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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

#221

Post by pabs3 »

3xblah wrote: post #205
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.

If omit the user-agent string or, even better, the user-agent header itself, everything will be fine, too. Tested with Cloudflare and many, many other servers over many years. On the whole, taking the entire web into account, it is rare for a user-agent string to be required . However, it has become common for servers to make many assumptions based on user-agent strings. I would guess there are many tech workers whos…

There are a number of sites that simply crash with a web framework backtrace or behave strangely when the User-Agent header is not sent.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#222

Post by Forge36 »

pabs3 wrote: post #221
3xblah wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If omit the user-agent string or, even better, the user-agent header itself, everything will be fine, too. Tested with Cloudflare and many, many other servers over many years. On the whole, taking the entire web into account, it is rare for a user-agent string to be required . However, it has become common for servers to make many assumptions based on user-agent strings. I would guess there are many tech workers whos…

There are a number of sites that simply crash with a web framework backtrace or behave strangely when the User-Agent header is not sent.

That sounds like something worth reporting if possible, assuming it's also written to a log it might be a denial of service week point.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#223

Post by ar0 »

creato wrote: post #166
JohnFen wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They do work well for the vast majority of people. Only on HN do I ever see people complaining about cloudflare/captchas/etc.

I see lots of complaints about Captchas in the “real” world, too. Not regarding the centralisation etc. aspect but more regarding how painful they are to complete correctly, but there are definitely complaints.

Regarding Cloudflare, a regular user will have no idea about what Cloudflare is and what they do. If something like the OP happens to them, they will just figure “the site is broken” and move on. So there could be a large hidden number of users who have suffered from overzealous Cloudflare blocking without being able to identify it as such.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#224

Post by htfu »

merpnderp wrote: post #90
cortesoft wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, no one said the SPLC is the final say for this. Second, do you have any examples of an organization that the SPLC deemed a white supremacist that wasn't?

I know the SPLC has paid out in defamation suits rather than allow the cases to go to trial. Pretty good sign they knew they'd lose as it has severely hurt their reputation. Here's a particularly egregious case where a UN affiliated group was labeled an extremist hate group and the SPLC wouldn't relent even after evidence was presented: https://www.newsweek.com/splc-nawaz-million-apologizes-98187...

How to you go from SPLC backing down after '"human rights advocates affiliated with the United Nations" praised Nawaz's work.' to Quilliam being UN affiliated, and SPLC not backing down?

At least read your own link, please. I get what you're saying about the settlement but they could've just paid out and not gone to such lengths explaining how they felt they'd gotten things wrong.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#225

Post by [deleted] »

SilasX wrote: post #207
jimrandomh wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the severely-outdated Firefox version number. Spambots and crawlers sometimes have user-agent strings corresponding to very old browsers, because they were set once when the bot was created and then never updated. On an unrelated site that I run, we get a lot of traffic with user agent strings corresponding to implausibly-old browsers, and it's ~100% bots.

November 2017 is “severely outdated”? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/57.0/releasenotes/

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#226

Post by [deleted] »

pabs3 wrote: post #221
3xblah wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If omit the user-agent string or, even better, the user-agent header itself, everything will be fine, too. Tested with Cloudflare and many, many other servers over many years. On the whole, taking the entire web into account, it is rare for a user-agent string to be required . However, it has become common for servers to make many assumptions based on user-agent strings. I would guess there are many tech workers whos…

There are a number of sites that simply crash with a web framework backtrace or behave strangely when the User-Agent header is not sent.

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#227

Post by [deleted] »

pabs3 wrote: post #221
3xblah wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If omit the user-agent string or, even better, the user-agent header itself, everything will be fine, too. Tested with Cloudflare and many, many other servers over many years. On the whole, taking the entire web into account, it is rare for a user-agent string to be required . However, it has become common for servers to make many assumptions based on user-agent strings. I would guess there are many tech workers whos…

There are a number of sites that simply crash with a web framework backtrace or behave strangely when the User-Agent header is not sent.

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#228

Post by wolco »

danShumway wrote: post #185
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…

> Let's hear some real solutions. It's by no means a full solution (there likely is no single full solution), and it may even be a bad solution -- but lately I've been trying to think about what the Internet would look like if we didn't have a massive arbitrage potential around server requests. Part of the reason why everyone is trying to detect bots is because bots will very, very rapidly eat up your bandwidth and C…

That's how ads work. More visitors more pageviews/clicks. People who serve ads don't want to pay for bots which is why they are a problem.

Doesn't medium do this?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#229

Post by anthk »

The-Compiler wrote: post #137
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…

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

So can do Falkon :)

Having a Chrome UA is a MUST on webkit based browsers if you want Google's taxing services such as Earth/Maps/Gmail and so on being faster and smoother than ever. Seriously.

Once you open Street View on luakit/vimb with a Chrome UA, the diff is night and day.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#230

Post by tomc1985 »

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.

Why is it that something as malleable as a user-agent string trips these kinds of sensors?

If I were to write a bot, copying current browsers' user-agents is literally the first thing I'd do

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