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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

#331

Post by marginalia_nu »

patrick451 wrote: post #105
marginalia_nu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of this traffic is bouncing all over the world before it reaches your server. Almost always via at least one botnet. Finding the source of the traffic is pretty hopeless.

When the government actually cares, they're able to track these things down. But they don't except in high profile cases.

Well sometimes at least.

When the government really cares, it can put all its resources to solve any particular problem. Though obviously that comes at the cost of reassigning resources from other tasks. Sadly it's impossible to assign all resources to solve every problem all at once.

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

#332

Post by lloeki »

latexr wrote: post #325
cprecioso wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Happened to me.

Interestingly enough I checked on another non-Private Relay device (it worked), disabled Private Relay, refreshed the page, which still blocked me, and it resulted in the ban instantly extending to my other non-Private Relay devices.

I presume some fingerprinting/evercookie was in place which led to a flagging/ban extension to my home IP.

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

#333

Post by benhurmarcel »

Xelbair wrote: post #303
nikkwong wrote: post #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…

To access any site protected by cloudflare captcha i have to change browsers from firefox to chrome. and i have basically default suite of addons (ublock is the only one affecting the pages themselves). VPN doesn't matter, i probably share IP with someone "flagged" via ISP. Every site, that is except their cloudlfare dashboard.

I have come across several websites on which Cloudflare blocks my devices, whatever I use. No Captcha, just blocked. I tried a stock iPhone (Safari, no blockers, no VPN, no iCloud relay, both on wifi or 4G), and a Windows PC with Firefox, Chrome, or Edge, no luck. That includes a website of a local business so that can't be the country either.

I have no idea why.

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

#334

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

littlestymaar wrote: post #327
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fair. I'm sure it's not as well-used/known as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. Probably not even Opera, although I'd be interested to see their respective "new users" numbers. I think it's in the same ballpark as Brave — definitely known, just not one of the big 5.

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

#335

Post by christophilus »

tibbar wrote: post #51

This 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…

Slack was doing this with their huddle feature for the longest time (still were last I checked). Drives me crazy.

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

#336

Post by areyourllySorry »

radlad wrote: post #61
tibbar wrote: post #51

This 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…

As a counterpoint, I asked Claude to write a script to fetch Claude usage and expose it as a Prometheus metric. As no public API exists, Claude suggested I grab the request from the Network tab. I copied it as cURL, and attempted to run it, and was denied with a 403 from CF. I forgot the script open, polling for about 20 minutes, and suddenly it started working. So even sending all the same headers as Firefox, but wi…

it's possible there was an attack that stopped which led to more lenient antibot

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

#337

Post by tyzoid »

taurknaut wrote: post #284
nikkwong wrote: post #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…

> 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.

It's a chromium derivative.

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

#339

Post by areyourllySorry »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #265
chr15m wrote: post #128

When one of my nodejs based sites experienced DoS, I installed & configured "express-slow-down" as middleware and it resolved the issue.

What Cloudflare does that can't possibly be implemented locally by a site owner?

handle terabytes per second of bot traffic

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

#340

Post by areyourllySorry »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #81

Cloudflare has been blocking "mainstream" browsers too, if you are generous enough to consider Firefox "mainstream." The "verify you are a human" sequence gets stuck in a perpetual never-ending loop where clicking the checkbox only refreshes the page and presents the same challenge. Certain websites (most notably archive.is) have been completely inaccessible for me for years for this reason.

archive.is does not use cloudflare for bot protection.
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