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

1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 6 comments | 05 Feb 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.012s | source | bottom

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
nikkwong ◴[06 Feb 25 05:13 UTC] No.42959315[source]▶
Yesterday I was attempting to buy a product on a small retailer's website—as soon as I hit the "add to cart" button I got a message from Cloudflare: "Sorry, you have been blocked". My only recourse was to message the owner of the domain asking them to unblock me. Of course, I didn't, and decided to buy the product elsewhere. I wasn't doing anything suspicious.. using Arc on a M1 MBP; normal browsing habits.

Not sure if this problem is common but; I would be pretty upset if I implemented Cloudflare and it started to inadvertently hurt my sales figures. I would hope the cost to retailers is trivial in this case, I guess the upside of blocking automated traffic can be quite great.

Just checked again and I'm still blocked on the website. Hopefully this kind of thing gets sorted out.

replies(13): >>42959473 #>>42959512 #>>42960071 #>>42960395 #>>42960397 #>>42961792 #>>42961906 #>>42964337 #>>42964617 #>>42965068 #>>42965688 #>>42965889 #>>42970070 #
raxxorraxor ◴[06 Feb 25 12:38 UTC] No.42961792[source]▶
I think this is on Cloudflare. Perhaps there is a demand for such a service, but it is another to implement it. And this is very bad for a free and therefore safe net.

I don't even know which attack vectors an integrity check for a browser could help against. Against infected clients? It is in any way evidently not effective.

replies(1): >>42962264 #
1. wvh ◴[06 Feb 25 13:50 UTC] No.42962264[source]▶
There is some political-philosophical irony that the Chinese prefer their government to do the blocking and take away their freedom, while the US prefers their monopolistic capitalistic corporate world to do it. A rose by any other name. Chose your friends carefully.
replies(1): >>42963941 #
2. Ray20 ◴[06 Feb 25 16:25 UTC] No.42963941[source]▶
To trivialize totalitarian regimes that carry out terror against their own citizens, that can outright kill you and whole your family, by comparing them to capitalistic corporate world where, in the worst case, you can simply choose another, less fancy option, is the height of madness.
replies(4): >>42964842 #>>42964845 #>>42965670 #>>42999625 #
3. tremon ◴[06 Feb 25 18:01 UTC] No.42964842[source]▶
Your snide comment might have had some weight if there had been zero instances of the US government [0] or US corporations [1] killing people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_by_the_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

4. imaginarypedro ◴[06 Feb 25 18:02 UTC] No.42964845[source]▶
https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-asthma-medicine-lawsuit...
5. gosub100 ◴[06 Feb 25 19:31 UTC] No.42965670[source]▶
I'd feel a lot safer walking the streets of any city in China late at night than I would in any blue states "zero tolerance" "gun free" zone.
6. wvh ◴[10 Feb 25 12:47 UTC] No.42999625[source]▶
Many roads can lead to that hell. It's not because you take the scenic route that you shouldn't have some sense of awareness about where you might be headed. There is no us and them, just human nature.