Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by acdha on Sunday May 31, 2026 @05:10PM (#48349788)

We do know, just ask anyone who runs a more popular site or does anything where abuse can be monetized (shopping, reviews, etc.). Avoiding that due to obscurity isn’t an answer because it’s saying you’re safe until something, possibly outside of your control, causes the bots to descend and give you an extra 500M requests with no chance of revenue.

I’m with OP: I don’t like this but the alternatives all look like the death of the open web.

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by handoflixue on Sunday May 31, 2026 @05:37PM (#48350001)

> just ask anyone who runs a more popular site

The person you're responding to already said they ran a modestly sized site. What actual scale opens one up to abuse? If only the top 1% of sites need it, then it seems silly to say "everyone" needs it.

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by ceejayoz on Sunday May 31, 2026 @06:34PM (#48350400)

It’s not just scale. Do you accept user generated content? If so, more of a target.

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by wizzwizz4 on Sunday May 31, 2026 @07:37PM (#48350925)

Stack Overflow was outside of the Cloudflare network for years, and anti-abuse was maybe 3 or 4 full-time jobs – much of which still needs to be done, because Cloudflare's anti-bot protection hasn't actually stopped it. Most UGC sites are not as big as Stack Overflow was at its peak.

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by black_puppydog on Sunday May 31, 2026 @09:51PM (#48351785)

errr... so anything related to UGC now has a lower bound of 3-4 FTE? Sure, I'll hire a team of content moderators next time I think about putting a comment form under my blog...

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by Dylan16807 on Sunday May 31, 2026 @10:45PM (#48352087)

Please read their last sentence again and think about how much it understates the difference between stack overflow in its prime and a normal website. Also the "much of which still needs to be done".

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by GoblinSlayer on Monday June 01, 2026 @04:35AM (#48354117)

Yes? Cloudflare doesn't replace moderators. At all. It only allegedly filters bot generated content, it doesn't filter user generated content and doesn't even intend to.

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by ceejayoz on Monday June 01, 2026 @07:38AM (#48355511)

Most UGC sites also don't have a horde of volunteer mods voting to close/delete things.

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by wizzwizz4 on Monday June 01, 2026 @08:42AM (#48356083)

I'm referring specifically to the activities of Charcoal (https://charcoal-se.org/) and their Stack Exchange staff counterparts, taken together. This is about large-scale platform abuse, of the sort that Cloudflare is alleged to prevent (but doesn't, really), not the more mundane (and laborious) task of manual quality control.

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by daishi55 on Sunday May 31, 2026 @06:27PM (#48350348)

So everyone is paying cloudflare… why?

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by fragmede on Sunday May 31, 2026 @06:34PM (#48350403)

Most likely not. Their free tier is fairly generous.

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by tardedmeme on Monday June 01, 2026 @06:21AM (#48354886)

Because paying with MITM is far less visible than paying with money

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Re:Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL by LgWoodenBadger on Monday June 01, 2026 @12:48PM (#48359321)

Because charging for bandwidth/traffic is still a thing, unfortunately

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