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Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

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Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#111

Post by calimac »

Thriptic wrote: post #89
hombre_fatal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Somewhat of a topic hijack and a naive question, but assuming Cloudflare is a government entity, wouldn't they still have to comply with whatever their terms of service / contracts with their users are? As they are a US company, barring illegality, theoretically they can't actually do shady shit without being in breach of contract right? They would also open themselves up to shareholder lawsuits.

So what user would try to enforce the terms of service on five for

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#112

Post by algeoMA »

gok wrote: post #82

I really wish you could just directly pay for services. A hundredth of a cent per visit would make most abuse un-profitable while still allowing very affordable procrastination.

I also hope this happens. It would be interesting too, if it was bidirectional (services paying you to use them. Payment for your data, essentially).

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#113

Post by tyingq »

amylene wrote: post #99
megous wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What percentage of traffic on the long tail of 95% of smallest websites served by CF is malicious then? So that we talk in numbers.

I have run a number of small and medium websites (20 users per month up to 2 million). At least 50% of the traffic I see in my logs includes some sql injection or other mass script kiddie bs.

That's fairly black and white. Blocking an unusual user-agent because you "think" it might be malicious is another thing.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#114

Post by geofft »

psz wrote: 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...

If it's looking at the actual User-Agent string, can't you just set that to a well-known string? Chrome themselves are about to freeze their User-Agent: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/-2J...

Since your User-Agent string probably starts with "Mozilla/5.0" anyway despite not being Mozilla, you might as well just set it to Chrome's despite not being Chrome. (Vivaldi did that for other reasons: https://vivaldi.com/blog/user-agent-changes/)

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#115

Post by xur17 »

RileyJames wrote: post #107
Liquix wrote: 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…

4. Outsource. Use a ReCaptcha/Cloudflare filling service (usually just someone else manually typing these in). I won’t link, but search “ReCaptcha solver” and you’ll find plenty. It highlights just how broken the system is. It doesn’t stop determined spammers/devs, until the value of the task is lower than the cost to solve. Considering it’s 50c USD per 1000....

I've seriously considered doing exactly this. I've solved numerous challenges for Google this week alone.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#116

Post by quickthrower2 »

JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #70
szczepano wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, because most custom browsers are malicious. They have the data to prove it. This isn't a side feature, it's a direct feature that is 100% intentional. They maintain a backend whitelist of known "good" user-agents. Curl is on that list and there are a few others outside of the big players. Most people building custom browsers are doing it to do something Chrome would disallow. One instance would only supporting…

Why doesn’t the bad actor fork Chromium or Firefox?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#117

Post by xeromal »

vageli wrote: post #81
JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because most custom browsers are malicious. They have the data to prove it. This isn't a side feature, it's a direct feature that is 100% intentional. They maintain a backend whitelist of known "good" user-agents. Curl is on that list and there are a few others outside of the big players. Most people building custom browsers are doing it to do something Chrome would disallow. One instance would only supporting…

Any sufficiently bad actor will already modify their user agent. Who is this really stopping?

Same argument could be said for gun control.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#118

Post by jabart »

RileyJames wrote: post #107
Liquix wrote: 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…

4. Outsource. Use a ReCaptcha/Cloudflare filling service (usually just someone else manually typing these in). I won’t link, but search “ReCaptcha solver” and you’ll find plenty. It highlights just how broken the system is. It doesn’t stop determined spammers/devs, until the value of the task is lower than the cost to solve. Considering it’s 50c USD per 1000....

Everyone keeps bringing this up but unless you have something of monetary value on the other end, this won't happen. ReCaptcha and a few if statements has stopped all contact us form spam on our site. Same for other sites I help to manage, no one is paying 50 cents per a thousand contact us spam messages.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#120

Post by lucb1e »

sandov wrote: post #80
Liquix wrote: 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…

4. Boycott Cloudflare.

Isn't that #1? Or do you mean more like what OP is experiencing by being banned?

GP already mentioned why #1 is not a solution (which I see the same way) and OP made it quite clear that not visiting CF sites isn't quite working either.

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