CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
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CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
1–10 of 182 posts
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#2Hmmm...well unfortunately a lot of scammers and thieves on the internet come out of third world countries. Like, it's crazy, but the economics of scam artistry make this worth while as a career in certain countries - for example Romania (https://abcnews.go.com/International/journey-hackerville-rom...).
So, websites are protecting themselves as best they can while pissing off the fewest of their customers by putting up more security measures blocked by country IP.
The real issue is the authoritarian governments that are making it so countries (like China) are completely fire-walled off from the internet.
Have you heard that Iraq is having massive street protests at the moment? If not, it might be because the government cut off internet access so a lot of the stories and media about the protests are not making it onto the social media sites. That's scary.
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#3I don't know what's so unique about my connection, but I, too, receive these capchas on a daily basis, on the very same sites.
I'd rather they track me, by IP address and/or cookies, and stop this non-sense. I accept the cookies and have a static and dedicated IP, but there's never an end to Cloudflare's captchas.
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#4I don't know what's so unique about my connection, but I, too, receive these capchas on a daily basis, on the very same sites. I'd rather they track me, by IP address and/or cookies, and stop this non-sense. I accept the cookies and have a static and dedicated IP, but there's never an end to Cloudflare's captchas.
Do you routinely use a VPN or a shared connection like University housing?
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#5They have an extension that addresses this: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500199265...
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#6I don't know what's so unique about my connection, but I, too, receive these capchas on a daily basis, on the very same sites. I'd rather they track me, by IP address and/or cookies, and stop this non-sense. I accept the cookies and have a static and dedicated IP, but there's never an end to Cloudflare's captchas.
Do you routinely use a VPN or a shared connection like University housing?
How do you define a VPN? Noone other than myself has ever used my IP addresses in X years.
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#7[2016].
Cloudflare's been working on improvements to the CAPTCHA system for Tor users (https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloudflare-ends-captcha-challe...), maybe some of those have benefited foreign countries as well. And CloudFlare does do country-level blacklists (which show up as the CAPTCHA behavior described) so maybe StackExchange had/has an overaggressive firewall.
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#8OP lives in Southeast Asia and suggests website owners choose a different CDN and fails to propose an alternative. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are two complaints,
(1) cloudflare requires a captcha for visitors from some regions (like SouthEast Asia)
(2) cloudflare does not have enough nodes in SouthEast Asia, and OP feels being rerouted to another node defeats the purpose of a CDN.
Yet, Cloudflare does (1) because they often see attacks from those regions. I'm not sure blaming Cloudflare for this is the right strategy. Regarding (2), CDNs do not just benefit users, they benefit the website too. Getting rid of the CDN is not a solution. Is there a better free CDN for that region? Is multi-CDN easy to setup?
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#9Is the situation improved by using the Privacy Pass add-on [1] from Cloudflare?
Supposedly:
>Privacy Pass is a Chrome/Firefox browser extension to make browsing Cloudflare-protected websites a better experience for users. In particular, if a user IP address is designated to have a poor reputation then the user may have to solve a Cloudflare CAPTCHA page before they can gain access to such websites. Privacy Pass uses elliptic curve cryptography to generate 'anonymous' tokens after a single CAPTCHA page is solved. These tokens can be used in future engagements with Cloudflare websites to prevent having to solve more CAPTCHAs. The extension generates 30 tokens for each CAPTCHA solution and thus can be used to reduce CAPTCHA pages for each user by a similar factor.
[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500199265...
Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
#10This.
I route all my traffic via mmy own vpn server at Hetzner for privacy and security reasons and this Cloudflare bullshit is infuriating at times.
Besides I guess 95% sites that use their free tier either don't actually need it or would be better off without it.