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Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

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21–30 of 164 posts

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#22
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to the world of WAFs. Pattern matching scary strings is big business.

For the uninitiated: https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/waf...

Thanks. For me WAF is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor since the 2000's era of German audio enthusiast forums

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#23
post #20

Probably not related, but I've been getting lots of throttling-like huge page load delays on HN the last couple days, only when logged in. Any idea whether that's just an overloaded application server, or something Cloudflare is doing?

That's often the case with HN I think from past experience when there are large threads on HN, and dang has in the past said that's due to the application server.

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#25
post #2

Any code including netcat (for it's tendency to be used in reverse shells) or SQL (for it's tendency to be used in SQL injections) tends to be blocked across the entire cloudflare-net these days.

In a site like HN, that’s ridiculous.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38939668

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#26
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not make sense at all; it is batshit-crazy broken.

Welcome to the world of WAFs. Pattern matching scary strings is big business.

what dark magic is this? do you put it in front of all POSTs or something?

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#27
post #20

Probably not related, but I've been getting lots of throttling-like huge page load delays on HN the last couple days, only when logged in. Any idea whether that's just an overloaded application server, or something Cloudflare is doing?

That's often the case with HN I think from past experience when there are large threads on HN, and dang has in the past said that's due to the application server.

Single core application server no less

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#30
post #6

Cloudflare has access to everyone's cleartext? I was unaware of this. NSA must love that

Same for Akamai, Cloudfront, Fastly, etc. Pretty much every business that wants to offload DDOS protection, caching,and some level of frontline security uses a proxying CDN.

An alternative is to keep all of your CDN assets on a CDN bucket on its own hostname, with your main secret-containing business apps on your own servers, but it costs a lot to manage this level of separation and the payoff is only protection against the theoretical attack of "NSA can't attack our users/spy on them". If the NSA ever did do this on a large enough scale or to target a particularly notable person, it's very unlikely it would be kept a secret for long, and the end-business that used Cloudflare et al. wouldn't be implicated whatsoever since every business uses one of the big CDN providers.

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