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Blocked by Cloudflare

jrhawley.ca

201–210 of 473 posts

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why would they load balance based on user agent? I can’t think of a scenario where that was a reasonable solution.

Maybe back when standarts where on shaky ground and different versions of the same content was made? I too cant see the performance advantage of it. Deprioritizing less mainstream browsers to mess with the nerds?

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#202
post #96
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’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…

A third browser... like what? Chrome and Firefox are all that exist now, unless you have access to a Mac with Safari.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cause of the problem is that your software is faulty by design. 1. IP addresses are to be used for packet routing. Certainly not for assigning "behavior scores" to users in the background. IP addresses say nothing about your visitors, my IP address could have been a complete stranger's IP address yesterday. 2. Deciding who can access half the web based on their TLS signature achieves nothing in the long run excep…

You're being a little dramatic. It's incredibly unlikely that millions of innocent users have been blocked, and unless you have data to the contrary you shouldn't make such a claim. You know what else is harmful to the concept of the open internet? The enormous malicious botnets and other endemic problems that require a solution like CloudFlare.

Data point of N+1, but I haven't been able to place online orders at Petco for about a year now because they use some Cloudflare feature that hates my browser + home internet connection. Other Cloudflare-proxied sites seem unaffected, and I'm not doing any botting/crawling, nor do I have any IoT devices on my home network. There's not enough information provided to be able to do any substantive troubleshooting.

This became irritating enough that it caused two side effects: (a) I stopped shopping at Petco, and (b) I moved a pile of sites off of Cloudflare and stopped recommending them, and now sometimes recommend against them.

Cloudflare is still a good, quick, cheap option for sites that receive unusual volumes of malicious traffic, so I'll still recommend them as a solution to some problems. But, they're not a good default.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#204
On one of my machines I run OpenBSD with Firefox with "Strict" privacy settings and "privacy.resistFingerprinting" enabled. There are so many websites I can't access, I get a straight-up 403 Forbidden page because CloudFlare has decided I am not trustworthy. I mean like pretty big companies like DigiKey, Home Depot, Canadian Tire, etc. I simply cannot use their websites, or I can load the initial page but then the API calls that provide the functionality all fail with a 403. DigiKey did something to unblock me and I can use their site again, but I know it's just a matter of time before it happens again. It's also a frequent problem on smaller sites that are simply using CloudFlare , and I never know when I'm going to be blocked from a site arbitrarily. It's especially egregious when it's a plain old text-based site like hamuniverse.com , or a small independent vendor like digirig.net ...

This is one of the things that makes it so clear to me that the web is diverging into two, one that is the "clean walled-garden capitalism web" and the continuation of the original web that was open, freely-accessible and built around sharing and knowledge.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#205

Hi there, I'm the PM for Cloudflare's challenge platform. I'd love to look into what the cause of the problem is, so you don't see these difficulties. > Cloudflare detected the high frequency of requests and denials (but not their faulty loop that caused this pattern of requests, of course), and tagged my browser as suspicious. I can tell you at least that we don't penalize users for this looping behavior, so this wo…

I have noticed that on StarLink some sites behind CF go into "prove you are human" loops that are impassable. What causes such loops? Just a challenge over and over.

There’s a patent for that. The catchpa loop is basically a honeypot for bots… and privacy-conscious legitimate folks.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#206
post #96
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’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…

Chrome will indeed divulge more information than other browsers but only on the condition that you have opted-in for such collection.

“The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web. This data is automatically collected by Chrome from users who have opted in, . . .”

Taken from https://web.dev/crux-and-rum-differences/

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

funny enough... I called out Cloudflare for the pariah it is, and got downvoted and flagged

and someone's come and done it again

I seriously never get people that love CF (or any company for that matter). Praising 1.1.1.1, giving it free advertising. CF is basically handing over your website in return for some less work on your part. I get the advantages of it (like less engineer credits wasted, less server maintaining work and probably cost, faster) but actively giving it free PR just doesnt fit right with me. Pay your bucks and sit. They are a Big Tech company, they dont need your prayers.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#208

Hi there, I'm the PM for Cloudflare's challenge platform. I'd love to look into what the cause of the problem is, so you don't see these difficulties. > Cloudflare detected the high frequency of requests and denials (but not their faulty loop that caused this pattern of requests, of course), and tagged my browser as suspicious. I can tell you at least that we don't penalize users for this looping behavior, so this wo…

I dont know which type of Firefox you use, but any reasonably tuned browser (in the privacy sense) fails your systems. I literally didnt have a single instance of passing them without handing over a pixel perfect fingerprint.

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, you know, most crawlers were fine. The only one that actively DDOSed websites was fucking Yandex. It doesn't respect robots.txt and it will actively fight against any rate limits by spawning connections on new IPs the moment one is blocked

? I personally experienced many unbehaving crawlers/bots not respecting robots.txt and behaving like another user agent. Feel free to prove me wrong and disrupt cloudflare by only handling that use-case

Found an old reference of mine what I did to block crawlers/bots

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101988

> Had a lot of spammers with Russian language. Implemented expanding xml-bombs, Google Captcha, hidden input fields and a couple of other things against bots. But the block on the russian language was most effective ( and since I was dogfooding it, I didn't see the harm at the time. But it's out of scope at this very moment, yes).

Re: Blocked by Cloudflare

#210
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed that on StarLink some sites behind CF go into "prove you are human" loops that are impassable. What causes such loops? Just a challenge over and over.

> Just a challenge over and over. It must be intentional. Not unlike the endless loop of frustratingly slow-fading reCAPTCHA challenges that don't go anywhere. The user gives up after some time, but doesn't see any explicit error or page blocking their access. I imagine it must be quite effective.

in my opinion, the admins do not enable the option to ban lower trust users (or set the threshold high), so CF tries over and over again instead of doing that.
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