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- Hacker News
- these Cloudflare blog posts are so verbose it's insane....by orliesaurus
- There's a few comments asking for further info on the motivation.
I'll explain my understanding.
Consider what problem CAPTCHA aims to solve (abuse) and how that's ineffective in an age of AI agents: it cannot distinguish "bot that is trying to buy a pizza" vs "bot that is trying to spider my site".
I don't understand Cloudflare's solution enough to explain that part.
I'm glad to see research here, because if we don't have innovation solutions, we might end up with microtransactions for browsing.
by chocalot - It started innocently enough. Scrolling through Instagram one evening in early 2025, I stumbled upon a sponsored post promising sky-high returns on crypto investments. The account, @CryptoWealthPro, flaunted testimonials, flashy charts, and limited-time opportunities in Bitcoin and Ethereum. As a middle-aged teacher with modest savings, I dreamed of early retirement. I messaged them, and soon a financial advisor named Alex guided me through a sleek app to transfer $20,000 from my bank. Initial profits appeared, luring me to invest more, another $35,000. Then, poof. The app vanished, withdrawals failed, and Alex ghosted me. I'd fallen for a classic pig-butchering scam, my life savings of $55,000 gone in digital smoke. Devastated, I reported to the police, but they said cross-border crypto frauds were tough to crack. Online forums like Reddit's r/scams echoed my despair, with victims sharing horror stories. Amid the gloom, one name kept popping up, Alpha Spy Nest (ASN), a team of forensic experts specializing in blockchain recovery. Skeptical after my trust betrayal, I visited alphaspynest.org. Their site detailed services, digital forensics, transaction tracing, and legal coordination. Reviews on Brainly and DiscussionBucks praised their success in similar cases. Desperate, I emailed alphaspynest@mail.com, attaching transaction details. Within hours, they responded. We've seen this Instagram ploy before fake profiles funneling funds to mixer wallets. ASN's team, comprising ex-cyber cops and blockchain analysts, swung into action. They used proprietary tools to map my transfers, from my wallet to a scam exchange, then tumbled through anonymity services. Over a week, they gathered evidence, IP traces, wallet histories, and even linked the scammers to a Southeast Asian ring. Collaborating with international authorities, they froze assets and initiated reversals. The breakthrough came when ASN uncovered a vulnerability in the scammers' setup of a traceable endpoint wallet. Through legal channels, they recovered 85% of my funds, $46,750 deposited back into my account. The rest covered fees, but it was a miracle. Today, I'm rebuilding, wiser. ASN didn't just recover money, they restored hope. If you're scammed, don't wait, contact pros like them. Beware Instagram lures, verify everything. My story? A cautionary tale turned to victory, thanks to Alpha Spy Nest's expertise.by Trishar
- This article was published on Oct 30th, but it refers to IETF draft-yun-cfrg-arc-01, a draft that was superseded by draft-yun-privacypass-crypto-arc-00 <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-yun-privacypass-crypt...> on Oct 20th, i.e. more than a week before the article was published.by teddyh
- > In order to use Privacy Pass for per-user rate-limiting, it's necessary to limit the number of tokens issued to each user (e.g., 100 tokens per user per hour). To rate limit an AI agent, this role would be fulfilled by the AI platform. To obtain tokens, the user would log in with the platform, and said platform would allow the user to get tokens from the issuer. The AI platform fulfills the attester role in Privacy Pass parlance.
If it's up to the AI platform to issue limited tokens to users, and it's also the AI platform making the web requests, I'm not understanding the purpose of the cryptography/tokens. Couldn't the platform already limit a user to 100 web requests per hour just with an internal counter?
by Ukv - It seems like the tl;dr is:
Cloudflare is helping to develop & eager to implement an open protocol called ARC (Anonymous Rate-Limited Credentials)
What is ARC? You can read the proposal here: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-yun-cfrg-arc-01.html#n...
But my summary is:
1. You convince a server that you deserve to have 100 tokens (probably by presenting some non-anonymous credentials)
2. You handshake with the server and walk away with 100 untraceable tokens
3. At anytime, you can present the server with a token. The server only knows
Other details (disclaimer, I am not a cryptographer):a. The token is valid b. The token has not been previously used- The server has a public + public key for ARC, which is how it knows that it was the one to issue the tokens. It's also how you know that your tokens are in the same pool as everyone else's tokens.
- It seems like there's an option for your 100 tokens to all be 'branded' with some public information. I assume this would be information like "Expires June 2026" or "Token Value: 1 USD", not "User ID 209385"
- The client actually ends up with a key which will generate the 100 tokens in sequence.
- Obviously the number 100 is configurable.
- It seems like there were already schemes to do this, but providing only one token (RFC 9497, RFC 9474) but I'm not sure how popular those were.
by tennysont - This is something I’ve been saying for a while[0,1]:
Services need the ability to obtain an identifier that:
- Belongs to exactly one real person.
- That a person cannot own more than one of.
- That is unique per-service.
- That cannot be tied to a real-world identity.
- That can be used by the person to optionally disclose attributes like whether they are an adult or not.
Services generally don’t care about knowing your exact identity but being able to ban a person and not have them simply register a new account, and being able to stop people from registering thousands of accounts would go a long way towards wiping out inauthentic and abusive behaviour.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41709792
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44378709
The ability to “reset” your identity is the underlying hole that enables a vast amount of abuse. It’s possible to have persistent, pseudonymous access to the Internet without disclosing real-world identity. Being able to permanently ban abusers from a service would have a hugely positive effect on the Internet.
by JimDabell - What problem is this trying to solve exactly?
If a computer (or “agent” in modern terms) wants to order you a pizza it can technically already do so.
The reason computers currently can’t order us pizza or book us flights isn’t because of a technical limitation, it’s because the pizza place doesn’t want to just sell you a pizza and the airline doesn’t want to just sell you a flight. Instead they have an entire payroll of people whose salaries are derived from wasting human time, more commonly know as “engagement”. In fact those people will get paid regardless if you actually buy anything, so their incentive is often to waste more of your time even if it means trading off an actual purchase.
The “malicious” uses of AI that this very article refers to are mostly just that - computers/AI agents acting on behalf of humans to sidestep the “wasting human time” issue. The fact that agents may issue more requests than a human user is because information is intentionally not being presented to them in a concise, structured manner. If Dominos or Pizza Hut wanted to sell just pizzas tomorrow they can trivially publish an OpenAPI spec for agents to consume, or even collaborate on an HPOP protocol (Hypertext Pizza Ordering Protocol) to which HPOP clients can connect (no LLMs needed even). But they don’t, because wasting human time is the whole point.
So why would any of these companies suddenly opt into this system? Companies that are after actual money and don’t profit from wasting human time are already ready and don’t have to do anything (if an AI agent is already throwing Bitcoin or valid credit card details at you to buy your pizzas, you are fine), and those that do have zero incentive to opt in since they’d be trading off “engagement” for old-school, boring money (who needs that nowadays right?).
by Nextgrid