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

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

#241

I just downloaded Palemoon to check and it seems the CAPTCHA straight up crashes. Once it crashes, reloading the page no longer shows the CAPTCHA so it did pass something at least. I tried another Cloudflare turnstile but the entire browser crashed on a segfault, and ever since the CAPTCHAs don't seem to come up again. ChatGPT.com is normally quite useful for generating Cloudflare prompts, but that page doesn't seem…

It uses a hard fork of Firefox's Gecko engine called Goanna, and is independently developed other than a few security patches from upstream. It has considerably diverged from contemporary Firefox so is not comparable.

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

#242

All by design. The idea is to keep older devices, ones with perhaps no government backdoors, and unauthorized software, off the Internet completely. Same reason there's a big push to kill X11 - it runs great on computers from before hardware backdoors were common. With the Trumpenreich looming, these devices will become very useful. IF they are allowed on the Internet.

>With the Trumpenreich looming

Weren't they useful the last time around, when 'literally Hitler' totally murdered freedom of speech until Biden the hero restored it?

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

#243
Yesterday I was attempting to buy a product on a small retailer's website—as soon as I hit the "add to cart" button I got a message from Cloudflare: "Sorry, you have been blocked". My only recourse was to message the owner of the domain asking them to unblock me. Of course, I didn't, and decided to buy the product elsewhere. I wasn't doing anything suspicious.. using Arc on a M1 MBP; normal browsing habits.

Not sure if this problem is common but; I would be pretty upset if I implemented Cloudflare and it started to inadvertently hurt my sales figures. I would hope the cost to retailers is trivial in this case, I guess the upside of blocking automated traffic can be quite great.

Just checked again and I'm still blocked on the website. Hopefully this kind of thing gets sorted out.

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

#244
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "junk" request? Is it hammering an expensive endpoint 5000 times per second, or just somebody using your website in a way you don't like? I've also been on both sides of it (on-call at 3am getting dos'd is no fun), but I think the danger here is that we've gotten to a point where a new google can't realistically be created. The thing is that these tools are generally used to further entrench power that mono…

> and you would not believe the extent that grocers go to to make price comparison difficult. This thing doesn't make thousands or even hundreds of requests - maybe a few dozen over the course of a day. It's gonna get even worse. Walmart & Kroger are implementing digital price tags, so whatever you see on the website will probably (purposefully?) be out of date by the time you get to the store. Stores don't want you…

So you put something in your cart and by the time you reach the cashier the price doubled? Sounds like someone is about to patent price locking when you add an item to your pysical shopping cart.

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

#245
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people attempting credit card fraud this is wrong. if someone can use your site they can use stolen cards, and bots doing this will not be stopped by them. cloudflare only raises the cost of doing it, it may make scrapping a million of product pages unprofitable but that doesn't apply to cc fraud yet.

>that doesn't apply to cc fraud yet It stops "card testing" where someone has bought or stolen a large number of cards and need verify which are still good. The usual technique is to cycle through all the cards on a smaller site selling something cheap (a $3 ebook for example). The problem is that the high volume of fraud in a short time span will often get the merchant account or payment gateway account shut down, c…

Someone who steals money from thousands of individuals for a living won't hesitate to use a botnet either. Cloudflare isn't a payment provider (*shudders* yet), they can't verify transactions, they can only guess at who's "honest". I'm at the losing end of this guess so often as someone who frequently visits friends and family in the neighbouring country they come from, and someone who doesn't have tracking cookies anymore that were set only a few minutes ago, who uses a "non-standard" browser (Mozilla's Firefox), I don't feel like Cloudflare does a very good job at detecting when I'm trying to honestly use the site. At the same time, doing security testing as my job: the customer having Cloudflare enabled usually doesn't matter for us being able to reach and exploit vulnerable pages, it just decides to block you randomly the same way that it does in private time when I'm not trying to break anything. It doesn't properly do the job and it blocks legitimate people based on a gut feeling, and you have no recourse, you can suck it up. Whatcha gonna do, take Cloudflare to court for blocking your access to your bank? Under what law is that illegal? There is nothing you can do; your bank's customer support isn't going to disable Cloudflare for you.

Anyway, no, this guessing game isn't the solution to stolen bank details, the solution is for the payment provider to authenticate the account holder beyond merely entering a public number, especially if they suddenly see a flood of transactions from this one merchant as you describe. They can decide to ask for a second factor: send the person an SMS/email, ask to generate an authenticator code, whatever it is they've got on file beyond your card/account number. Anything else is just guesswork

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

#246

As 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.

If I were hosting a web page, I would want it to be able to reach as many people as possible. So in choosing between CDNs, I would choose the one that provides greater browser compatibility, all other things equal. So in principle, the incentives are there for Cloudflare to fix the issue. But the size of the incentive may be the problem. Not too many customers are complaining about these non-mainstream browsers.

> If I were hosting a web page, I would want it to be able to reach as many people as possible. So in choosing between CDNs

I host many webpages and this is exactly it. Anyone is welcome to use the websites I host. There is no CDN, your TLS session terminates at the endpoint (end to end encryption). May be a bit slower for the pages having static assets if you're coming from outside of Europe, but the pages are light anyway (no 2 MB JavaScript blobs)

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

#247

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?

Yes, [D]DoS is a problem. Its not uncommon for a single person with residential fiber to have more bandwidth than your small site hosted on a 1u box or VPS. Either your bandwidth is rate limited and they can denial of service your site or your bandwidth is greater but they can still cause you to go over your allocation and cause massive charges. In the past you could ban IPs but that's not very useful anymore. The di…

> not uncommon for a single person with residential fiber to have more bandwidth than your small site hosted on a 1u box or VPS.

Then self host from your connection at home, don't pay for the VPS :). That's what I've been doing for over a decade now and still never saw a (D)DoS attack

50 mbps has been enough to host various websites, including one site that allows several gigabytes of file upload unauthenticated for most of the time that I self host. Must say that 100 mbps is nicer though, even if not strictly necessary. Well, more is always nicer but returns really diminish after 100 (in 2025, for my use case). Probably it's different if you host videos, a Tor relay, etc. I'm just talking normal websites

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

#248

As 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.

[deleted]

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

#249

CloudFlare sometimes attempts to verify that I'm a human when requesting a JSON resource [1] on Australia Post's web site, which breaks parcel tracking feature without any visible captcha. The problem can only be diagnosed by using the browser's inspector tool. Even worse, I get the blanket "You have been blocked" message when I try to manually open the URL and solve the captcha. [1] https://digitalapi.auspost.com.au…

I got a HTML with a error message first, but then I tried adding ".json" on the end of the URL and got a JSON with a error message (that the URL is wrong), and then I removed ".json" from the end of te URL and then I got what seems to be the proper JSON response.

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

#250
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What bit do you mean specifically? As a fellow web hoster, who also hosted kids before (from a game making forum), I can fully corroborate what they're saying
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