Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

I don’t follow the logic here. There seems to be an implication of ulterior motive but I’m not seeing what it is. What aspect of ‘privacy’ offered by a VPN do you think that Reddit / LinkedIn are incentivised to bypass? From a privacy POV, your VPN is doing nothing to them, because your IP address means very little to them from a tracking POV. This is just FUD perpetuated by VPN advertising.

However, the undeniable reality is that accessing the website with a non-residential IP is a very, very strong indicator of sinister behaviour. Anyone that’s been in a position to operate one of these services will tell you that. For every…let’s call them ‘privacy-conscious’ user, there are 10 (or more) nefarious actors that present largely the same way. It’s easy to forget this as a user.

I’m all but certain that if Reddit or LinkedIn could differentiate, they would. But they can’t. That’s kinda the whole point.

Not following what could be sinister about a GET request to a public website.

> From a privacy POV, your VPN is doing nothing to them, because your IP address means very little to them from a tracking POV.

I disagree. (1) Since I have javascript disabled, IP address is generally their next best thing to go on. (2) I don't want to give them IP address to correlate with the other data they have on me, because if they sell that data, now someone else who only has my IP address suddenly can get a bunch of other stuff with it too.

IP address is a fingerprint to be shared with third parties, of course it's relevant. It's not ulterior motive, it's explicit, it's not caring about your traffic because you're not good product. They can and do differentiate by requiring a sign-in. They just don't care enough to make it actually work. Because they are adtechs and not interested in you as a user.

It's equally easy to forget about users from countries with way less freedom of speech and information sharing than in Western rich societies. These anti-abuse measures have made it much more difficult to access information blocked by my internet provider during the last few years. I'm relatively competent and can find ways around it, but my friends and relatives who pursue other career choices simply don't bother anymore.

Telegram channels have been a good alternative, but even that is going downhill thanks to French authorities.

Cloudflare and Google also often treat us like bots (endless captchas, etc) which makes it even more difficult.

SQL injection?

Get parameters can be abused like any parameter. This could be sql, could be directory traversal attempts, brute force username attempts, you name it.

At the very least, they're wasting bandwidth to a (likely) low quality connection.

But anyone making malicious POST requests, like spamming chatGPT comments, first makes GET requests to load the submission and find comments to reply to. If they think you're a low quality user, I don't see why they'd bother just locking down POSTs.

If your site is vulnerable to SQL injection, you need to fix that, not pretend Cloudflare will save you.

> For every…let’s call them ‘privacy-conscious’ user, there are 10 (or more) nefarious actors that present largely the same way.

And each one of these could potentially create thousands of accounts, and do 100x as many requests as a normal user would.

Even if only 1% of the people using your service are fraudsters, a normal user has at most a few accounts, while fraudsters may try to create thousands per day. This means that e.g. 90% of your signups are fraudulent, despite the population of fraudsters being extremely small.

Was anybody stopped to do nefarious actions by these annoyances?

It's like at my current and previous companies. They make a lot of security restrictions. The problem is, if somebody wants to get data out, they can get out anytime (or in). Security department says that it's against "accidental" leaks. I'm still waiting a single instance when they caught an "accidental" leak, and they are just not introducing extra steps, when at the end I achieve the exact same thing. Even when I caused a real potential leak, nobody stopped me to do it. The only reason why they have these security services/apps is to push responsibility to other companies.

Obviously. But I was responding to "what is sinister about a GET request". To put it a slightly different way, it does not matter so much whether the request is a read or a write. For example DNS amplfication attacks work by asking a DNS server (read) for a much larger record than the request packet requires, and faking the request IP to match the victim. That's not even a connection the victim initiated, but that packet still travels along the network path. In fact, if it crashes a switch or something along the way, that's just as good from the point of view of the attacker, maybe even better as it will have more impact.

I am absolutely not a fan of all these "are you human?" checks at all, doubly so when ad-blockers trigger them. I think there are very legitimate reasons for wanting to access certain sites without being tracked - anything related to health is an example.

Maybe I should have made a more substantive comment, but I don't believe this is as simple a problem as reducing it to request types.