Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#141

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #123

I don't see anyone here mentioning this, so I will. CloudFlare supports PrivacyPass, a third-party, privacy-preserving way to do proof-of-work for websites. Basically, you do some small amount of CPU work and get 30 tickets your browser can transparently redeem for access to a site. That's a pretty clever way to both deter bad actors and ensure legitimate users get uninterrupted access to websites.

I probably don't understand PrivacyPass well enough, but I don't really see how it's a good solution to the problem.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#142

Post by sturgill » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

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…

I’m a fan of Recaptcha v3. There are many actions where you can ask for some additional input in a non-puzzle way. Simple example is sending a confirmation email before signup when the score is below a certain threshold.

Because I freaking hate those captcha puzzles...

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#143

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

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…

> This isn't a side feature, it's a direct feature that is 100% intentional.

So Cloudflare is intentionally breaking the web? Good to know.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#144

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #139

lucb1e wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Support options would be good info to put on that CAPTCHA page instead of having to find that somewhere deep down in an HN thread.

Wasn't HN also behind CloudFlare? Looks like that changed, but maybe it will be again in the future.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#145

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #94

vageli wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. They do—changing your user agent is trivial.

Why would I want to send an incorrect user agent? There's no point having one if it's just going to lie anyway.

I agree. I wish browsers would just stop sending a user agent string entirely. I don't think that I've sent an honest one in over a decade.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#146

Post by at_a_remove » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

pwinnski wrote: post #88

Rebelgecko wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, Cloudflare were free speech absolutists. They accepted customers in a content neutral way. When people tried to get them to deplatform ISIS websites, they said this: One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred. A website, of course, is nothing but speech... A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it create…

> Since then, they've stopped working with a number of other sites due to content, like 8chan. I believe that number is 1, and that the only two sites they've shut off service to are Daily Stormer and 8chan.

The old joke about there being only three numbers in computer science comes to mind. First they blocked none (zero) on the basis of the content, then a site was blocked (one), and now ... well, two isn't "many," but it won't be the last block we see on that basis.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#147

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

> Most people building custom browsers are doing it to do something Chrome would disallow.

Chrome is not, and isn't meant to be, DRM. There are DRM extensions for that, but Chrome (and let's extend this statement to any other whitelisted browser) does not try to limit what you can do to a website. The only restriction I can think of is the common ports thing, but if you want to connect to port 25 (typically for SMTP/email), go ahead and change the about:config setting and you can do it.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#148

Post by dewey » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

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…

This can't only be based on user agents, otherwise it would be pretty useless. I can set my Firefox's user agent to curl if I feel like it, the same way malicious actors would just set the user agent in their scripts / headless browsers etc.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#149

Post by mirimir » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

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…

My solution is connecting via nested VPN chains, working in VMs, and compartmentalizing stuff using multiple personas.

Reputable VPN services do a good job of keeping their IPs off blocklists. Occasionally I'll get blocked, because some jerk has been abusing the VPN server that I'm exiting from. But if it doesn't resolve promptly, I just switch to a different exit server.

So I only use this VM, and this VPN exit, as Mirimir. And given that, I don't go out of my way to prevent tracking. Not enough, anyway, to trigger blocking. Because I don't really care if everything that Mirimir does gets linked. Indeed, I pretty much always use "Mirimir" as my username, or sometimes "Dimi" or whatever.

If I don't want stuff linked, I use a different persona in a different VM, using a different VPN chain. Or that via Tor using Whonix.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#150

Post by ta999999171 » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

smkellat wrote: post #86

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…

Cloudflare is publicly traded under the symbol NET and has quite a number of institutional investors. A list can be found here: https://old.nasdaq.com/symbol/net/institutional-holdings If all those companies are fronts for various parts of the US intelligence community then we're really screwed, I suppose.

That's... not how that would work.