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Blocked by Cloudflare

jrhawley.ca

131–140 of 473 posts

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#131
post #80

The amount of times Cloudflare is making me sit through their 15 to 30 second "checking your connection" page is insane. For people going through life with ADHD such as myself, the impact of all these delays and disruptions throughout the day can be severe. Despite being properly medicated this measure is absolutely debilitating and makes for a dreadful and very taxing online experience.

Cloudflare's Privacy Pass may help here: https://privacypass.github.io/ It should significantly reduce the amount of CAPTCHAs you see in a way that's not terrible for privacy. For Safari, you can enable Private Access Tokens: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-enable-private-access-tok... Both of these mechanisms are similar to Google's web DRM proposal in that they rely on external issuers to generate tokens, but un…

Wow, that doesn't sound like a terrible idea!

Which is honestly surprising in this area where it feels like privacy, anonymity and human verification are incompatible with each other.

I am trying to minimise my time wasted by websites, which is hard to balance with privacy, one other one is the repetitive consent forms (if you don't retain cookies, it's a never ending process). I think consent forms and human verification are the 2 biggest human time wasters.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#132
post #84

So many privacy nuts use Chrome and don't realize this: > What about Google Chrome? > I tried all of the above in Firefox. So I naturally tried to access the same page in Google Chrome to see if I’d still be blocked. Thankfully, I wasn’t. > But of course I wasn’t because Chrome doesn’t have the same privacy- and security-enhancing designs that Firefox does. Chrome will happily collect as much private information abou…

> So many privacy nuts use Chrome

Really? That's news to me.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#133
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no Google fanboy but I wasn’t satisfied with this: > Chrome will happily collect as much private information about me and my browsing history and share them with select parties, as needed What information does Chrome provide in this scenario that Firefox doesn’t? It feels like backward logic: it worked in Chrome therefore it must be because Chrome gave extra info. In reality it could be a whole bunch of things, s…

You're conflating a downside of using Chrome and the reason they think Cloudflare blocked them.

> So I naturally tried to access the same page in Google Chrome to see if I’d still be blocked. Thankfully, I wasn’t.

> But of course I wasn’t because Chrome doesn’t have the same privacy- and security-enhancing designs

Maybe I’m missing something but it seems the conflation was by the article author, not me?

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#135
post #84

So many privacy nuts use Chrome and don't realize this: > What about Google Chrome? > I tried all of the above in Firefox. So I naturally tried to access the same page in Google Chrome to see if I’d still be blocked. Thankfully, I wasn’t. > But of course I wasn’t because Chrome doesn’t have the same privacy- and security-enhancing designs that Firefox does. Chrome will happily collect as much private information abou…

I care about accessing the sites I use quickly and efficiently, with a minimum of auth and compatibility dance.

Since Chrome is so common that it's basically guaranteed to have been tested against the site I'm trying to access, I use Chrome.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#136
Increasingly more sites are getting stuck in a Cloudflare verification loop on my end. I use Firefox on the beta channel, and I do have a few privacy extensions and a heavily modified user.js. If you want to give in to the browser fingerprinting, I have found that enabling WebGL, enabling performance timing (wow), setting network.http.referer.XOriginTrimmingPolicy to 0, among other tweaks, helps me break out of the verification loop.

In other words, if Cloudflare can't reliably fingerprint your browser, you are treated as a "bot" and denied access to a huge chunk of the web. Well, in that case, I would rather be a bot than a human. Being a human seems to be increasingly annoying nowadays :)

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#137
post #63
post #12

Any time a large portion of internet traffic is controlled by a single source it brings problems like this with it. All cloudflare has to do is arbitrarily decide who and who can't use the internet and effectively their word becomes law. Like most things it starts with an innocent premise (e.g. "an easy way to stop bad actors") and ends up extended to any number of arbitrary things. Worse, the argument from privacy a…

You don’t pay Cloudflare money nor are you customer. The customers are the sites that pay them money to protect their infrastructure. The customers have many choices in CDN/WAF providers and Cloudflare isn’t even largest, Akamai is. Fastest growing CDN is cloudfront. There is healthy competition so why would anti trust laws apply?

Cloudflare controls about 19% of websites. Of the websites that use a CDN, 80% of them use Cloudflare [0] (in a note at the bottom of link).

[0] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/statistically-speaking-wh...

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#138
post #12

Any time a large portion of internet traffic is controlled by a single source it brings problems like this with it. All cloudflare has to do is arbitrarily decide who and who can't use the internet and effectively their word becomes law. Like most things it starts with an innocent premise (e.g. "an easy way to stop bad actors") and ends up extended to any number of arbitrary things. Worse, the argument from privacy a…

Cloudflare does not have nearly enough market share to be an anti-trust concern.

Cloudflare controls about 19% of websites. Of the websites that use a CDN, 80% of them use Cloudflare [0] (in a note at the bottom of link).

[0] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/statistically-speaking-wh...

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#139
post #9

> The next day, I tried accessing a web page internal to my company… […] I couldn’t get past a security check page because of issues in Cloudflare’s software. […] The silliness of it all is that I was on my work device the whole time, which was behind my workplace VPN. This seems more like an "IT department gone mad" problem than a Cloudflare problem. I'm surprised they'd rather switch to Chrome than submit a support…

Passkeys have optional attestation payloads, which is basically what WEI is doing. Google in particular doesn't recommend requiring attestation except in corporate-security scenarios, but the fear is that banking and media sites will require attestation anyway, which locks users into whatever attestation mechanisms supported by the server; so basically Google, Apple and Microsoft.

You know I knew there was going to be something I really didn’t like about passkeys, and here it is

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website owner complains elsewhere in this topic of blocked users (country-specific): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37050774

That's not a lot of information for such a complex subject. Eg. If you live in a dictatorship and use a VPN. You're traffic is together with a lot of people. The website owner can disable cloudflare their checks and that will leave their site unprotected. The choice of that is up to the website owner, no?

It seems like a lot of people are pretending that because there's a contractual relationship between Cloudflare and many websites, that Cloudflare can't cause outsized harms to other parties.

It really sucks for a third party to claim you're a bot and as a result you lose access to resources. And the potential for harm is only increasing.

Worse still, the false positive rate appears unacceptably high (look at all the people here with substantial issues) and there's no recourse unless you get a highly voted thread on hacker news.

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