Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 554 posts

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

#21
Since 2024 to now I've had to constantly verify that I'm human just to visit certain sites due to Cloudflare. Now it's even worse since (sometimes) cdnjs.cloudflare.com loads infinitely unless I turn on my VPN. Infuriating that I have to use a service known for potential spam, to get another service that blocks spam to bloody work.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

#24

How many of you all are running bare metal hooked right up to the internet? Is DDoS or any of that actually a super common problem? I know it happens, but also I've run plenty of servers hooked directly to the internet (with standard *nix security precautions and hosting provider DDoS protection) and haven't had it actually be an issue. So why run absolutely everything through Cloudflare?

Web scraping without any kind of sleeping in between requests (usually firing many threads at once), as well as heavy exploit scanning is a near constant for most websites. With AI technology, it's only getting worse, as vendors attempt to bring in content from all over the web without regard for resource usage. Depending on the industry, DDoS can be very common from competitors that aren't afraid to rent out botnets to boost their business and tear down those they compete against.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

#25

A lot of people are failing to conceive the danger that poses to the open web the fact that a lot of traffic runs through/to a few bunch of providers (namely, CloudFlare, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and "smaller" ones like Fastly or Akamai) who can take this kind of measures without (many) website owners knowing or giving a crap about. Google itself tried to push crap like Web Environment Integrity (WEI) so websites co…

I can easily conceive the danger. But I can directly observe the danger that's causing traffic to be so centralized - if you don't have one of those providers on your side, any adversary with a couple hundred dollars to burn can take down your website on demand. That seems like a bigger practical problem for the open web, and I don't know what the alternative solution would be. How can I know, without incurring any n…

how do you know a normal-looking request coming from google chrome is not a botnet trying to ddos you?

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

#26

How many of you all are running bare metal hooked right up to the internet? Is DDoS or any of that actually a super common problem? I know it happens, but also I've run plenty of servers hooked directly to the internet (with standard *nix security precautions and hosting provider DDoS protection) and haven't had it actually be an issue. So why run absolutely everything through Cloudflare?

It’s free unless you’re rolling in traffic, it’s extremely easy to setup, and CF can handle pretty much all of your infra with tools way better than AWS.

Also you can buy a cheaper ipv6 only VPS and run it thru free CF proxy to allow ipv4 traffic to your site

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

#27
post #5

I'm using chrome on linux and noticed that this year cloudflare is very agressive in showing the "Verify you are a human" box. Now a lot of sites that use cloudflare show it and once you solve the challenge it shows it again after 30 minutes! What are you protecting cloudflare? Also they show those captchas when going to robots.txt... unbelievable.

Whoever configures the Cloudflare rules should be turning off the firewall for things like robots.txt and sitemap.xml. You can still use caching for those resources to prevent them becoming a front door to DDoS.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

#28

Chromium on linux is also frequently blocked by cloudflare. I can't use tools such as HIBP.

Same here. I just gave up on most of these websites. When I absolutely need to use a website such as for flights, I have a clean chrome browser I spin up.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

#29

A lot of people are failing to conceive the danger that poses to the open web the fact that a lot of traffic runs through/to a few bunch of providers (namely, CloudFlare, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and "smaller" ones like Fastly or Akamai) who can take this kind of measures without (many) website owners knowing or giving a crap about. Google itself tried to push crap like Web Environment Integrity (WEI) so websites co…

> Or even worse, serve modified content instead of what the actual origin is serving?

I witnessed this! Last time I checked, in the default config, the connection between cloudflare and the origin server does not do strict TLS cert validation. Which for an active-MITM attacker is as good as no TLS cert validation at all.

A few years ago an Indian ISP decided that https://overthewire.org should be banned for hosting "hacking" content (iirc). For many Indian users, the page showed a "content blocked" page. But the error page had a padlock icon in the URL bar and a valid TLS cert - said ISP was injecting it between Cloudflare and the origin server using a self-signed cert, and Cloudflare was re-encrypting it with a legit cert. In this case it was very conspicuous, but if the tampering was less obvious there'd be no way for an end-user to detect the MITM.

I don't have any evidence on-hand, but iirc there were people reporting this issue on Twitter - somewhere between 2019 and 2021, maybe.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

#30
post #23

Things like "using Linux" or "having an adblocker at all" get you sent to captcha hell. Anything where you're in the minority of traffic. It's not going to change; why would it?

I have multiple blockers (Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, Facebook Container) in Firefox and have not experienced this issue.
Post reply on HN