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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

#531

Post by inetknght »

dmantis wrote: post #515
inetknght wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if there should be an international body of laws which covers fraud...

That's not feasible for bots, crawling, IP laws, etc. Strict fraud could be handled, but everything above is really different per jurisdiction by obvious reasons. There is nothing clearly good or bad in bots, or e.g. pirates, it depends on particular cultural perception. And if one nation thinks that the action is not a crime, it doesn't make sense to them to prosecute such actions for foreign requests.

One problem at a time. A lot of the malicious activity of bots/crawling/etc hide behind plain fraud.

Combat fraud first so you can start to really identify the other more troublesome troublemakers.

Bots? Declare the owner. Lie about the owner? Fraud.

Crawling? Bots.

Intellectual property? That's an entire whole other industry.

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

#532

Post by dragontamer »

pc86 wrote: post #517
dragontamer wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The head of the administration, Trump, literally issued an order. An order that's being carried out right now. And that order is messing with disability programs and other accessibility issues. Directly.

A sibling comment quoted it as well but the relevant thing is here: > Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies,…

I quoted it and irrelevant.

Trump signed the order like that. If he wanted to change the order, he would have written it differently.

In any case, President Elon is pissed at accessibility folks harassing him over Twitter firings (including the firing of Twitters accessibility teams). This is stuff well within their politics and is 100% what they want.

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

#533

Post by zinekeller »

chaoskitty wrote: post #467
zinekeller wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rather blunt, but if it is between 98% (CF-protected) versus near-0% (heavily-DDoSed site), then you hopefully you now see the dilemma that other people faced.

There's absolutely no data to back up the suggestion that sites regularly suffer from DDoS. It's like talking about getting murdered - it happens, and there are statistics, but if you're literally expecting everyone to change their whole lives based on the fact that some people are murdered, with zero consideration for the where, why and how, you're doing it wrong.

> There's absolutely no data to back up the suggestion that sites regularly suffer from DDoS.

For a random site from the internet, sure, because a random blog is probably too small to be noticed.

Forums, even relatively niche ones, unfortunately do suffer DDoS from their disgruntled users. (Or competitors of the same fandom. Or from the disgruntled part of a rivaling fandom.)

> It's like talking about getting murdered - it happens, and there are statistics, but if you're literally expecting everyone to change their whole lives based on the fact that some people are murdered, with zero consideration for the where, why and how, you're doing it wrong.

All analogies fail somewhere, but this is probably one of those which easily falls apart. Injuries are probably better. In a random population, there are a relatively small proportion of injuries, but some jobs (like construction) tend to have a significantly higher number of injuries compared to a mean person, in the same manner that a DDoS on a random website is unlikely but certain types of websites are DDoS magnets.

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

#534

Post by what »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #466
Analemma_ wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can find you literally hundreds of posts from people insisting that ADA is nothing but a small-business-killing shakedown, that it's makework for lawyers, that it's doing nothing to help the disabled, and that it's just as bad if not worse than DEI. What makes your claim better than theirs?

> What makes your claim better than theirs? Well, for starters it's not so absolute: > it's doing nothing to help the disabled It's obviously doing something for the disabled. Reserved disabled parking spots and wheelchair-accessible building entrances are requirements of the ADA. It seems reasonable to think it "improves people's lives". A whole bunch of contrary opinions are not necessarily reasons for disagreement…

>reserved disabled parking spots

I’ve never seen an actually disabled person use one. They’re always occupied by cars with placards but the people are pretty clearly abled or able enough to walk across the parking lot.

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

#535

Post by what »

handoflixue wrote: post #475
agoodusername63 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you assume that the 10% of non standard browsers are going to buy anything? Demographic is important here. If I was running a shop that sold software for Linux users, sure. If I'm running a store that sells pretty much anything else? I'm not caring.

Why would you expect people using non-standard browsers don't buy things? Presumably they still eat food, wear clothing, and enjoy hobbies. I'd think that a non-standard browser also strongly suggests that they're a financially-comfortable middle-class individual, and quite possibly a whale with FAANG income.

It strongly suggest they’re a neet.

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

#536

Post by molticrystal »

reify wrote: post #8

I use Librewolf and Zen Browser If I am met with the dreaded cloudflare "Verify you are a human" box, which is very rare for me, I dont bother and just close the tab.

To have cloudflare work on Librewolf I had to enable web workers.

Why does it need web workers, when it worked fined without them on Waterfox Classic firefox 56 fork that hasn't been updated in water?

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

#537

Post by rollcat »

pkkkzip wrote: post #219
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.

I'm not sure why people are mad at Cloudflare. They are not obligated to support browsers outside the general marketshare nor should you expect to. Cloudflare not supporting Pale Moon has no impact on the rest of us. Matter of fact today is the first time I'm hearing of this browser I will never end up using.

This is not about supporting or not, this is outright blocking/gatekeeping; you can just let pass, but they chose to block. It's completely different from e.g. no longer releasing builds for PPC Macs.

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

#538

Post by InsideOutSanta »

littlestymaar wrote: post #498
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would you join a subreddit for an obscure browser if you never even bothered to run it?

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

#539

Post by tibbar »

createaccount99 wrote: post #431
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…

> That means my browser is pretending to be Firefox AND Safari on an Intel chip. That's not the case, that ua is Chrome on MacOS. The rest is backward compatibility garbage

This is the user agent on Chrome, but the reason for all the references to other browsers (and an old OS and architecture), the backward compatibility garbage, is to pretend to be those browsers for the sake of old websites that are doing string matching on the user agents.

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

#540

Post by littlestymaar »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #538
littlestymaar wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would you join a subreddit for an obscure browser if you never even bothered to run it?

You vastly underestimate how many “just curious” lurkers there are on any subreddits !
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