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Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

blog.dijit.sh

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Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#131

Post by megous »

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.

I've looked at my logs, and obvious nonsense like POST or GETs with any search params on a website that only has static html pages wich should not generate these kinds of requests is about 1% of last 25000 requests.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#132

Post by lucb1e »

JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #73
tmoravec wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the websites I visit give me the CloudFlare screen like One more step Please complete the security check to access . Followed by either endless stream of ReCaptchas or one completely impossible.

if captcha loops are still an issue, you should write in. JGC takes that stuff seriously. You're more likely to see a IP block, because most site owners do not whitelist TOR endpoints or specifically block them because it's mostly abuse.

I'm guessing JGC is some dude that works at CF, but where should one write in? You're literally looking at a Google CAPTCHA, you can't go to the contact page because that's behind this proxy that won't let you pass.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#133

Post by tzs »

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.

If they were an actual part of government, sovereign immunity would be something that would have to be considered. In a nutshell, the government cannot be sued unless it decides to allow it.

The government has passed laws to allow itself to be sued under certain circumstances. The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), for example, allows suits for a variety of torts.

I believe (but am not actually sure) that most normal business-type transactions with the government are covered under FTCA or other acts, so a breach of contract by Cloudflare-the-government-entity would probably be pretty much like a breach by any random non-government entity.

Still, if you were going to depend on that it would be a good idea to actually look into the details of the FTCA and other such acts and compare to the actual Cloudflare TOS.

I have no idea whatsoever how sovereign immunity works in the case of a corporation chartered under some state's corporate law (Delaware in the care of Cloudflare) that is owned (fully or in part) by the government. I'd guess that it could only possibly apply if the government owns enough of the company to have control.

Cloudflare is public, so we can probably not worry about that scenario. If the government actually controls them, it is doing it surreptitiously, and so even if sovereign immunity should be somehow applicable I'd expect that the government would not bring it up because doing so would necessarily bring to light their control.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#134

Post by JohnFen »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #38
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…

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…

> most people on HN only seem capable of attacking the few affordable solutions to that problem.

I doubt that many would attack those solutions if they actually worked well, but they don't. These "solutions" are a big part of the reason why the web gets smaller for me every day as more and more websites become unusable.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#135

Post by nemothekid »

joepie91_ wrote: post #101
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…

The problem is that the narrative has been poisoned by Cloudflare and Google (for Recaptcha) - they both overstate the size of the problem, as well as the effectiveness of their solution. In other words: when someone demands "real solutions", they're typically expecting a degree of solution that quite likely just does not exist at all, to solve a problem that isn't as severe as people believe, just because that's the…

>because whatever alternative is suggested (hidden form elements, a random VPS provider with DDoS mitigation, serving assets locally, etc.) is immediately dismissed as "that can't possibly be as effective / effective enough", even though it'd be perfectly adequate for the vast majority of cases.

They are immediately dismissed because I don't want to pay a fulltime engineer to play cat and mouse with skiddies on the internet.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#136

Post by kube-system »

mschuster91 wrote: post #32
ecnahc515 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not censorship. The Internet is a vast space, someone will host your stuff.

Universality is not a defining characteristic of censorship. Most censors have very limited scope.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#137

Post by The-Compiler »

dijit wrote: post #92
RyanK24 wrote: post #83

It appears that you may have made some modifications to your user agent string. If you revert your user agent to the one provided by default by your browser vendor everything will be fine.

It appears that setting it to the same as Chromes does indeed work! for context this is what I had set (and, for quite some time it was working): "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecho/20100101 Firefox/57.0" Ironically I set this so that I could continue logging in to google. Since I had been unable to log in to google-apps without setting this user agent string. What did it fail on? the mis-spelling of "Gec…

I always recommend setting custom user-agents for a problematic page instead of setting them globally.

For the Google issue, qutebrowser v1.9.0 does that already, see https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/5182

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#138

Post by heyyyouu »

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…

Aren't there configuration options/levels that can be set within CloudFlare to mitigate these issues?

EDIT: Another user posted this below, answering my question:

sgtfrankieboy 1 hour ago | undown [-]

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 thing

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#139

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

lucb1e wrote: post #132
JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if captcha loops are still an issue, you should write in. JGC takes that stuff seriously. You're more likely to see a IP block, because most site owners do not whitelist TOR endpoints or specifically block them because it's mostly abuse.

I'm guessing JGC is some dude that works at CF, but where should one write in? You're literally looking at a Google CAPTCHA, you can't go to the contact page because that's behind this proxy that won't let you pass.

JGC is fairly popular on here and is CTO at Cloudflare. You can simply write into support@cloudflare.com, those tickets are forwarded to engineering teams.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#140

Post by The-Compiler »

migueldemoura wrote: post #110
dijit wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears that setting it to the same as Chromes does indeed work! for context this is what I had set (and, for quite some time it was working): "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecho/20100101 Firefox/57.0" Ironically I set this so that I could continue logging in to google. Since I had been unable to log in to google-apps without setting this user agent string. What did it fail on? the mis-spelling of "Gec…

That User-Agent won't trigger the block page you were experiencing. No clue about the issues with Google, perhaps some feature detection going on?

Nope, it's Google trying to ban "embedded browser frameworks" - see https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/5182 for details.
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