Presumably, like their captchas, this will completely break things like ad blockers, browsers with strict cookie policies, and probably things without hardware attestation.

Unless there's a privacy-preserving way this can be used to send money, then it's just another chunk of the surveillance state that's being rapidly erected over the last few years. The word "privacy" does not appear once in the article.

Even if it did, I'd be skeptical. If their payment system does allow money to be sent in a privacy and free speech preserving way, then it'll be used for money laundering.

This whole "agents bad" framing is complete BS. It's the reality of how people use the internet now, and, frankly, ad blockers have been a thing since forever. On the other hand, if successful, this infrastructure will give Cloudflare centralized control over internet publishing and also centralized surveillance of all users with no opt out.

Piracy is looking better and better. So does the small web. Come to think of it, the library does too. Any good solutions for non-destructively scanning books?