What is cloudlfare actually supposed to do? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 5 days ago by zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I mean other than making surfing the web slow as molasses.

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[-] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago

It exists to identify if whoever is visiting is a human or a bot.

Why?

Because if it's a bit it's likely automated and there's a variety of reasons to not want automated requests to come through. Some of them are:

because lots of "hackers" try to hack systems by automatically trying to find security vulnerabilities in a server, service etc.
because automated requests can be done faster, so they can happen more commonly, and they use resources, and if there's too many this genuinely affects server performance budget
bunch more reasons

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 points 5 days ago

To add to this: the issue with it comes with the implementation which, without explinaiton, requires JavaScript, web assembly, etc.

And for whatever fucking reason insists on loading several megabytes of data before even deciding whether to make you complete the challenge. This is why it's so slow.

this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026

25 points (90.3% liked)

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