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Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

blog.dijit.sh

41–50 of 335 posts

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#41
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which settings would those be? I'm using Cloudflare for a couple of my sites, and if I can fix this, I will. Otherwise I'll stop using Cloudflare.

In CloudFlare go to "Firewall" and then click Settings on the right. Here you can set the Security Level and if you want to use Browser Integrity Checks among other things.

Thanks! I will look into that further.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...yes, they have and they will again. I don't doubt this, but do you have more info on what you're referring to on "they have"? I'm a bit out of the loop on that.

There's been a few occurrences of them terminating service for the sites promoting extremist views, eg: https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/ I don't entirely disagree with it but it's censorship nonetheless.

Did 8chan promote "extremist" views...? No more or less than posters on Twitter do on a regular basis, yet Twitter hasn't been silenced.

The same people that got 8chan shut down also hate 4chan, and want to see it silenced.

It has to do with the memes that come out of 4chan, mocking a certain crowd of people for being emotionally fragile and over-reactionary to everything...

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#43
post #24

I suspect Cloudflare is doing some form of 'fingerprinting' to flag potential attacks. Fingerprinting is probably based on things like IP, user agent, js being enabled, etc. In this case it seems that Cloudflare only banned a specific user agent with js_enabled=no. Obviously this is all just an educated guess, since I've worked on building scrapers for cloudflare-protected websites.

Came to say the same thing.... Try changing the user-agent the browser sends to match the user agent that Chrome sends.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#44
post #17

The problem presented by services like ReCaptcha and Cloudflare is a tough nut to crack. They're silently embedded in a huge portion of modern websites, and the average user will never even know about them. But it seems to be way too easy for them to blanket-ban or serve an absurd amount of captchas to powerusers, linux gurus, privacy geeks, or anyone with the wrong combination of browser+addons. And the failures (as…

Yeah, you can't really talk about downsides of Recaptcha/Cloudflare without also acknowledging the extreme amount of malicious actors and abuse on the internet. We're in a "this is why we can't have nice things" predicament and you have malicious actors to thank for that, yet most people on HN only seem capable of attacking the few affordable solutions to that problem. I'm even down with the theory that Cloudflare is…

> How are you going to talk about the downsides of Recaptcha/Cloudflare without also acknowledging the extreme amount of malicious actors and abuse on the internet?

This is acknowledged by the original question

>> Also, how would your implementation differ to solve this issue?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#45
post #5

There is another side effect of visiting sites served by CloudFlare with disabled JavaScript: Email addresses (or any other words separated by an @) appear as "[email protected]" instead. Take this blog post from CloudFlare themselves for example: https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-performance-compariso... That's just ridiculous.

How is it ridiculous? It's called email obfuscation (it can be disabled within Cloudflare) it's to stop spam bots from ripping email addresses from websites and adding them to mailing lists.

Because their regex is crap and if you have @twitterHandle or something with a legitimate "@" you just see the obfuscated version.

It's laughably adorable to think it's actually solving a problem or helping in any way, the 'bad actors' it's trying to prevent probably have a work around anyway.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#46
post #16

Because the author using a niche browser (QT wrapped in an app), this might be Browser Integrity Check. It's purpose is to block non-browser like behaviour common for spammers/malware. That would also explain switching to Chrome fixes the issue. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170086-U...

So if your browser agent is not firefox, chrome, safari internet can stop working. What a great side feature.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#47
post #17

The problem presented by services like ReCaptcha and Cloudflare is a tough nut to crack. They're silently embedded in a huge portion of modern websites, and the average user will never even know about them. But it seems to be way too easy for them to blanket-ban or serve an absurd amount of captchas to powerusers, linux gurus, privacy geeks, or anyone with the wrong combination of browser+addons. And the failures (as…

Yeah, you can't really talk about downsides of Recaptcha/Cloudflare without also acknowledging the extreme amount of malicious actors and abuse on the internet. We're in a "this is why we can't have nice things" predicament and you have malicious actors to thank for that, yet most people on HN only seem capable of attacking the few affordable solutions to that problem. I'm even down with the theory that Cloudflare is…

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#48
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...yes, they have and they will again. I don't doubt this, but do you have more info on what you're referring to on "they have"? I'm a bit out of the loop on that.

They threw out Neonazi Twitter, a.k.a. Gab.

[flagged]

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#49
post #17

The problem presented by services like ReCaptcha and Cloudflare is a tough nut to crack. They're silently embedded in a huge portion of modern websites, and the average user will never even know about them. But it seems to be way too easy for them to blanket-ban or serve an absurd amount of captchas to powerusers, linux gurus, privacy geeks, or anyone with the wrong combination of browser+addons. And the failures (as…

> Two steps backwards in every conceivable way. The giants gain more invisible power and powerusers suffer decreased productivity/privacy. Not going to happen.

I agree with the first two sentences, but disagree with the third. I believe that this state is actually the intended end goal.

Previously, for many years, I browsed the web with Javascript disabled. At the time, this had very little impact on my browsing experience; perhaps some of the layout would be broken, but not in a way that would interfere with the functionality or content of the site.

Nowadays, not only is this totally impossible, blocking even a subset of a site's JS (such as through uMatrix) is trial and error to get the site to load at all, or to do simple tasks like click on a "login" button.

With Google's plan to "phase out" cookies [0], I expect the web to become even more opaque and difficult to modify "on the fly" -- that is, on the user's local machine prior to displaying the content. In particular, this will affect ad and tracker blocking the most, as the pain from effective ad blockers starts to bite harder and harder.

So, when you say "The giants gain more invisible power", that is true and desireable from their perspective, and since they write the code that actually underpins most web browsers, why wouldn't they?

When you say, "powerusers suffer decreates productivity/privacy", yes, that's absolutely true. Why would they care? It's such a small fraction of their business. Some users will go to more and more extremes to preserve their privacy, eventually accessing only some small subset of sites from an esoteric Kali-derived distro, and others will capitulate and shift their behavior back to the herd.

In the end, the giants still win.

[0]: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-says-chrome-will-end-s...

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re also using your labor to train models by serving you pages and checking which links you click. No js required.

Just because he's being exploited by Google in one way doesn't mean he has to allow himself to be exploited in every possible way.

Do you consider "exploitation" here to be negative or unethical?

He is willingly using Google because the provide amazingly useful services completely free of monetary charge. Are you objecting to the fact that Google benefits in some way by providing this service?

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