This. I’ll happily buy an 8k TV only if it’s a dumb TV/monitor.

In some states an obscured/unreadable license plate is all a cop needs to pull you over…

I hate to break it to you but not only does Cloudflare do this sort of thing, but so does Akamai, AWS, and virtually every other CDN provider out there. And far from being awful, it’s actually protecting the web.

We use Akamai where I work, and they inform us in real time when a request comes from a bot, and they further classify it as one of a dozen or so bots (search engine crawlers, analytics bots, advertising bots, social networks, AI bots, etc). It also informs us if it’s somebody impersonating a well known bot like Google, etc. So we can easily allow search engines to crawl our site while blocking AI bots, bots impersonating Google, and so on.