alt Hacker NewsBeating this would require a large amount of sophistication, not a small amount.
Basic machine learning clustering will expose bots mouse+keyboard+touch behavior and discriminate them from humans.
It will also likely discriminate against anyone with a disability and therefore using affordances like eye tracking. Just imagine how different a person with only one hand would look compared to a “typical” user!! This shouldn’t be too much of a problem in the USA because no one is enforcing the ADA at the moment outside of California / Illinois / NY.
But I’m curious to hear from ‘eastdakota how they plan to guarantee that users with disabilities won’t be affected by these kinds of behavioral analysis. Cloudflare has such a massive footprint that it’s absolutely critical for them to err on the safe side of filtering, assuming they desire to be ethical.
The immoral thing for cloudflare to do would be to say “we just provide a ‘bot likeliness score’ and it’s up to each website to decide what threshold they need”. And then wave their hands and say “we’re not the ones blocking users with disabilities…the websites are the ones setting their thresholds too strictly”.
When you reach Cloudflare’s size … you own all the 2nd and 3rd order effects of your decisions.
This kind of data not only separates bots from humans - it’s pretty trivial to distinguish male vs female, right-handed vs left-handed, approximate age, native language (based on keyboard input patterns), state of injury (including tracking progression of healing), and a variety of different mental/physical disabilities. How one navigates a website tells you whether they are ADHD or schizophrenic or has Parkinson’s, and it can tell you about drug use/abuse: how well is this person’s Parkinson’s treatment working? What days of the week does that person tend to abuse amphetamines?
It is super difficult to mimic all of these signals in a way that would cluster the same as typical humans.
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> It is super difficult to mimic all of these signals in a way that would cluster the same as typical humans.
Not really, beat ML with ML. I won't disclose how to do it, because who knows who might read this, but you can easily do it with a model trained for that purpose.
We used to say the same sorts of things about LLM prose, music, and image generation. Now just a few years later it can be very difficult to know for sure if something is made by AI or a human. There are still tells, but they are much more subtle and harder to spot, and models are still improving. Mimicing human mouse movement won't be any more of a challenge.