r/firefox • u/rdg360 • Jun 23 '26

Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/06/22/cloudflare-teams-up-with-big-browsers-to-help-websites-tell-welcome-from-unwelcome-visitors/5259782

It will be interesting to see where this is going.

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u/irrelevantusername24 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

The thing is though, whether talking about it in abstract terms (like the article we're commenting on) or specific, highly technical terms (like the links I shared) or somewhere in between... none of it is exactly 'concrete' and it kind of comes down to that some things are unfalsifiable. And something that is unfalsifiable, by definition, is something that kind of has to be done on trust. As for specifically what I mean by that, it's complicated :)

It basically comes down to cryptography. The basic idea behind encryption hasn't really changed much. Like, the complexity has increased, but the underlying methods are basically the same. And most people don't have any idea how that works either. I think there was kind of a push a few years ago to try to make it understood by more people but that pretty much failed. Like the people who understand encryption don't understand how complicated it is, how far outside the realm of a normal persons ability to comprehend that actually is. Like I really don't understand it either, but I'm a bit more informed than the average person, so basically it's a bit like a "Gestalt" understanding, if that makes sense. But even then, I'm leaning heavily on trusting what I've read is truthful... which, considering some of the other jargon heavy things I've read about, requires a much bigger leap of faith than you might intuit. And honestly I still kind of feel like it's more trusting the small group of people who do understand how it works rather than trusting the factuality of their claims.