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

1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | 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
ai-christianson ◴[05 Feb 25 20:07 UTC] 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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1. betaby ◴[06 Feb 25 15:39 UTC] No.42963387[source]▶
Other comments say that DDoS are common, not my experience though. I run a couple of API/SAAS sites and DDoSes are rare. Sites are in Canada and Brazil if that matters, although I won't disclose what data-centers. Most strange thing is that no one demanded any ransom during those DDoS attacks ever. Just some flooding for 1-2 days. Most of the times I did't even care - servers are on 10G ports and I pay 95% percentile for the traffic with a cap on final bill. Sites are geo-fenced by nftables rules, only countries of interest are allowed.