Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#1

Post by assttoasstmgr » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

Lately I've been getting frequent "Error HTTP 451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons" thrown by Cloudflare whilst using Piped (a YouTube alternate front end used by Nitter).

However these errors are generated... in error. The page links to a DMCA complaint which lists about a half dozen unrelated YouTube (and Piped) links, none of which are being accessed when the error is generated. In fact, viewing the video on YouTube plays back fine. There appears to be a glitch in Cloudflare's URL filtering. It's been happening so frequently that Piped is often unusable.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#2

Post by adspedia » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 7:12 AM UTC

Have you submitted that to https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains/feedback ?

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#3

Post by joecool1029 » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 7:27 AM UTC

I thought about submitting this a week or so ago. Here's the link to the issue and discussion on it: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/issues/1704

TL;DR: Apparently there's a Hong Kong dude living in Germany that didn't like his videos being on Youtube, so he sent DMCA takedown requests to Piped instead and Cloudflare did a takedown on the whole domain, which only appears if sent as a referral from outside piped.kavin.rocks (or using the redirect extension for firefox).

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#4

Post by ronnier » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 7:37 AM UTC

Cloudflare is making my live very difficult right now. Spammers are hosting websites using free domains, like .ml, .tk, so an unlimited supply of random domains, hosting them behind cloud flare which prevents us from easily getting the page content or blocking the IP for a period of time since the IP is shared.

Lots of spam hosted on cloudflare these days.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#5

Post by mhoad » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 8:12 AM UTC

This is the same company that has repeatedly gone to the mat to ensure Nazi’s and targeted hate campaigns remain active online. But this is where they draw the line?

They have on multiple occasions had long and public campaigns talking about how important it is to fight censorship in all its forms except a random DMCA troll in Hong Kong?

I don’t think Cloudflare really love “free speech” as much as they pretend in their public messaging.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#6

Post by Jamie9912 » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 8:13 AM UTC

mhoad wrote: post #5

This is the same company that has repeatedly gone to the mat to ensure Nazi’s and targeted hate campaigns remain active online. But this is where they draw the line? They have on multiple occasions had long and public campaigns talking about how important it is to fight censorship in all its forms except a random DMCA troll in Hong Kong? I don’t think Cloudflare really love “free speech” as much as they pretend in th…

They weren't hosting anything..

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#7

Post by mhoad » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 8:16 AM UTC

Jamie9912 wrote: post #6

mhoad wrote: post #5

This is the same company that has repeatedly gone to the mat to ensure Nazi’s and targeted hate campaigns remain active online. But this is where they draw the line? They have on multiple occasions had long and public campaigns talking about how important it is to fight censorship in all its forms except a random DMCA troll in Hong Kong? I don’t think Cloudflare really love “free speech” as much as they pretend in th…

They weren't hosting anything..

You know exactly what I mean here. I’m going to update the post though.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#8

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 8:28 AM UTC

ronnier wrote: post #4

Cloudflare is making my live very difficult right now. Spammers are hosting websites using free domains, like .ml, .tk, so an unlimited supply of random domains, hosting them behind cloud flare which prevents us from easily getting the page content or blocking the IP for a period of time since the IP is shared. Lots of spam hosted on cloudflare these days.

How do they make it hard to get the page content?

Is it easier/better to block by IP than to block unknown free domains?

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#9

Post by Gigachad » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 8:29 AM UTC

You can’t rely on cloudflare for infrastructure. They have proven too many times they will just drop stuff almost as much as Google will.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#10

Post by comeonbrandon » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 8:31 AM UTC

See if changing the URL from piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v= to piped.video/watch?v= will work. I've never had the "Unavailable for Legal Reasons" error when using the latter domain name.

Additionally you can set up a permanent redirect with a browser addon like the Redirector to always be sent from piped.kavin.rocks to piped.video.