Precursor

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing.

Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole

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.

I implemented all of this in hCaptcha 6 years ago, not just to distinguish bot from human but also to recognize the keyboard/mouse behavior of the same person signing up for many accounts or testing multiple credit cards. This kind of abuse detection was a part of Cloudflare when they switched to hCaptcha in 2020 and I had thought they already implemented all this themselves four years ago when they transitioned away from hCaptcha in 2022.

control+F accessibility no results

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.

How about we make browsers not report mouse movement to the page? This is getting way too creepy.

This (agent detection) is now a kind of emerging space. Obviously it'll get much more important, too.

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.)

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.

I think in 10/20 years from now, access to the Internet will be allowed only upon personal identification. Every website will be allowed to ask about your identity upon serving any content. Thats the only way I see this is going. The internet as it is right now does not have a future if majority of traffic will be done by agents. Thus, the cost of that traffic will have to be put on the users and since displaying ads doesnt make sense to agents, a paid access will be introduced (which is what cloudflare is slowly doing)

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.

I can’t wait for cloudflare to sell data on how well my wrist is working to my insurance company. What a wonderful hell we’ve created for ourselves.

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.

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.

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 can 1000% guarantee this will adversely impact assistive technology. You can tell it will because they don't mention any testing with regards to assistive technology.

The examples of mouse movement, really reminds me what bot scripts looked like for Runescape back in 00s-10s. Early scripts were color-based and jumped the mouse around, and those were quickly caught. But over time, bot scripts developed into complex orchestrations; taking breaks, doing random actions spontaneously, moving the mouse naturally, logging sessions on different platforms (mobile, PC), even responding in chat.

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.

Great. More surveillance, slow browsing and turnstile-style false positives to blanket the web.

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.

how does this interact with keyboard navigation & accessibility tools?

I dislike bots as much as anyone else... when weird inquiries come through my company's lead form, it costs some time and attention to sort them.

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 can’t wait for Cloudflare to decide my musical-rhythm enhanced typing and extraordinarily rapid and repeatable-pattern captcha clicking are somehow machine signifiers just like Google does: If I complete Google captchas at full speed it decides I’m a robot and challenges me endlessly, once 29 times in a row in two minutes or something. That’s what I get for having excellent spatial reflexes and mouse-clicker practice from Q3A sniping. So exhausted of the reversion to mediocre tendency of anti-bot systems, sigh.

Your keyboard and mouse rhythm and timings are probably so unique that they can be considered PII. Wonder how that works out legally.

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.

Gosh, this is all pretty nauseating.

Is this equivalent to Google Cloud Fraud Defense? https://cloud.google.com/security/products/fraud-defense

please drink verification can to continue

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.

as a heavy user of computer use, i hope enterprises realize that people like me will switch to competitors that support native computer use & APIs

>keyboard activity, focus changes, and visibility. These events are serialized into a compact format and buffered in memory. At regular intervals, the buffered data is sent back to the evaluation layer for analysis.

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 can't even ...

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.

even before the llm era sites would flag me as a bot for opening 15 links to read later. its fucking infuriating now

hmmm i think this is the first time i've seen a genuinely decent approach to blocking scraper/agents

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

So we're just going to let tech monopolists make accessibility impossible, are we? Fuck that!

Yawn. Train a domain-specific model on human inputs and then run inference against that. At integration, you change what, one line of code with another? You at best raise the expense to bot, but in today's world, this isn't much compute expense. You can do it on 10-year-old Xenon processors, the same ones used by companies promoted on LowEndBox.

Skids already fall into the trap of using open source automation like playwright-extra-stealth.