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1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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.

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ai-christianson ◴[] No.42954365[source]
How many of you all are running bare metal hooked right up to the internet? Is DDoS or any of that actually a super common problem?

I know it happens, but also I've run plenty of servers hooked directly to the internet (with standard *nix security precautions and hosting provider DDoS protection) and haven't had it actually be an issue.

So why run absolutely everything through Cloudflare?

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professorsnep ◴[] No.42956166[source]
I run a Mediawiki instance for an online community on a fairly cheap box (not a ton of traffic) but had a few instances of AI bots like Amazon's crawling a lot of expensive API pages thousands of times an hour (despite robots.txt preventing those). Turned on Cloudflare's bot blocking and 50% of total traffic instantly went away. Even now, blocked bot requests make up 25% of total requests to the site. Without blocking I would have needed to upgrade quite a bit or play a tiring game of whack a mole blocking any new IP ranges for the dozens of bots.
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1. CGamesPlay ◴[] No.42957695[source]
How do you feel, knowing that some portion of the 25% “detected bot traffic” are actually people in this comment thread?