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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

#491

Post by BrenBarn »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #144
stevenAthompson wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that you're right. To make matters worse, I suspect that not even a splinternet can save it. It needs a new foundation, preferably one that wasn't largely designed before security was a thing. Federation is probably a good start, but it should be federated well below the application layer.

I mean, it wasn't even that security wasn't a thing: the earliest incarnations of the Internet were defense projects, and after that, connections between university networks. Abuse was nonexistent because you knew everyone on your given network. Bob up the hall wouldn't try to steal your credit card or whatever, because you'd call the police. I think a decent idea is, we need to bring personal accountability back int…

> It's too free, and we have too many opportunistic assholes in it for it to remain so.

There's some truth in this, but I think there is a lot of room for improving things as far as making life much more painful for opportunistic assholes in general.

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

#492

Post by Dalewyn »

mattatobin wrote: post #447
Dalewyn wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I couldn't care less. It's one man shouting against another, it's pointless to try finding facts out of that. But as a simple Pale Moon user, I can say you caused a big enough disruption to the project that even a user who doesn't really pay attention also noticed. Now you're here again sidetracking the subject at hand with past dramallamas and seemingly getting your pantaloons moist at having stories besid…

You started this shit by bringing up the past dude. If this story is gonna rise to a broader appeal it would be fuckin bullshit for it to die because oh it's just Pale Moon and/or SeaMonkey. Cloudflare staff have a real hateboner for non-mainstream browsers and tell yourself what you like but I still actually care about the well being of this unmitigated disaster we call the Internet and the "Open Web".. Not to menti…

You started it first, my dude:

>This is Tobin.. but without the Paradigm.

>Now no one hates that furry bastard more than me (and I challenge you to try)

>I know my fate for trying.. how many will join me knowing that?

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

#493

Post by gloosx »

leafmeal wrote: post #440
gloosx wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still using Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 on my desktop. The internet is so much better like this! There is a 2010 lightweight mobile version of Google, and m.youtube with obviously cleaner and better UI and not a single ad (apparently it's not worth to show you ads if you still appear to be using iphone 6)

I tried this just for fun and youtube said to update my browser :(

When you click OK it lets you in regardless ;)

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

#494

Post by gloosx »

hexagonwin wrote: post #470
gloosx wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still using Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 on my desktop. The internet is so much better like this! There is a 2010 lightweight mobile version of Google, and m.youtube with obviously cleaner and better UI and not a single ad (apparently it's not worth to show you ads if you still appear to be using iphone 6)

This is iOS 6 and not iPhone 6, btw.

Whoa, really. So it is even back to 3GS/4 days then.

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

#495

Post by SLJ7 »

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…

You should really take the few minutes to email them and let them know that's happening. It's not their fault Cloudflare is awful.

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

#496

Post by mimasama »

rollcat wrote: post #44

On one hand, this is a scummy move from CloudFlare. All this has ever done is make browsers spoof their UAs. Mozilla/4.0 anyone? On the other, Pale Moon is an ancient (pre-quantum) volunteer-supported fork of Firefox, with boatloads of known and unfixed security bugs - some fixes might be getting merged from upstream, but for real, the codebases diverged almost a decade ago. You might as well be using IE 11.

> known and unfixed security bugs

Which are..?

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

#497

Post by mimasama »

ec109685 wrote: post #395
willywanker wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses a hard fork of Firefox's Gecko engine called Goanna, and is independently developed other than a few security patches from upstream. It has considerably diverged from contemporary Firefox so is not comparable.

Seems seriously risky to be running a browser without access to mainstream security patches. Perhaps it’s secure enough for now due to its obscurity.

> without access to mainstream security patches

They do have access to them. The lead developer and project owner has sec bug access in bugzilla.

But vulnerabilities in newer Mozilla have over time become less and less relevant in Pale Moon's codebase, which led to the latter dropping the tracking of how many Mozilla security patches have been applied in the release notes (starting with 33.0.1).

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

#498

Post by littlestymaar »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #306
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.

Its subreddit has 52k members. There are probably hundreds of thousands of users. Still a niche browser, but it's pretty commonly used on Macs.

> Its subreddit has 52k members. There are probably hundreds of thousands of users.

I don't get your reasoning here, you shouldn't even expect more than a fraction of the reddit users to have even installed and tried the browser, let alone using it regularly.

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

#499

Post by lofaszvanitt »

airhangerf15 wrote: post #209
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #37

Cloudflare is slowly but surely turning the web into a walled garden.

Slowly? Have you not watched the pot boil around you for the past decade? There are zero good search engines. Everything returns propaganda. This is all as it was intended.

since the invention of llms it's not that much of a deal that search engines are useless

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

#500

Post by doctor_radium »

Aachen wrote: post #245
bragr wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Someone who steals money from thousands of individuals for a living won't hesitate to use a botnet either. Cloudflare isn't a payment provider (*shudders* yet), they can't verify transactions, they can only guess at who's "honest". I'm at the losing end of this guess so often as someone who frequently visits friends and family in the neighbouring country they come from, and someone who doesn't have tracking cookies a…

> Whatcha gonna do, take Cloudflare to court for blocking your access to your bank? Under what law is that illegal?

In the USA, I think it would be worth trying to sue Cloudflare for either "free speech" or "public nuisance" violations. Gonna reach out to the ACLU and EFF in the coming days.

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