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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: 0.53s | 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
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.

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jen729w ◴[06 Feb 25 08:46 UTC] No.42960397[source]▶
Vendors who block iCloud Relay are the worst. I'm sure they don't even know they're doing it. But some significant percentage of Apple users -- and you'd have to think it's only gonna grow -- comes from those IP address ranges.

Bad business, guys. You gotta find another way. Blocking IP addresses is o-ver.

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oremolten ◴[06 Feb 25 14:57 UTC] No.42962962[source]▶
Well its primarily because the security vendors for say WAFs and other tools list these IPs in the "Anonymizers" or "VPN" category and most typically these are blocked as seldom do you see legitimate traffic originating to your store front or accounts pages from these. Another vendor we use lists these under "hacking tools" So your option as a security professional is to express to your risk management team we allow "hacking tools" or lose iCloud Relay customers. Which way do you think they steer? In alternative cases a site may use a vendor for their cart/checkout page and don't even have control over these blocks as they are also blocking "hacking tools" or "anonymizers" from hitting their checkout pages.
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1. grayhatter ◴[06 Feb 25 16:02 UTC] No.42963660[source]▶
> So your option as a security professional is to express to your risk management team we allow "hacking tools" or lose iCloud Relay customers

a professional would explain how the vendor is being lazy and making a mistake there because they don't understand your business.

depending on the flavor of security professional (hacker) they might also subtly suggest that this vendor is dumb and should be embarrassed they've made this mistake, thus creating the implication that if you still want to block these users you would also have to be an idiot

under so circumstance is what I ever allow anyone to get the mistaken impression that some vendor understands my job better than I do. As a "security professional" it's literally your job to identify hostile traffic, better than a vendor could.