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

Post by RobotToaster » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #401

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…

> I would be pretty upset if I implemented Cloudflare and it started to inadvertently hurt my sales figures. The problem is that all these Cloudflare forensics-based throttling and blocking efforts don't hurt sales figures. The number of legitimate users running Arc is a rounding error. Arc browser users often come to Cloudflare without third-party tracking and without cookies, which is weird and therefore suspicious…

Post by tremon » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 6:01 PM UTC

Ray20 wrote: post #392

wvh wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some political-philosophical irony that the Chinese prefer their government to do the blocking and take away their freedom, while the US prefers their monopolistic capitalistic corporate world to do it. A rose by any other name. Chose your friends carefully.

To trivialize totalitarian regimes that carry out terror against their own citizens, that can outright kill you and whole your family, by comparing them to capitalistic corporate world where, in the worst case, you can simply choose another, less fancy option, is the height of madness.

Post by tempodox » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

rozap wrote: post #109

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.

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…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #350

maples37 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, if you tick off the wrong person, the threshold for them starting a DDoS is surprisingly low. A while ago, my company was hiring and conducting interviews, and after one candidate was rejected, one of our sites got hit by a DDoS. I wasn't in the room when people were dealing with it, but in the post-incident review, they said "we're 99% sure we know exactly who this came from".

What the hell is wrong with people? Honestly the lack of substantive human interaction in a lot of folks' lives, except via the Internet, is a real problem. Take that story for instance. Here's how that goes in the physical world, just to show how unbelievably ridiculous it is. So you didn't get the job? What's your next step? I'll stop by their office and keep people from entering the front doors by running around i…

Post by dragontamer » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

RobotToaster wrote: post #411

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be pretty upset if I implemented Cloudflare and it started to inadvertently hurt my sales figures. The problem is that all these Cloudflare forensics-based throttling and blocking efforts don't hurt sales figures. The number of legitimate users running Arc is a rounding error. Arc browser users often come to Cloudflare without third-party tracking and without cookies, which is weird and therefore suspicious…

I wonder if cloudflare blocks like these affect screen reader users, in which case they may violate the ADA.