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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

#321

Post by DocTomoe »

jeroenhd wrote: post #119
rozap wrote: 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…

I've such bots on my server. Some Chinese Huawei bot as well as an American one. They ignored robots.txt (claimed not to, but I blacklisted them there and they didn't stop) and started randomly generating image paths. At some point /img/123.png became /img/123.png?a=123 or whatever, and they just kept adding parameters and subpaths for no good reason. Nginx dutifully ignored the extra parameters and kept sending the…

Sounds like a problem easily solved with fail2ban. Which keeps legitimate folks in, and offenders out - and also unbans after a set amount of time, to avoid dynamic IPs screwing over legitimate users permanently.

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

#322

Post by DocTomoe »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #135
Aeolun wrote: post #130

Earlier 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…

> Can Prusa survive a world where China takes, but never gives?

Can Prusa survive in a world where they only may operate in CzechNet, with the rest of the customer base being firewall off?

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

#323

Post by Terr_ »

makeitdouble wrote: post #117
rozap wrote: 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…

> somebody using your website in a way you don't like? This usually includes people making a near-realtime updated perfect copy of your site and serving that copy for either scam or middle-manning transactions or straight fraud. Having a clear category of "good bots" from either a verified or accepted companies would help for these cases. Cloudflare has such a system I think, but then a new search engine would have t…

I'd settle for some kind of "proof of investment" in a bot-identity, so that I know blocking that identity is impactful, and it's not just one of a billion tiny throwaways.

In other words, knowing who someone is isn't strictly necessary, provided they have "skin the game" to encourage proper behavior.

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

#324

Post by simplyinfinity »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #311
xrisk wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would 2FA cause lose sales? One would imagine it’s because people are being auto charged for shit they don’t want but haven’t noticed or forgot to cancel.

Because it's more work? Also 2fa often fails for the rightful card owner. And Cloudflare overzealous "security" is one of the reasons for failure.

in europe 2fa is mandatory for all (or almost all) online purchases, especially first time purchase from a merchant when your card hasn't been authorized. Sites using stripes' link get away with no 2fa most of the time, but not all the time. Make it mandatory on visa/mastercards level, and you won't loose much sales, as all transactions would require it and people will have to 2fa everywhere.

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

#325

Post by latexr »

cprecioso wrote: post #316
jen729w wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vendors who block iCloud Relay are the worst. I'm sure they don't even know they're doing it. But some significant percentage of Apple users -- and you'd have to think it's only gonna grow -- comes from those IP address ranges. Bad business, guys. You gotta find another way. Blocking IP addresses is o-ver .

This would be weird, esp. given that Cloudflare is one of the vendors who act as exit nodes for iCloud Relay.

I believe your parent comment means when the target website blocks, not Cloudflare.

YouTube is a perfect example. Using iCloud Private Relay can now frequently label you as a bot, which stops you from watching videos until you login.

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

#326

Post by pndy »

lwid1 wrote: post #211
pndy wrote: post #88

I don't have any issues so far under Librewolf, Waterfox and Ungoogled Chromium.

I have the problem with LibreWolf on Linux, and have to fall back to Ungoogled Chromium. Edited to add: without adblock

No problem under Linux whatsoever with tracking and ad blocking extensions in each browser

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

#327

Post by littlestymaar »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #309
littlestymaar wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a niche browser. I think I heard of it once on HN over the past few years, and I'd be surprised if there was actually more than a few thousands of people using it.

I would be surprised if it were that low; the arcbrowser sub Reddit has 50 thousand members. Still, regardless of the actual figure, I think there's a broader point which avoids the need to agree on an absolute threshold: should cloudflare block access to websites using a blacklist or should it grant access using a whitelist? Especially since it's trivial to spoof your user agent.

I'm not defending Cloudflare on any way, blocking niche browsers is sad. I'm just saying that it doesn't make sense to say it's not a niche browser.

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

#328

Post by wkat4242 »

maxk42 wrote: post #232
wkat4242 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah with Instagram I wouldn't be surprised if they just do this to annoy to into using their app. Where they can force timed ads (you have to watch an ad now for a few seconds before it continues).

I noticed another platform (wallapop, a kind of ebay/craigslist here in Spain) that does the same. It never works well in a browser, even in chrome. I think they're just trying to bully their users to their app, which has 30+ trackers in it.

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

#329

Post by lucumo »

Aachen wrote: post #247
matt_heimer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 50 mbps has been enough to host various websites,

Bandwidth hasn't been a limiting factor for years for me.

But generating dynamic pages can bring just enough load for it to get painful. Just this week I had to blacklist Meta's ridiculously overactive bot sending me more requests per second than all my real users do in an hour. Meta and ClaudeBot have been causing intermittent overloads for weeks now.

They now get 403s because I'm done trying to slow them down.

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

#330

Post by taurknaut »

chrisandchris wrote: post #310
taurknaut wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using Arc on a M1 MBP; normal browsing habits. Well i've certainly never heard of this browser before and it still seems pretty young. I'd guess it's the same issue.

I'm still not sure how some random browser should result in a block by the provider. I don't think there's any security risk for the provider of the site by using an outdated browser. Blocking malicious IPs yes/maybe, blocking suspicious acitivity maybe. But because you have browser X - please not. This is going to lead two a two-class internet where new technologies will not emerge and big players will win because t…

I presume this was not intentional.
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