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…
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
#242All 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.
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
#243Not 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
#244Earlier 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 be out of date by the time you get to the store.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…
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#245Earlier 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…
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
#246As 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.
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
#247How 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…
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
#248As 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.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#249CloudFlare 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…
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
#250Earlier 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.