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

1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 2 comments | 05 Feb 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

Hello.

Cloudflare's Browser Intergrity Check/Verification/Challenge feature used by many websites, is denying access to users of non-mainstream browsers like Pale Moon.

Users reports began on January 31:

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32045

This situation occurs at least once a year, and there is no easy way to contact Cloudflare. Their "Submit feedback" tool yields no results. A Cloudflare Community topic was flagged as "spam" by members of that community and was promptly locked with no real solution, and no official response from Cloudflare:

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/access-denied-to-pale-moo...

Partial list of other browsers that are being denied access:

Falkon, SeaMonkey, IceCat, Basilisk.

Hacker News 2022 post about the same issue, which brought attention and had Cloudflare quickly patching the issue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317886

A Cloudflare product manager declared back then: "...we do not want to be in the business of saying one browser is more legitimate than another."

As of now, there is no official response from Cloudflare. Internet access is still denied by their tool.

Show context
windsignaling ◴[05 Feb 25 21:30 UTC] No.42955454[source]▶
As a website owner and VPN user I see both sides of this.

On one hand, I get the annoying "Verify" box every time I use ChatGPT (and now due its popularity, DeepSeek as well).

On the other hand, without Cloudflare I'd be seeing thousands of junk requests and hacking attempts everyday, people attempting credit card fraud, etc.

I honestly don't know what the solution is.

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inetknght ◴[05 Feb 25 21:50 UTC] No.42955733[source]▶
> On the other hand, without Cloudflare I'd be seeing thousands of junk requests and hacking attempts everyday, people attempting credit card fraud, etc.

Yup!

> I honestly don't know what the solution is.

Force law enforcement to enforce the laws.

Or else, block the countries that don't combat fraud. That means... China? Hey isn't there a "trade war" being "started"? It sure would be fortunate if China (and certain other fraud-friendly countries around Asia/Pacific) were blocked from the rest of the Internet until/unless they provide enforcement and/or compensation their fraudulent use of technology.

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marginalia_nu ◴[05 Feb 25 22:00 UTC] No.42955875[source]▶
A lot of this traffic is bouncing all over the world before it reaches your server. Almost always via at least one botnet. Finding the source of the traffic is pretty hopeless.
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1. patrick451 ◴[05 Feb 25 22:08 UTC] No.42955979[source]▶
When the government actually cares, they're able to track these things down. But they don't except in high profile cases.
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2. marginalia_nu ◴[06 Feb 25 10:49 UTC] No.42961110[source]▶
Well sometimes at least.

When the government really cares, it can put all its resources to solve any particular problem. Though obviously that comes at the cost of reassigning resources from other tasks. Sadly it's impossible to assign all resources to solve every problem all at once.