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You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

ctrl.blog

71–80 of 354 posts

Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#71
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burn the witch! Lets read through that page for a second though: Drop support for obsolete HTTP versions Doesn't seem like that's going to cause much issue for any legitimate client from the past 10-20 years. He only recommends blocking HTTP 0.9/1.0, which fair enough Append a #hash to the form’s action URL Hah. Clever man. I don't see how this is going to stop any legitimate user from loading your website or submitt…

He's quite tame compared to me I suppose. I block anything that is not HTTP/2.0 which currently knocks out all the bots and all crawlers except Bing. But I just have hobby sites these days. Nobody would notice or care if my sites went offline. Using NGinx as an example: if ($server_protocol != HTTP/2.0) { return 403 'Nope'; } Another thing I have found useful to drops some bots is to become invisible to them. Many of…

IMO blocking bots isn't too big of a concern, the problem is when a dedicated attacker realizes you serve valuable data (in your HTML). Next thing you know, they're running puppeteer or a similar remote controlled browser to scrape your site, which is both undesirable in itself and the scraper might overload your site/database by scraping with no internal parallel request limit. If you're not a startup with an unlimited early cloud budget, it can be costly if you want to handle both bot usage (including official API-based or scraping bots) and regular users.

Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#72
Harsh blocking/limiting/challenging is way too valuable to sites that are actually trying to make money online. It's not going away short of legislation banning it. Losing 1/10,000 legitimate customers to cut fraud attempts, spam, exploit attempts, and so on, by 90% or more, is just too good a trade-off.

I have bad news about the most-likely fix for it, longer term, so we can lay off the IP-based reputation stuff and the geo-blocking: it's tying some form of personal ID to your browsing activity, so that bears the reputation instead of the address.

Sorry. Said it was bad news.

Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#73
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CloudFlare allows website host to have much finer grain control that would have solved many of these problems - if they pay for it . I see no problem with this.

The hosts aren't blocking him though, it's Cloudflare. > Just about every website I visited from my home internet connection would result in a challenge page.

Cloudflare is blocking him because the hosts didn’t configure Cloudflare to not use captcha for sub domains that host non browser traffic like podcast RSS feeds. That was his theory.

That capability is only available for paid CloudFlare plans.

Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the author or his reputation, but his suggestions that you linked are (in my opinion) standard actions for any dev/server admin getting spammed by their forms... And the suggestions really only impact malicious actors accessing your website from a script... Virtually none of those would be an issue for any browser made in the last 15-20 years, or headless browsers, but would break rudimentary scripts lik…

I guess like ctrl.blog you can't grasp the significance of the issue until it happens to you. My firefox fork is definitely blocked by his algorithmic "bot" detector. Just because your browser isn't doesn't mean it only blocks bots. False positives happen. They happen a lot more than you think. And they are a serious problem. Even more serious when it's cloudflare, but arguing for everyone to implement these algorith…

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Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#76

Yeah, this just continues to reinforce my opinion Cloudflare. It's not something I would ever recommend, and there are numerous other superior options out there. I see Cloudflare failing frequently enough that if it were something I was responsible for, I'd be embarrassed at the very least.

What superior options would you recommend that are privacy focused and free?

Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#77
I actually think that Cloudflare is setting up the foundation of Chinese style (but privately outsourced in the US case) censorship machinery in the US. Between their AI erroneously flexing its power, Kiwifarms scandal and similar, they are emerging as a rival to Google in its censorship effort. One of the most dangerous companies in the internet.

Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#78
post #64

Has he tried unplugging the router for 15 minutes and plugging it back in? I jest but I know Comcast and Spectrum will both issue a new IP address in that timeframe.

IP bans by modern services like CF can't be solved that easily in my experience.

Clearly CF has a crystal ball /s.

Once the IP address I don't own is released and assigned to some other router how do you think CF determines the new IP address for the individual/home? Unless this person is running the CF Dynamic DNS service which gives CF the IP address, I'm not sure CF would have any reasonable validation techniques to determine who is what given the size of residential networks.

Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#79
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have a threat score https://developers.cloudflare.com/firewall/recipes/block-ip-... I was surprised to learn Cloudflare was born out of Project Honeypot, so I am guessing Cloudflare does share data with them: https://www.projecthoneypot.org/cloudflare_beta.html

FYI you're responding to the cloudflare CTO

It’s naive to assume Cloudflare CTO would not be lying if beneficial to him or Cloudflare.

Re: You don’t want to be on Cloudflare’s naughty list

#80

Yeah, this just continues to reinforce my opinion Cloudflare. It's not something I would ever recommend, and there are numerous other superior options out there. I see Cloudflare failing frequently enough that if it were something I was responsible for, I'd be embarrassed at the very least.

I'm curious if you've had experience with their enterprise package?

I can understand people's gripes about things on the free/cheap packages, where Cloudflare makes decisions for you, sometimes ones you don't like.

But as an enterprise customer, I've never found it to be anything short of fantastic - I can tailor it to behave exactly how I want, and not interfere with my customers.

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