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Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
231–240 of 554 posts
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#232Chromium on linux is also frequently blocked by cloudflare. I can't use tools such as HIBP.
Yeah and Firefox on Linux too. I do have the user agent set to one from Edge because otherwise Microsoft blocks many features in Office 365. Once it thinks it's Edge it suddenly does work just fine. But it doesn't completely fix all the cloudflare blocks and captchas.
+1 for Firefox on Linux. Several other services (like Instagram) now also accuse me of being a bot every time I legitimately log in with Firefox on Linux.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
The great firewall, but in reverse.
What other choice do we have? Countries, whether it be Ukraine or Taiwan, can't risk other countries harvesting their social media platforms for the mother of all purges. I never assume that anything that happened historically can never happen again - no Polish Jew would have survived the Nazis with this kind of information theft. Add AI into the mix, and wiping out any population is as easy as baking pie. Countries…
> no Polish Jew would have survived the Nazis with this kind of information theft.
I'm not sure this is a good is a good example. I believe a majority of Polish Jewish survivors were those who fled into parts of soviet union not occupied by nazis(some were sent to gulags but this was still much better chance to survive then those who stayed in Poland). Another large portion were in concentration camps and hadn't been killed yet. And I believe 60,000 or less are estimated to have hid in Poland through the war. It's unlikely many remained in their pre war identities and simply concealed their Jewishness and managed to survive.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#234I'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.
Cloudflare has been even worse for me on Linux + Firefox. On a number of sites I get the "Verify" challenge and after solving it immediately get a message saying "You have been blocked" every time. Clearing cookies, disabling UBO, and other changes make no difference. Reporting the issue to them does nothing. This hostility to normal browsing behavior makes me extremely reluctant to ever use Cloudflare on any project…
linux + firefox. not sure what happened to me yesterday but the challange/response thing was borked and when i finally got through it all, it said i was a robot anyway. this was while trying to sign up for a skype acct, could have been a ms issue though and not necessarily cloudflare. i think the solution is to just not use obstructive software. thanks to this issue i discovered jitsi and that seems more than enough for my purposes.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most (D)DOS attacks are just either UDP floods or SYN floods that iptables will handle without any problem. Sometimes what people think are DDOS is just their application DDOSing themself because they are doing recursive calls to some back-end micro-service. If it was actually a traffic based DDOS someone still needs to pay for that bandwidth which would be too expansive for most companies anyway - even if it kept yo…
What's the iptables invocation that will let my 10Gbps connection drop a a 100Gbps syn flood while also serving good traffic?
xdp
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to clear cookies to avoid sending that data back. Just use a browser that properly isolates third party/Facebook cookies.
You don't even need to use a different browser - Firefox has an official "Multi-account containers" extension that lets you assign certain sites to open in their own sandbox so you can have a sandbox for Google, another for Facebook, etc.
So, what's a good strategy for managing containers? I've used this extension for years, and in the past I was a bit more conservative with my containers (personal, work, google, facebook, twitter, banking, etc.) and now I've gone a bit more ... "ham" as they say ... and I have 29. One example is travel, to keep fare searches from pervading news story ads. But I'm sure there's a way to strike a balance that I've just not yet found.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#237How 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?
I've been hosting web sites on my own bare metal in colo for more than 25 years. In all that time I've dealt with one DDoS that was big enough to bring everything down, and that was because of a specific person being pissed at another specific person. The attacker did jail time for DDoS activities. Every other attempt at DDoS has been ineffective, has been form abuse and credential stuffing, has been generally amateu…
I'm sorry but lumping in people who prefer to use a weird browser with "marginalised people" does not help your credibility.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#238This echoes the user agent checking that was prevalent in past times. Websites would limit features and sometimes refuse to render for the "wrong" browser, even if that browser had the ability to display the website just fine. So browsers started pretending to be other browsers in their user agents. Case in point - my Chrome browser, running on an M3 mac, has the following user agent: "'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel…
They are pretending to be an ancient Mozilla version from the time after Netscape but before Firefox, KHTML (which was forked to webkit), Firefox (Gecko engine), Chrome and Safari. The only piece of browser history it's missing is somehow pretending to be IE.
Amusingly, I also just realized that even the operating system is spoofed here! I'm on macOS 14, yet the user agent claims "Mac OS X" 10.15. It's a pretty funny situation, and clearly for the sole benefit of very old websites and libraries performing dubious checks.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#239Yeah, this is ridiculous. Even if their heuristics fail badly for Pale Moon, they could easily fall back to POW.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#240As a website owner and VPN user I see both sides of this. On one hand, I get the annoying "Verify" box every time I use ChatGPT (and now due its popularity, DeepSeek as well). On the other hand, without Cloudflare I'd be seeing thousands of junk requests and hacking attempts everyday, people attempting credit card fraud, etc. I honestly don't know what the solution is.
> I honestly don't know what the solution is.
well, for starters, if you're using cloudflare to block otherwise benign traffic, just because you're worried about some made... up....
> On the other hand, without Cloudflare I'd be seeing thousands of junk requests and hacking attempts everyday, people attempting credit card fraud, etc.
well damn, if you're using it because otherwise you'd be exposing your users to active credit card fraud... I guess the original suggestion to only ban traffic once you find it to be abusive, and then only by subnet, doesn't really apply for you.
I wanna suggest using this as an excuse to learn how not to be a twat (the direction cf is moving towards more and more), where for most sites 20% of the work will get you 80% of the results... but dealing with cc fraud, you're adversaries are already on the more advanced side, and that becomes a lot harder to prevent... rather than catch and stop after the fact.
Balancing the pervasive fear mongering with sensible rules is hard. Not because it's actually hard, but because that's the point of the FUD. To create the perception of a problem where there isn't one. With a few exceptions, a WAF doesn't provide meaningful benefits. It only serves to lower the number of log entries, it rarely ever reduces the actual risk.