I have to assume it's related to anti-AI measures put in place, but for the last week or so I've been bouncing between my piefed.social and piefed.zip logins because one will randomly start doing the are you human auto-CAPTCHA in a loop that never ends, but I'll be able to log in to the other normally. This first happened to me with .social about 10 days ago for at least a whole day. Then it came back. Went out again a day later. I swapped to .zip for a week, but now .zip is doing the Cloudflare thing and .social is fine. I only see the actual behavior in the browser (FF or derivative), but when using Voyager on mobile the symptom is just that the API queries time out or fail, but I'm guessing that it is the same cause.

Could be your network is being used as a residential proxy. Time to audit the logs.

More than usual yeah.

The cynical part of me wonders if it's just to tag my activity as useful human usability patterns for future modeling.

I am. But I'm using a VPN with LibreWolf so it definitely is triggering a few red flags.

MITM Cloudflare is a travesty to the internet.

Same situation here. I assume AI use VPNs heavily which causes the increase.

I'm seeing them everywhere, everywhere. I mostly use w3m(a text browser) and just think of my pain. I have to move to a regular browser just to read an article. Fuck cloudflare

Good thought, the logs don't bear it out though, traffic seems normal (and I'm on a pretty up-to-date openwrt).

Sadly, this actually seems pretty plausible

nope.

I'm sorry to have to inform you of this, but it's possible you might be a bot.

I am definitely human, fellow human. For example I enjoy:

• Breathing oxygen
• Consuming nutrients and excreting waste
• Many other definitely-human activities

Are VPNs really worth the money(asking as a broke buster)?

Yes, you do appear to be a human person.

Is it just PieFed.* or all kinds of websites?

I see Cloudflare captchas on a lot of sites, but I've only had this problem of the neverending captcha on piefed recently.

Hmm. I haven't changed any Cloudflare config in the last week so it must be them doing what they do.

Maybe I'll turn off cloudflare and see whether anoobis alone is enough to cope.

I have only had this infinite loop happen on fediverse links. Sometimes not even Cloudflare, but ones using Anubis, too.

Since it happens only rarely, and only with links posted here on the Fediverse, I just have been assuming the server host is incorrectly configured by an amateur self-hosting type.

Every website down to small independent forums are getting absolutely slammed by thousands of AI bots. They are just raping any text they can find to train their models.

Cloudflare proxying is off on piefed.social and the server has not caught fire yet. Hurrah!

With proxying off, all their crap security stuff is bypassed. Also all their helpful caching stuff... But I've gotten that working pretty well in nginx these days anyway.

I'm getting invalid cert errors when trying to access PieFed.social now.

Edit: looks like it's resolved now.

TIL debian does not come with cron installed, the service that renews certificates. So bare bones!

godspeed

I turned it off just after posting that comment. After a few bumps (expired SSL, no cron on the server), it worked fine although now lemmy.world isn't sending us any content. So, not really fine.

Guess that entirely depends on your internet service provider and where you live. If your ISP doesn't collect data on your web surfing, and you're not a pirate, you should be fine without a VPN.

This is exactly what an AI bot would say!

i didnt see any cloudflare when opening here, but i have been getting a weird error on other websites with Cloudflare saying "Incompatible browser extension or network configuration", im not going to disable my browser extension just for them though so im glad on piefed im not having issues, i dont even have problems on how websites look but somehow Cloudflare thinks my extensions may be an issue