Precursor(blog.cloudflare.com) |
So it's a keylogger?
Precursor is a client-side, session-based verification system, built with privacy in mind, that uses dynamically injected JavaScript to continuously collect behavioral signals as visitors interact with your application.
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.
that mouse cursor movement is very hard to replicate a real human with the amount of data that cloudflare has you could reproduce something close but cloudflare has seen probably trillions of movements that will be tough to beat
watching this carefully but i think this is the right approach
Skids already fall into the trap of using open source automation like playwright-extra-stealth.
Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole
While I can understand why you would be alarmed, I can point to almost two decades of lamenting on this forum about how we need better ways of rewarding content creators than ads. Well, this is it.
Moreover, these products weren't built in a vacuum. Most threads about Anthropic and OpenAI have complaints about how these companies were built on stolen content. There's a reality we have to face here and we can't have it both ways.
Cloudflare turnstile is a pop up. This product is pervasive surveillance. It having a cf logo doesn't change that or ameliorate the many many abuses that two decades have shown are part and parcel.
And at the same time, they're paying SEO experts to make that same content easier to be ingested by systems (Google and other Search Engines) which use it for their own AI offerings.
Are you going to be able to make your online content available to Google Search but unavailable for Google Gemini?
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?
where bots run rampant ?
trust me as an operator - I'm grateful Cloudflare exists.
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.
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
Other products in the space:
- Foil (https://usefoil.com/), I'm biased, a friend is building this
- Kasada https://www.kasada.io/
- DataDome (https://datadome.co/)
- Castle (https://castle.io/)
- Fingerprint (https://fingerprint.com/)
- HUMAN (http://humansecurity.com/)
- Google Cloud Fraud Defense, which is basically the updated reCaptcha (https://cloud.google.com/security/products/fraud-defense?hl=...)
- this, Cloudflare Precursor
It seems like some of the main reasons people care so far are:
- Preventing automated credential stuffing
- Preventing bots from creating a bunch of fake accounts (eg free trial abuse, which can also lead to high twilio SMS bills!)
- Reducing payment fraud
- Blocking LLM scraping
- Blocking automated scalpers (!) eg for tickers or sneakers
I'm curious to see which use cases end up dominating as the reason companies care about this. And I'm hopeful that my agents will still have good ways for me to browse and do things on the web on my behalf - eg detect agents and route them to an agent path, rather than blocking them.
(I'm interested in tools for detecting AI agents and seeing how this shifts as bot traffic goes way up.)
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.
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.
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
There's been plenty of effort put into mimicking realistic / "human" behavior in writing video game bots, and every video game still has tons of bots despite the best efforts of the game devs.
You definitely can't win against bots - but you can definitely make the entire "game" (web at large, in this case) worse off for everyone else through this "always-online DRM" parallel.
But what makes Cloudflare so confident that automation always equates to "fraud and abuse?" If I send my agent to go retrieve some information, do they consider that fraud?
If I block various ad trackers does that trigger their "bot detection" incorrectly? Do I have any recourse? Or is Cloudflare appointing themselves judge, jury and executioner?
And let's not forget this little chestnut: > 4. Privacy by design. Precursor was designed to collect signals that help to distinguish human patterns from automated and abusive patterns.
Ahh, so to "protect" against bots they're standing up a whole new regime of user surveillance and session-level monitoring. And they definitely won't be selling that, they promise. Got it.
This crap should be illegal. In the real world, I can authorize others to act on my behalf. The same should be true with software agents.
I expect this will be effective for maybe a day.
Not a fan
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.
Generally isn't a good bot one that respects robots.txt and is respectful of the site's resources by not being spammy?
Just want to make sure I understand the real issue here, because that sounds like a lot of fearmongering to me.
It would be like Gmail automatically whitelisting email from other Gmail accounts or blacklisting email from competitors. Why should Google do that? Their customers are mostly strangers to each other and they want spam filters that work well.
Crazy to post this when Google basically does do that with Gmail addresses. They may shove it into your “other” folder but they do absolutely nothing to stop free Gmail accounts from spamming and phishing. Gmail spam is the biggest threat by volume I’ve seen in years of managing email security for clients
Potato potato.
I'm not sure if I'm talking about the scrapers or Cloudflare at this point. Probably both. Probably the same pool of forced laborers.
hundreds of millions of residential ips, human browser fingerprints, custom browser binaries, auto solve of turnstyle, recaptcha v3, kasada, datadome, AWS WAF, etc if they come up.
I think it'd be good if there were more products that did a better job of making an actually undetectable agent, but doesn't seem like any exist yet.
[1]: https://usefoil.com/research/stealth-browser-leaderboard
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.
Not really, beat ML with ML. I won't disclose how to do it, because who knows who might read this, but you can easily do it with a model trained for that purpose.
I'm sure, they can add a jitter, but then you just change how you detect / weight detection.
Until somewhere down the line. Like when half of Spain gets cut off due to an arbitrary block on a consolidated service facade...
We have antitrust regulations for such things.
Because of this, perfectly mimicking humans is not a good goal for a bot (as it is the case for AI in music), because they would become very inefficient, at least latency wise (throughput could be engineered around by scraping many unrelated webpages in parallel).
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.
and you bootstrap with existing javascript detection engines.
the challenge is usually the human input data, your objective is to be clustered among the humans and for that you need to know what humans look like.
this is not an open ended arms race, it will end once the bots approximate humans to a sufficient degree - false positive rate for detection will become unacceptable even if the detection system is slightly ahead.
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.