Prove You're Human. The Site Wasn't Checking Anyway.

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. A follow-up to Prove You're Human. Pay With Your Data. Back in May I wrote about the whole "prove you're human" racket. reCAPTCHA going from digitizing books to labeling Google's image data, the phone number push, the research showing bots beat humans at the image challenges anyway. Near the end I gave Cloudflare's Turnstile some partial credit. No traffic lights, no Google, genuinely better. But still a checkpoint you didn't agree to, run by a middleman you didn't pick. Last Friday Cloudflare published their own post announcing Turnstile Spin, a tool that lets your AI coding agent set up Turnstile for you. On the surface it's a product launch. Read it a second time and it's something else: an admission that some of those "verify you are human" checkboxes weren't verifying anything. How It's Supposed to Work Turnstile has two halves. The widget sits on the page and runs its challenges in your browser. If you pass, it hands the page a…

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