341–350 of 354 posts
> For whatever reason, I must have done something that angered Cloudflare I'm guessing: having an IP address close to (or outright reused from and thus identical to) someone malicious, whom you know nothing about.
This is not an acceptable situation, but I have NFI what individual nobodies can do about it :(
This kind of behavior from such companies that have the market dominance should be illegal. They have the unsupervised power to destroy people's life. But for me, the biggest problem is not companies from this size doing this, nowadays it is completely expected; the biggest problem are people, including developers, that think they are right and have the right to do it.
Reputation systems should be based on /abuse/, not on automation. I also ended up on the naughty list for running an archival scraping program. Trying to preserve part of the Internet is apparently against the rules. It's really a shame because my code honors rate limits, doesn't spam, and is completely docile.
It’s against copyright laws too, unless you get the right holders’ go-ahead first.
Some regional differences, but it’s mostly not allowed with a few exceptions for some institutions.
> For whatever reason, I must have done something that angered Cloudflare I'm guessing: having an IP address close to (or outright reused from and thus identical to) someone malicious, whom you know nothing about.
That’s one of the theories discussed in the article, yes.
Another cause could be that you have some malware on your network that is attacking sites.
The author could be infected with something that wakes up sporadically (perhaps on external command) to participate in an attack, and then returns to dormancy. So the Cloudfare block being lifted isn't necessarily evidence that all is well.
Cloudflare is a regular problem for Starlink users. We're on CGNAT so users share IPv4 addresses. I see CAPTCHAs when using Starlink ten times as often as on my other ISP. I don't think it actually breaks things the way this article describes, it seems like a gentler behavior, but it's annoying. A few months ago I got on Akamai's naughty list (with my other ISP) for some very light automated website downloading. That…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get it browsing from a major ISP in the US. I have the gall to browse in private mode and to block trackers and ads because of all the malware they contain. (And I don't use a browser that requires me to login just to browse the web - gasp!) And apparently, that means I'm worthy of this sort of punishment as well.
> I have the gall to browse in private mode and to block trackers and ads because of all the malware they contain. I do these things as well. It’s been months since I’ve seen a CloudFlare challenge page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What superior options would you recommend that are privacy focused and free?
You can't have privacy-focused and free services. You're either the paying customer or the product being sold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just 10 minutes ago, I got the following email from a housemate (I'm not home at the moment): > The past few weeks I've been getting tons of redirects to verify my humanity before being allowed to view a webpage. Usually I just have to click the box that says human, not find all the ladders in a photo. SoFi is doing it every single time I log in. Petco, too, along with others who are more sporadic. This is happening…
> I do exactly zero web crawling / scraping / abusive anything from my home connection. That you know about . Your house mates share the internet connection. I’m guessing you have WiFi, so you may have unintended guests. You probably have lots of devices, one of which may be infected. Your ISP may have issued you a different IP which may have a negative reputation score. You could be using a malware infected browser…
This is actually the least likely these days... the no.1 cause would be CGNAT, the vast majority of residential endpoints share an IPv4 address with a huge number of users, mobile networks are even worse... that's before we even get to IP recycling for dynamic IPs which happens at high frequency with mobile networks again, so you will inevitably get affected eventually.
This is why it's a bad idea to block IPs outright, because today one IP address never equates to a single individual or the same set of individuals over time. The other problem with blocking IP addresses based on abuse is considering them equal in user weight, yet one IP might have 2 users, another might have 10000 users - Blocking a TOR exit node is a good extreme example of this... people think of it as an effective defence because of the concentration of abuse on that single IP address, but they fail to consider the concentration of users behind that IP address - TOR exit nodes probably are a slightly higher source of abuse per user, but not any where as high as per IP - if you measure abuse per IP you are more likely looking a rough picture of users per IP for highly NATed IPs.