Disgusting and unsurprising.
Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.
Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.
Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.
Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?
Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!
The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to
monkegopher.Fuck Cloudflare.
I get why you’re frustrated and you have every right to be. I’m going to preface what I’m going to say next by saying I work in this industry. I’m not at Cloudflare but I am at a company that provides bot protection. I analyze and block bots for a living. Again, your frustrations are warranted.
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Even if a site doesn’t have sensitive information, it likely serves a captcha because of the amount of bots that do make requests that are scraping related. The volume of these requests can effectively DDoS them. If they’re selling something, it can disrupt sales. So they lose money on sales and eat the load costs.
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With more and more username and password leaks, credential stuffing is getting to be a bigger issue than anyone actually realizes. There aren’t really good ways of pinpointing you vs someone that has somehow stolen your credentials. Bots are increasingly more and more sophisticated. Meaning, we see bots using aged sessions which is more in line with human behavior. Most of the companies implementing captcha on login segments do so to try and protect your data and financials.
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The rise in unique, privacy based browsers is great and it’s also hard to keep up with. It’s been more than six months, but I’ve fingerprinted Pale Moon and, if I recall correctly, it has just enough red flags to be hard to discern between a human and a poorly configured bot.
Ok, enough apologetics. This is a cat and mouse game that the rest of us are being drug into. Sometimes I feel like this is a made up problem. Ultimately, I think this type of thing should be legislated. And before the bot bros jump in and say it’s their right to scrape and take data it’s not. Terms of use are plainly stated by these sites. They consider it stealing.
Thank you for coming to my Tedx Talk on bots.
Edit: I just want to say that allowing any user agent with “Pale Moon” or “Goanna” isn’t the answer. It’s trivially easy to spoof a user agent which is why I worked on fingerprinting it. Changing Pale Moon’s user agent to Firefox is likely to cause you problems too. The fork they are using has different fingerprints than an up to date Firefox browser.
Thank you for that info, very helpful.
Dude, thank you for this context. I was already aware of these considerations but just wanted to thank you for sharing this with everyone. Its participation like this that makes the internet a better place. 🍻
Also Cloudflare adds a caching layer, often physically closer to users. Increasing speed of delivery and reducing server costs. It’s a no-brainer for server admins.
Also, I don’t work for Cloudflare either. The animosity is new to me, and certainly something I’ll look into.
But captchas have now proven useless, since bots are better at solving them now than humans?
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for reading and commenting!
During my first (shitty) job as a dev outta school, they had me writing scrapers. I was actually able to subvert it pretty easily using this package that doesn’t appear to be maintained anymore https://github.com/VeNoMouS/cloudscraper
Was pretty surprised to learn that, at the time, they were only checking if JS was enabled, especially since CF is the gold standard for this sort of stuff. I’m sure this has changed?
Given that the last updates to this repo were five years ago, I’m not too sure if it’s still valid. I don’t follow Cloudflare bypasses but I am fairly certain there are more successful frameworks and services now. The landscape is evolving quickly. We are seeing a proliferation of “bot as a service”, captcha passing farms, dedicated browsers for botting, newsletters, substacks, Discord servers, you name it. Then there are the methods you don’t readily find much talk on like custom modified Chrome browsers. It’s fascinating how much effort is being funneled into this field.
Oh i can definitely see custom browsers being useful in that area. I remember the JavaScript navigator properties were always such a PITA as there was nothing you could really do to get around what they exposed
Ever heard of counting attempts? Log the IP, present a CAPTCHA after 100 requests in a minute.
Besides, if I wrote a bot I would run a browser dialer from Chrome. It would request your site in a Chrome tab and appear completely legitimate to your stupid fingerprinting scripts
Yes, the industry is well aware of this. We do behavioral detection on both sessions and IPs. This is fairly basic.
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LibreWolf is next, and it’s not exactly niche. In seeing it more and more, and LW defaults, even dropping resist settings, gets bounced by CloudFlare every time.
Wouldn’t that also block Firefox by proxy?
Doesn’t seem to. I turned off all the LW resist options, plus all my extensions, and still ended up in an infinite loop. But same extensions in FF doesn’t seem to have an effect.
And so far LibreWolf and Icecat have both worked fine for me.
Tilde.teams and tilde.club even have outwardly facing email accounts.
We have a newsgroup server.
We have a dedicated irc server.
Member gopher/https/gemini pages.
And other services.
And each tilde has it’s own focus.
Be kind. Contribute as you can to discussions.
What is gemini
https://tilvids.com/videos/watch/e1d6ed23-315a-4fc6-8d5b-6d96d51e4819
Rocking the web bloat.
https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-83-rocking-the-web-bloat-modern-gopher-gemini-and-the-small-internet
Be Free.
These bastards haven’t MITMed half the internet for nothing. This isn’t the first time they abuse that either.
I hate that I once fell for it too when I just started out hosting stuff and put it behind their proxy.
What do you use now instead of cloudflare?
What is MITMed?
“Man in the middle”. They are used by a lot of web services as a proxy, usually to prevent DDOS attacks.
And when Cloudflare is the proxy for a web site, it’s Cloudflare that provides the HTTPS connection, meaning that you don’t actually have an encrypted channel directly to the site. Cloudflare is the man-in-the-middle eavesdropping on all of your communications with that site. Your bank transactions, your medical records, your personal messages, etc.
Lol what?
I thought they just did rate limiting and such, I can’t believe they do SSL as well.
Need to start spoofing user agent strings again.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hotbar 3.0)
It is obvious that Cloudflare is being influenced to enforce browser monopolies. Imagine if Cloudflare existed in 2003 and stopped non Internet Explorer browsers. If you use cloudflare to “protect” your site you are discriminating against browser choice and are as bad as Microsoft in 1998.
If you use cloudflare to “protect” your site you are discriminating against browser choice and are as bad as Microsoft in 1998.
😕
On librewolf, i get blocked. its a firefox fork and still it happens. had to set up a Firefox User Agent plugin.
Its kind of funny but thats how user agents have been for a while. It’s historically just been browsers pretending to be one another.
Yeah and that’s why it’s one of the basics of the basics you learn as a software developer that you shouldn’t sniff the useragent, because it’s unreliable and causes issues. Yet all big webpages (especially those pretending to be a software) do it, causing issues. Even just trimming the useragent string (xorigin.trimming.policy) makes “advanced services” like a webshop unusable.
Just don’t do useragent sniffing, do feature detection instead.
Lol… You gonna browse how daddy told you or you won’t get to browser
I just duplicated this. I downloaded Pale Moon and went to https://hear-me.social and clicked on “Register”. It puts up a Cloudflare “managed challenge” which loops endlessly when using Pale Moon, but not the other browsers I’ve tried it with, including Zen, another Firefox fork.
It’s a problem, for sure.
As a staunch Pale Moon user, Cloudflare is just being a bully and I circumvent their nonsense when I need to desperately use a particular site or just don’t go to that site anymore if I can do without.
What doesn’t work with Lynx is a wrong website.
So make useragent sniffing useless by all being Chrome?
Funnily enough, some webpages work better if you block webgl and set the user agent to Lynx or Dillo.
I can’t use my Browser without it being created by a tech giant, cant use my new computer without having my software uefi signed by Microsoft, AI will soon need me to have my GPU licensed and registered.
The world is heading to crap.
You can always build a PC and not have to deal with that UEFI signing stuff as you’re expected to provide your own OS still, that option hasn’t been eliminated yet.
Also, AMD cards are more friendly to Linux users than Nvidia cards are, even with the existence of NVK for the latter; NVK only supports Turing and newer cards and Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta are too old for it, and since Nouveau is broken on Maxwell and newer by firmware signing, once those cards lose support in the proprietary drivers, unless NVK gets backported to them somehow, you’ll be SOL in the near future for 900-series, 10-series, and the Titan V, while Kepler and older is still supported by Nouveau, meanwhile over at AMD, Mesa actively supports Radeon cards going back to GCN1.
Basically, if you still have an R9 Fury or an RX 580 sitting around, for example, those cards will still be actively supported by Mesa open drivers for the foreseeable future, meanwhile your GTX 980Ti or 1080Ti, at least currently, are fully at the mercy of Nvidia’s closed drivers.
Should change my user agent to sod off
I feel like I remember reading that the pale moon JavaScript engine was broken and causing the capcha to break repeatedly?
Let me see if I can find sources
EDIT: Looks like I was remembering a previous issue where the captchas were causing the entire pale moon browser to crash. I believe this has been fixed, but the new issue is a much less exciting block.
I would be very interested to know how they plan to resolve these issues with “Ladybird.” Using a new engine will likely clash with the FALSE “security measures” of many websites and harm the browsing experience. It’s often said that users should demand respect for web standards, but in the meantime, as usability declines, users will gradually drift away. Firefox learned this lesson the hard way.
Pale Moon still exists? Huh
I just won’t use cloudflare, that’s fine.
But everyone else is
then I guess they don’t value us as much as they should and need to be reminded of their place under the consumers boot.
That’s analogous to saying you won’t call any numbers on certain carrier
It’s possible, but your overall service is devalued if you can’t connect to a large group of people.
Then you won’t browse about 20% of the Internet, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s disproportionately impacting sites you would generally want to browse
I posted to this effect in a Firefox alternatives thread: if you use an alternative low adoption rate FOSS browser you trade increased privacy via less/no data harvesting for decreased privacy via much higher susceptibility to browser fingerprinting by google/meta/etc. doesn’t matter if you resize your windows if your browser reports its one that only 5,000 people use. And something tells me the tech giants have a way around user agent spoofing
And now even if you don’t care about that? Fuck you. Cloudflare locks you out of the modern internet because of course anyone not using chrome or safari is a bot
I have pretty draconian privacy protections on my devices and home network. It makes the internet hostile. Captchas regularly fail and I have to try them many times. Embedded youtube videos always think I am a bot and refuse to play unless I sign in, I get weird interstitial pages with captchas on google search, yandex, etc (kagi and searx don’t so I use searx), etc.
Advertisers have pushed companies to make the internet openly hostile to anyone who wants to maintain privacy. And to be clear google and meta are advertisers first and foremost. Fuck them
