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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

#381

Post by hedora »

jen729w wrote: post #304
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…

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 .

I’ve noticed wifi at coffee shops, etc have started blocking it too.

I need to disable it for one of my internal networks (because I have DNS overrides that go to 192.168.0.x), or I’d wish they’d just make it mandatory for iPhones and put and end to such shenanigans.

Apple could make it a bit more configurable for power users, and then flip the “always on” nuclear option switch.

Either that, or they could add a “workaround oppressive regimes” toggle that’d probably be disabled in China, but hey, I’m in the US, so whatever.

Edit: I also agree that blocking / geolocating IP addresses is a big anti-pattern these days. Many ISPs use CGNAT. For instance, all starlink traffic from the south half of the west coast appears to come from LA.

As a result, some apps have started hell-banning my phone every time I drive to work because they see me teleport hundreds of miles in 10 minutes every morning. (And both of my two IPs probably have 100’s of concurrent users at any given time. I’m sure some of them are doing something naughty).

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

#382

Post by jillyboel »

jen729w wrote: post #304
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…

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 .

If you use a weird proxy you're gonna get blocked. Facts of life.

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

#383

Post by lynndotpy »

lynndotpy wrote: post #129
windsignaling wrote: post #72

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.

> 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. The solution is good security-- Cloudflare only cuts down on the noise. I'm looking at junk requests and hacking attempts flow through to my sites as we speak.

Whoops-- this was a draft I didn't intend to post in this state. I must have fatfingered the "reply" button somehow. Alas, too late to edit or delete now.

Cloudflare cuts down on the noise, but also helps does the work of preventing scrapers, people who re-sell your site wholesale, and cutting down on the noise also means cutting down on the cost of network requests.

It also can help where security is lax. You should have measures against credential stuffing, but if you don't, Cloudflare might prevent (some) of your users from being hacked. Which isn't good enough, but is better than no mitigation at all.

I don't use Cloudflare personally, but I won't dismiss it wholesale. I understand why people use it.

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

#384

Post by echoangle »

hedora wrote: post #380
echoangle wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more like a VPN instead of Tor

Actually, it’s closer to Tor, but hardcoded to two hops, and hop 1 and 2 are always different (audited) organizations. I wish they’d just used Tor though.

Isn’t hop 1 always apple and only the external IP is a secondary provider?

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

#385

Post by buyucu »

windsignaling wrote: post #72

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.

My VPN/Fileserver VPS is not behind Cloudflare, and I haven't had any trouble for years. Only the SSH port is accessible from outside (which is probably not even necessary), with password login disabled. I use fail2ban and a few other extra layers of security.

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

#386

Post by buyucu »

windsignaling wrote: post #72

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.

Credit cards are an ancient insecure technology that needs to go away. There are systems in Europe like iDEAL that are much more 21st century appropriate.

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

#387

Post by grayhatter »

oremolten wrote: post #370
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 .

Well its primarily because the security vendors for say WAFs and other tools list these IPs in the "Anonymizers" or "VPN" category and most typically these are blocked as seldom do you see legitimate traffic originating to your store front or accounts pages from these. Another vendor we use lists these under "hacking tools" So your option as a security professional is to express to your risk management team we allow…

> So your option as a security professional is to express to your risk management team we allow "hacking tools" or lose iCloud Relay customers

a professional would explain how the vendor is being lazy and making a mistake there because they don't understand your business.

depending on the flavor of security professional (hacker) they might also subtly suggest that this vendor is dumb and should be embarrassed they've made this mistake, thus creating the implication that if you still want to block these users you would also have to be an idiot

under so circumstance is what I ever allow anyone to get the mistaken impression that some vendor understands my job better than I do. As a "security professional" it's literally your job to identify hostile traffic, better than a vendor could.

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

#388

Post by grayhatter »

jen729w wrote: post #304
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…

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 .

> Bad business, guys. You gotta find another way. Blocking IP addresses is o-ver.

no, it's still the front line. And likely always will be. It's the only client identifier bots can't lie about. (or nearly the only)

At $OLDJOB, ASN reputation was the single best predictor of traffic hostility. We were usually smart enough to know which we can, or can't block outright. But it's an insane take to say network based blocking is over... especially on a thread about some vendor blocking benign users because of the user-agent.

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

#389

Post by ir77 »

tessela wrote: post #346
latexr wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It happens to me a lot, I just created a small automation to use https://cobalt.tools to download the content. Their loss, not mine.

why is your tool so hard to use on ios? the website instructions say you need a companion siri shortcut, but no where is there actually a shortcut listed.

combing and coming through searches and reddit all comes up with non-working siri shortcuts that complain that the url is not found.

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

#390

Post by PokestarFan »

Hold-And-Modify wrote: post #57

Forgot to clarify: this is not about an increased amount of captchas, or an annoyance issue. The Cloudflare tool does not complete its verifications, resulting in an endless "Verifying..." loop and thus none of the websites in question can be accessed. All you get to see is Cloudflare.

I was on Brave in iOS. I had to turn off Brave Shield.
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