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Ask HN: Is your Firefox blocked by Cloudflare in recent weeks? (e.g., Gitlab)

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Ask HN: Is your Firefox blocked by Cloudflare in recent weeks? (e.g., Gitlab)

#1

Post by neilv »

In recent weeks, CloudFlare has been blocking my Firefox ESR browser from various sites, with dreaded infinite loops like "Checking your browser before accessing gitlab.com."

This was merely annoying until now, in a "guess I won't be reading that article or trying their site, after all" way, but I can't log in to an actually important site, GitLab.

Even when I disable both uBlock Origin and Firefox "Advanced Tracking Protection", I'm still blocked from GitLab by CloudFlare.

Testing with Chromium (same residential IP address as Firefox) in a "please violate me in every possible way" configuration, CloudFlare doesn't block me from GitLab.

But I really want to use Firefox for GitLab, and my Firefox doesn't have trouble with non-CloudFlare sites. For example, GitHub works fine with my Firefox. (But I'd really prefer to use GitLab, so long as this problem can be resolved and I'm not going to run into problems like this.)

I see a various complaints about CloudFlare blocking GitLab online, with various explanations. Sometimes, the user is blamed for not figuring out how they're not complying with whatever CloudFlare is trying to do (like the user is some divergent citizen, to be denied rights, in some Kafkaesque authoritarian police state).

I suspect that sites don't know when CloudFlare is false-positive blocking legitimate visitors and costing them customers...

Re: Ask HN: Is your Firefox blocked by Cloudflare in recent weeks? (e.g., Gitlab)

#2

Post by sebastien_b »

>I suspect that sites don't know when CloudFlare is false-positive blocking legitimate visitors and costing them customers

So let them know. Put a value on it too. Then maybe they’ll be more careful in dismissing “false positives” as a business cost (especially for someone like GitLab competing for business).

Re: Ask HN: Is your Firefox blocked by Cloudflare in recent weeks? (e.g., Gitlab)

#5

Post by than3 »

sebastien_b wrote: post #2

> I suspect that sites don't know when CloudFlare is false-positive blocking legitimate visitors and costing them customers So let them know. Put a value on it too. Then maybe they’ll be more careful in dismissing “false positives” as a business cost (especially for someone like GitLab competing for business).

That's a false trail, no one would trust numbers from a potentially disgruntled customer. There's little credibility that couldn't be shredded by a behemoth.

Re: Ask HN: Is your Firefox blocked by Cloudflare in recent weeks? (e.g., Gitlab)

#6

Post by _siis »

This is a growing problem. As far as I'm aware, Cloudflare does not collect or report these type of metrics because if they did, they could be abused.

There is no way to actually know who is or isn't a bot. The methodology for bot detection changes dramatically, isn't published, often isn't well tested, and fails to fully capture turing tests in any meaningful way. Its all about forcing more requirements on the user, where the more unique the user is, the more likely its a user and counting all blocks as a net win. The only problem is it drives surveillance capitalism, and its a flawed assumption.

Maybe you should start an end-user Firefox extension/platform that aggregates where it checks for these, and allows the user to self-report when it fails (or detect and show repeat failures.

Re: Ask HN: Is your Firefox blocked by Cloudflare in recent weeks? (e.g., Gitlab)

#7

Post by vladvasiliu »

I don't use GitLab that often, but I've never had any issue with it. I'm rarely if ever logged into my account when I stumble there. Latest was yesterday morning.

I'm using latest Firefox on Linux, with advanced tracking protection as well as uBlock Origin and uMatrix for good measure. The latter isn't configured to turn itself off on Gitlab.

Re: Ask HN: Is your Firefox blocked by Cloudflare in recent weeks? (e.g., Gitlab)

#8

Post by jhoelzel »

its maybe just the site your visiting on that has traffic.

for instance i have noticed the same on the chatgpt page. I have to "verify" a lot which is just another sign for "we are overloaded at the moment"

At least thats how i interpreted it so far. Im using Ferdium which has integrated firefox

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