, so a small percentage of blind people is unlikely to worry them.
One interesting aspect is of course that the movement from the same user can be different depending on what type of mouse they use. I use a mouse at work on my PC, touchpad on my private laptop, and thinkpad nipple on work laptop. Three different profiles for one user.
Obviously different movements from a AI, but if we come to the day where mouse movement fingerprinting becomes another gatekeeper, there could be some interesting outliers.
It's a bleak world in terms of bots flooding the web, but out of all possible solutions, this seems to be preferable over invasive and identifying fingerprinting that everyone wants to roll out. Here's hoping that mouse movements aren't sufficiently unique as to be fingerprintable too.
What prevents bots/agents from just adding "jitter" to their movements that mimics how humans move their cursor?
I know there are other signals being used but this one in particular seems like it wouldn't be hard to beat with a small amount of sophistication from the bot.
Beating this would require a large amount of sophistication, not a small amount.
Basic machine learning clustering will expose bots mouse+keyboard+touch behavior and discriminate them from humans.
It will also likely discriminate against anyone with a disability and therefore using affordances like eye tracking. Just imagine how different a person with only one hand would look compared to a “typical” user!! This shouldn’t be too much of a problem in the USA because no one is enforcing the ADA at the moment outside of California / Illinois / NY.
But I’m curious to hear from ‘eastdakota how they plan to guarantee that users with disabilities won’t be affected by these kinds of behavioral analysis. Cloudflare has such a massive footprint that it’s absolutely critical for them to err on the safe side of filtering, assuming they desire to be ethical.
The immoral thing for cloudflare to do would be to say “we just provide a ‘bot likeliness score’ and it’s up to each website to decide what threshold they need”. And then wave their hands and say “we’re not the ones blocking users with disabilities…the websites are the ones setting their thresholds too strictly”.
When you reach Cloudflare’s size … you own all the 2nd and 3rd order effects of your decisions.
This kind of data not only separates bots from humans - it’s pretty trivial to distinguish male vs female, right-handed vs left-handed, approximate age, native language (based on keyboard input patterns), state of injury (including tracking progression of healing), and a variety of different mental/physical disabilities. How one navigates a website tells you whether they are ADHD or schizophrenic or has Parkinson’s, and it can tell you about drug use/abuse: how well is this person’s Parkinson’s treatment working? What days of the week does that person tend to abuse amphetamines?
It is super difficult to mimic all of these signals in a way that would cluster the same as typical humans.
We used to say the same sorts of things about LLM prose, music, and image generation. Now just a few years later it can be very difficult to know for sure if something is made by AI or a human. There are still tells, but they are much more subtle and harder to spot, and models are still improving. Mimicing human mouse movement won't be any more of a challenge.
Like any other detection system you will always have determined adversaries that put in the work to bypass it.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't still try to block the much larger number of less sophisticated/resourced adversaries that are using OOTB libraries and low-effort setups.
are you sure it's non trivial? they posted a 2d image of what it looks like. a fairly simple model of the users wrist and mouse position doesn't seem crazy hard but the devil is in the details
In 2027 how many tokens will we spend to create the jitter, pre-jitter planning, post-jitter verification, and then cloudflare’s inevtiable counter-jitter
Cloudflare has a lot of enterprise customers. Selling bot check to companies wanting to protect their content & also taking a cut out of payments for access by bots could be a good earner for them.
I have been noticing a lot of Cloudflare false positives where it keeps spinning on my sessions never actually redirecting me to the underlying page. If they keep just vibe coding and releasing a new solution every day, I am afraid it will be reflected in their services quality.
There is nothing stopping a bot from moving their cursor like a human. This is basically just putting up a door with zero walls and telling people to stay out of your house.
All of these things are completely abusable/bypass-able and just annoying for actual humans who trigger flags.
> There is nothing stopping a bot from moving their cursor like a human.
Sure, we could write a library that slows the bot down and makes it move the cursor in procedurally-generated curves with a certain degree of noise added... but its all extra work, and it all slows the bots down. Presumably they wouldn't reveal that part of the secret sauce if it was all of the secret sauce
Acting like a human is something scapers already do. Using residential proxies, using latest Chrome user agents, not moving/typing as fast, etc. This is just 1 more layer, moving mouse naturally.
I wonder how it'll handle those of us who try and use the mouse as infrequently as possible. I imagine the cognitive delay part would be largely telling. But it'll be interesting to see if I start getting blocked because I use vimium.
Not sure, but I struggle with skepticism for anyone who blocks archive.today, which cloudflare does, along with nextdns and others. Being blocked by such a large... apologies in advance for 'lack of better word' vernacular, cartel, is a near death sentence.
Although the blocking of archive.today goes back years, as can be verified through forum searches and archives with nextdns and others, I was not aware of this and have no excuse to dispute it. But for the record, the blocking predates 2026 by many years -- and my own records also verify this. That said, I think I need to learn more.
As a real user who uses an Ultimate Hacking Keyboard with the mouse layer, this frustrates me immensely. Yes I'm a corner case, but this is likely to make certain website not work for me because my lines are perfectly straight and my arcs zig-zag much like a bot might.
Considering the keyboard/mouse layer feels like an advancement to me, this feels like tech that will lock in the "old" way of doing things.
I really detest how adversarial the web is getting. I'm not a cloudflare hater but please, please consider people like me when rolling out stuff that affects millions or maybe even hundreds of millions or billions of people.
So now instead of having the slow-axx Cloudflare turnstile slowing down your requests, you get surprised with a "You are a BOT!!!" while you are conducting your business on a website.
I already quickly close any website that I do not need for business purposes when it shows me the Cloudflare spinner. Now I might have to start considering competitors who do not implement this shit.
Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole
We have antitrust regulations for such things.
Until somewhere down the line. Like when half of Spain gets cut off due to an arbitrary block on a consolidated service facade...
They are advantageous to leverage in certain situations but essential they are not. We're used to, in the technology industry, looking for or creating problems to solve with services we are aware of. Moving back to necessity and need, do we really? Are we being objective? Most of the time, no.
where bots run rampant ?
trust me as an operator - I'm grateful Cloudflare exists.
I genuinely don't understand these generic complaint comments.
Are you complaining that they offer too much? Or do you believe nobody is offering similar services?
Just want to make sure I understand the real issue here, because that sounds like a lot of fearmongering to me.
I expect there's much more going on than just mouse path detection but I can imagine that this is already tricky for touchscreens and for people using non-traditional mouse inputs (the thinkpad nub comes to mind - but it would also be bad optics to accidentally block people using accessibility mouse tools as bot users, though then this becomes a loophole for agentic browsing!)
In general though I think this is almost definitely a good thing to reduce agentic bot abuse & spam.
If a bot is simulating mouse movement but doing it badly then that’s a strong signal of shenanigans. A good bot will obey robots.txt and do nothing to hide that it’s a bot.
Generally isn't a good bot one that respects robots.txt and is respectful of the site's resources by not being spammy?
Feels a little bit like the mob selling "protection" to shop keepers.
Yeah so this mouse movement astrology is going to completely lock non-sighted/keyboard only users out of large swaths of the Internet isn't it.
Yet all people are ok with it
Obviously different movements from a AI, but if we come to the day where mouse movement fingerprinting becomes another gatekeeper, there could be some interesting outliers.
I know there are other signals being used but this one in particular seems like it wouldn't be hard to beat with a small amount of sophistication from the bot.
Basic machine learning clustering will expose bots mouse+keyboard+touch behavior and discriminate them from humans.
It will also likely discriminate against anyone with a disability and therefore using affordances like eye tracking. Just imagine how different a person with only one hand would look compared to a “typical” user!! This shouldn’t be too much of a problem in the USA because no one is enforcing the ADA at the moment outside of California / Illinois / NY.
But I’m curious to hear from ‘eastdakota how they plan to guarantee that users with disabilities won’t be affected by these kinds of behavioral analysis. Cloudflare has such a massive footprint that it’s absolutely critical for them to err on the safe side of filtering, assuming they desire to be ethical.
The immoral thing for cloudflare to do would be to say “we just provide a ‘bot likeliness score’ and it’s up to each website to decide what threshold they need”. And then wave their hands and say “we’re not the ones blocking users with disabilities…the websites are the ones setting their thresholds too strictly”.
When you reach Cloudflare’s size … you own all the 2nd and 3rd order effects of your decisions.
This kind of data not only separates bots from humans - it’s pretty trivial to distinguish male vs female, right-handed vs left-handed, approximate age, native language (based on keyboard input patterns), state of injury (including tracking progression of healing), and a variety of different mental/physical disabilities. How one navigates a website tells you whether they are ADHD or schizophrenic or has Parkinson’s, and it can tell you about drug use/abuse: how well is this person’s Parkinson’s treatment working? What days of the week does that person tend to abuse amphetamines?
It is super difficult to mimic all of these signals in a way that would cluster the same as typical humans.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't still try to block the much larger number of less sophisticated/resourced adversaries that are using OOTB libraries and low-effort setups.
I'm sure, they can add a jitter, but then you just change how you detect / weight detection.
All of these things are completely abusable/bypass-able and just annoying for actual humans who trigger flags.
Sure, we could write a library that slows the bot down and makes it move the cursor in procedurally-generated curves with a certain degree of noise added... but its all extra work, and it all slows the bots down. Presumably they wouldn't reveal that part of the secret sauce if it was all of the secret sauce
Not a fan
Explanation direct from the CEO of CloudFlare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
Considering the keyboard/mouse layer feels like an advancement to me, this feels like tech that will lock in the "old" way of doing things.
I really detest how adversarial the web is getting. I'm not a cloudflare hater but please, please consider people like me when rolling out stuff that affects millions or maybe even hundreds of millions or billions of people.
I already quickly close any website that I do not need for business purposes when it shows me the Cloudflare spinner. Now I might have to start considering competitors who do not implement this shit.
I wonder if the folks at Cursor feel called out, or just glad that they're big enough to be perceived to be a threat.