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

1343 points Hold-And-Modify | 2 comments | 05 Feb 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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grayhatter ◴[06 Feb 25 16:08 UTC] No.42963720[source]▶
> Bad business, guys. You gotta find another way. Blocking IP addresses is o-ver.

no, it's still the front line. And likely always will be. It's the only client identifier bots can't lie about. (or nearly the only)

At $OLDJOB, ASN reputation was the single best predictor of traffic hostility. We were usually smart enough to know which we can, or can't block outright. But it's an insane take to say network based blocking is over... especially on a thread about some vendor blocking benign users because of the user-agent.

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weare138 ◴[06 Feb 25 16:39 UTC] No.42964083[source]▶
I don't use iCloud Relay but it seems Apple's ASN would be 'reputable'.
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1. maratc ◴[06 Feb 25 16:50 UTC] No.42964177[source]▶
It would appear to be, but only until the bad guys looking to come from reputable ASNs find out about this.
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2. IggleSniggle ◴[06 Feb 25 17:25 UTC] No.42964481[source]▶
Oh they have. It's been a big problem for my company. I assume Apple must work on this from their end, but any success would seem to undermine the privacy guarantee of the service.

"Bad guys" using Private Relay is one reason these IPs get blocked: one abuser can cause an entire block of people to get flagged as a single malicious user; and a big enough group of users can also look like a single malicious user to many blocklisting strategies, because they all share the same IP.