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.
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?
Every other attempt at DDoS has been ineffective, has been form abuse and credential stuffing, has been generally amateurish enough to not take anything down.
I host (web, email, shells) lots of people including kids (young adults) who're learning about the Internet, about security, et cetera, who do dumb things like talk shit on irc. You'd think I'd've had more DDoS attacks than that rather famous one.
So when people assert with confidence that the Internet would fall over if companies like Cloudflare weren't there to "protect" them, I have to wonder how Cloudflare marketed so well that these people believe this BS with no experience. Sure, it could be something else, like someone running Wordpress with a default admin URL left open who makes a huge deal about how they're getting "hacked", but that wouldn't explain all the Cloudflare apologists.
Cloudflare wants to be a monopoly. They've shown they have no care in the world for marginalized people, whether they're people who don't live in a western country or people who simply prefer to not run mainstream OSes and browsers. They protect scammers because they make money from scammers. So why would people want to use them? That's a very good question.
> Cloudflare wants to be a monopoly. They've shown they have no care in the world for marginalized people, whether they're people who don't live in a western country or people who simply prefer to not run mainstream OSes and browsers.