Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet
3 years ago
Across many different pages including science journals, ChatGPT, and many others, CloudFlare verification goes into an infinite loop of:
1. "Verify you are a human"
2. Check the box or perform some other type of rain dance
3. "Please stand by, while we are checking your browser..."
4. Repeat step 1
I'm on Fedora Linux 37 using Firefox 110.
The workaround is to use Chrome.
After experiencing this dozens of times and getting annoyed of needing to use Chrome, I finally went and deleted all my cookies and cache which I had been dreading to do.
It did not help.
I don't have a CloudFlare account so I wrote up a detailed post on their community forums. I offered a HAR file and was willing to do diagnostics. It received no responses and it was auto-closed.
It's unacceptable that CloudFlare is breaking the internet while offering no community support.
Edit: I'm in Texas. I'm not using a VPN or Tor, just AT&T Fiber. I don't have ad-blockers. No weird extensions. Nothing special (besides being on Linux).
Edit2: Since this got traction, I opened a new community post: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/infinite-verify-you-are-a-human-loop/503065
To be clear, I'm not against CloudFlare doing DDoS protection, etc., but it can't be breaking the internet while ignoring community posts on it.
Edit3: The CloudFlare team has engaged. Thank you HN!
This is because Cloudflare is not happy with Firefox 'resist fingerprint' feature.
Some related issues:
- https://forum.gitlab.com/t/cant-open-the-signin-page-it-keep...
- https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/linux/-/issue...
- https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/issues/1253
The purpose of CAPTCHA is supposedly to test if human or a bot, not to break or violate user privacy protections. It appears Cloudflare and others rather push the dangling of websites as "carrots", and see if they can get users to disable their ad blockers or any other privacy protections to get access.
The Cloudflare verification has become a sick or sadistic joke now. It's often just used to annoy people, and no matter if they pass the tests, denies access anyway. If the test is not going to determine access, then don't provide it, and just wholesale be up front on mindlessly or frivolously blocking people and entire IP ranges.
I thought the purpose of captcha was to train AI
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There's a natural contradiction between security and privacy.
For security, an actor needs to be tested and marked as secure, or else tested again before every interaction.
For privacy, an actor must not be marked, lest observers could correlate several interactions and make conclusions undesirable for the actor.
It does not make the infinite loop produced by CLoudflare any more reasonable though.
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There's more to it than just anti-fingerprinting. There's also some other fingerprinting going on, and I think there may be some kind of IP reputation system that influences these prompts as well. I've put privacy protections up to max but never see Cloudflare prompts.
I see them using some VPNs and using Tor, but that makes sense, because that's super close to the type of traffic that these filters were designed to block.
I suspect people behind CGNAT and other such technologies may be flagged as bots because one of their peers is tainting their IP address' reputation, or maybe something else is going on on a network level (i.e. the ISP doesn't filter traffic properly and botnets are spoofing source IPs from within the ISPs network?).
Every IPv6 thread we get someone saying "Oh v6 is worthless, we can stay on v4 forever, there are no downsides to CGNAT". I still have no idea how they can think that.
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>I suspect people behind CGNAT and other such technologies may be flagged as bots because one of their peers is tainting their IP address' reputation, or maybe something else is going on on a network level
This is a thing that is absolutely happening, I got temporarily shadowbanned for spam on Reddit the day I switched to T-Mobile Home Internet which is CGNAT'd, and I didn't post a single thing
I'm curious why you seem to think that Tor is more legitimate to block than those behind CGNAT. There's been plenty of research showing on a per-connection basis, Tor is no more prone to malicious activity than connections from random IPs, and that it's only on a per-IP basis malicious activity is more likely. I.e., it's the same phenomenon as why CGNAT causes collateral damage. You could argue that Tor is opt-in and therefore less worthy of protection, but saying "users who want extra privacy deserve to be blocked, even when we know (as much as one can know) that they're not using it for malicious reasons" seems like a fairly dystopian premise.
I'm actually kind of glad more people are becoming aware of this problem, and hope it finally spurs more interest in mechanisms that divorce network identity from IP addresses -- including the work Cloudflare is doing on Privacy Pass!
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Some sites I have already visited keep popping them up. And I'm on public IP that should have been associated with my computer for a while...
Maybe it is just per use case. Or they think I'm a bot as I keep looking at sites every couple hours... Which might be actually common with these sites.
it may be anecdotal but I see Cloudflare on Firefox compared to Chrome.
The most entertaining part of when I first ran into endless verification loop/Cloudflare error codes is that I couldn't access their official forums/support articles for information due to the same problems.
Had the same issue a long time ago, it was surprising how much of the internet was just "turned off": https://blog.dijit.sh/cloudflare-is-turning-off-the-internet...
Got SSL_ERROR_UNSUPPORTED_SIGNATURE_ALGORITHM when I went to the site and a redirect to https when I manually changed the protocol to http. I turned off https-only mode in Firefox so it appears to be a redirect that your server is sending back.
When I change the protocol and get the redirect back to https there's another "/" which is added after the domain such that "domain/path" becomes "domain//path". This repeats if I continue to change the protocol and hit the redirect such that "domain//path" will become "domain///path" (I noticed this because there was like 6 of them).
Apologies if this is indeed caused by my browser settings; I've been unable to find the cause if that's the case.
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Interesting find but that's not the issue for me. about:config shows privacy.resistFingerprinting=false by default (maybe Fedora sets that default?). There were various sub-settings (privacy.resistFingerprinting.*), some of which default to true, so I explicitly set them to false, and refreshed, but that didn't help. I also changed layout.css.font-visibility.resistFingerprinting from 1 to 0. I also tried adding the domain I'm testing to privacy.resistFingerprinting.exemptedDomains and that didn't help.
I wonder at what stage we can consider the damage Cloudflare is doing to the internet as naughty under anti-trust or similar?
Lucky me, I didn't find yet any site to regret if I just give up when I'm presented with the "verify you're human" garbage - which by the way you can get also on Windows Firefox from Google.
The breadth of sites that have this is increasing. I've had problems from everything to a website that sells eggs to science journals to ChatGPT.
> This is because Cloudflare is not happy with Firefox 'resist fingerprint' feature.
"Cloudflare is not happy with anything that is not Cloudflare"
ftfy :)
Yes, I was going to mention something like this. I use a custom firefox cookie setting and get many sites that are broken. The sign that it is a security setting within firefox is the fact that chrome will work fine.
> I'm not using a VPN or Tor, just AT&T Fiber. I don't have ad-blockers. No weird extensions. Nothing special (besides being on Linux).
Even if you were doing any, or all of these things, you are no less a legitimate internet user than anyone else. This whole "rain dance" supplication to show you are worthy of browsing a web site has got to go. Stop visiting sites who treat their users this badly!
This reminds me of the origin of "jaywalking". People used to walk wherever they wanted but when cars became a thing they found that people where in their way. So they started to blame people for "jaywalking" to turn it into a bad thing that the pedestrians are doing rather than framing it as cars wanting to take some of the road away from pedestrians.
We are trying to frame people who are trying to protect their privacy as "suspicious" rather than saying that we want to track them better.
Likening packets on the internet to people in a street is not an accurate analogy. The reason people use these solutions is that they're inundated with garbage traffic that is often automated. The internet is more like a street with 5 real people and 1,000 malicious humanoid robots.
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The FUD and moralization of groupthink conformance.
When not in a vehicle and there are no cops around, I do the New Yorker thing: I completely ignore signals and focus on traffic. The prima facie and prime directive is safety over conformance. I will not waste my life at the behest of some Christmas lights.
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Same thing with fraud against a business being turned into “identity theft”.
What is the alternative though; we had a millions of requests from 100000s of IPs from all continents a few months ago; literally the only thing that got our site back up was bot fight from cloudflare. How do you do this another way?
Personally, I have no problem with CloudFlare or their verification and protection products. But something's broken if it works in Chrome but not in Firefox (and I'm not doing anything special in Firefox).
there is no alternative. it sucks, and so people complain. the only solution is to just let people complain.
there's no way to solve this problem without having some sort of tracking system to determine who's a legitmate user.
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I think there are potential alternatives that could evolve.
My preferred solution would be domain validated identities with long lived, global reputation alongside some type of attestation. For example, if I have a GitHub account with 'example.com' as a verified domain, GitHub could attest 'example.com seems to be a real user or organization that behaves well'. It would be similar to the web of trust concept in GPG, but technology is to the point where it could actually be built in a way that makes it usable. Money that you're spending, or the way you interact in well known communities, could have the side effect of bolstering your reputation everywhere.
My most feared solution would be a similar system of attestation, but using Passkey since it would solidify the role of the current big tech companies as the arbiters of everything online. For example:
Those companies, as Passkey providers, would, for all intents and purposes, be your 'anchor identity' online and they'd be in a good position to attest to you behaving like a normal, non nefarious participant.
I think Apple would be the company that could sell that kind of change to normal users. It could be done in a way that's anonymous because all you really need is an attestation that says 'Apple certifies this user is in good standing'. Apple is very good at selling those kinds of changes as being privacy focused and I think their user base would go for it if it were framed as 'good people' (aka Apple device owners) getting a superior experience that isn't available to the 'bad people' (aka bots, bad actors, and outliers).
If it worked, Google would follow with Android. Anyone else large enough for their opinion of you to count (Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) could probably compete, but it doesn't work for startups or small, less known providers.
In my opinion, as soon as authentication moves to something like domains or digital signatures where 3rd party attestations become simple, we could see a lot of new ideas that focus on reputation and related solutions / services.
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Curious, why do you have a bot problem?
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> Stop visiting sites who treat their users this badly!
The problem is the individual sites aren’t making these highly technical decisions, people are using what seems to them an innocuous security product.
Not visiting a random website places no pressure on CloudFlare to change, since there’s no way to correlate your choice with the decision to use CloudFlare.
Not to mention that you may not have a choice. I've seen government sites have this shit on them. We're quickly approaching the satirical society of the movie _Brazil_.
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It's a form of digital totalitarianism. Submit to the rule of a few corporations or be left out socially, economically, etc.
> Stop visiting sites who treat their users this badly!
Too bad that basically means you can't surf the internet anymore as a majority of websites use Cloudflare. One of my Firefox installations on Linux are also plagued by this. I can't use Firefox to browse the web.
I already do that tbh. The internet is pretty redundant and you can find what you want anywhere.
CloudFlare blocks me from a part of the internet when I use anonymizing tools like Tor. I assumed they just do that to fingerprint and track you. Even the crypto thing to get a dozen or so passes after solving a riddle never worked.
So I have just moved on to websites protected by Akamai, or virtually anything but CloudFlare. It's not just a political decision btw. It's just easier to move on than to try to fight CloudFlare or to become viral on HN to get support.
It shouldn't be up to the user to adapt, but to the website.
agreed, especially when you are trying to BUY something. the modal popups trying to get you sign up for newsletters, the demand to prove you are human, fuck right off.
I see you're using an ad-blocker. You must disable it to see my low-effort content that's available on the next search result.
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I get CAPTCHA fails from my work's corporate network. We are on VPN and it makes us look like a sketchy VPN provider. Heck, StackOverflow blocks us half the time without a CAPTCHA challenge.
this is what I do. "Fuck 'em" if they think everyone is trying to hack their site. They could use any number of standard protections but they choose to use a hammer. The only place I'll kind of jump through hoops for is my personal bank or CC companies. I set up a socks5 server for that so I wasn't using the VPN that cloudflare and IAmVeryImportant.com sites hate.
> This whole "rain dance" supplication to show you are worthy of browsing a web site has got to go.
This is just whining. I don't necessarily like it either, but you conveniently ignore all the reasons why that rain dance supplication exists in the first place. All ears if you have a better solution for DDoS attacks, malicious bot traffic, etc.
I know CloudFlare has market share that would push their complaints to the top, but they aren't the only bot traffic blocker, DDoS shield, etc. Do other providers get a (proportionally) similar amount of complaints?
[flagged]
Even though they will engage on your ticket, the problem is a business level problem they help create and solve at the same time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32709329
> "Without CloudFlare's "neutral" security service offerings I couldn't have facilitated millions of DDoS attacks."
For those of you who are blaming website operators;
> "As someone who has previously justified their actions by saying "I am not directly causing harm, the responsibility flows downstream to my end users" I can tell you it is a shaky defense at best. "
The crux of the issue is this:
> "CloudFlare is a fire department that prides itself on putting out fires at any house regardless of the individual that lives there, what they forget to mention is they are actively lighting these fires and making money by putting them out!"
The crooks and the ilk of the internet get a free ride to do their 'shark infestations' everywhere online thanks to CF. However the real humans are the ones harmed here. One person complaining loudly got a ticket addressed. The other 10000 affected won't.
> CloudFlare is a fire department that prides itself on putting out fires at any house regardless of the individual that lives there, what they forget to mention is they are actively lighting these fires and making money by putting them out!
This doesn’t seem like a fair analogy. When I read the quote I expected to dig into the article and find that Cloudflare was somehow intentionally optimizing their network for carrying out DDoS attacks against non-customers in some sort of shady under the table dealings.
In this case the fire department is not lighting fires. They are not committing arson. They are saving all houses including the houses of arsonists.
It doesn’t seem like this kid used Cloudflare to carry out DDoS attacks (burn down houses). It seems like they used Cloudflare to keep their own house from burning down and then went and committed arson on their own.
I emailed John Graham-Cumming about this on March 15th and was told he was looping in the right people.
Small browsers (like mine) are basically unusable now because of this. Theyre significantly squeezing everyone into chrome/safari. Ours is even chromium based, so super annoying.
Is it because you have a different UserAgent? Otherwise, how would CloudFlare even know your browser is different if you're Chromium based?
No kidding, I had to set curl user agent to chrome in order to call some API service hosted behind cloudflare or it'll get blocked intermittently.
Fingerprinting.
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Update: The problem has been resolved. I can no longer reproduce the issue. I'm not sure if there was a fix on CloudFlare's side or if it was because I cleared cookies and cache and restarted my browser after resetting general.useragent.override.
If it was the latter, I'm sorry to CloudFlare as this was user error.
However, I do think the two meta points still stand:
1. Better diagnostics: perhaps a FAQ page that lists common issues such as an overridden general.useragent.override, etc. (obviously without giving anything away to bad people, but I'm sure certain things such as this can be pointed out)
2. Better responsiveness in the community forum particularly to this category of errors which blocks public internet activity.
> If it was the latter, I'm sorry to CloudFlare as this was user error.
The fuck it was. None of user agent, stale cache or cookies should have any bearing on you being allowed to view websites.
This is even worse for RSS. Website admin enables Cloudflare for DDoS protection, and RSS clients start getting errors, because they cannot prove their humanity. Would be great if some workaround would be built into Cloudflare, as contacting website admin probably won't do any good.
This is, in fact, a problematic case. RSS is expected to be consumed by other applications and bots. To make things worse, it might not be immediately obvious to the site owner when CF is interfering with the access to his content.
Website admin can solve this and still have protection by enabling caching of the rss feed, using a transform rule to drop all fields that could mess with the cache key, and then reducing the security level for that url. The cache works fine as a DDoS defense aswell as long as you don't let people mess with the key.
Same with API access. I had to change curl's user agent to chrome in order to use some API service that hosted behind cloudflare reliably.
That changing the user agent string helps just shows how absurd these checks are.
I've had this happen to me. I ended up configuring a proxy feed in Feedburner.
so you gave up more control of your content because Cloudflare's a belligerent actor :(
depressing you got stuck in such a mess
You're kinda railing against locks on doors ("I just want them all to easily open for me!") without realizing why they are there.
You can thank abusers and spammers for ruining the internet for you, not website operators trying to deal with spam/bots.
I've had my most inconsequential service taken offline with a $5 booter because the user wanted to brag on Discord. You can bet I default to Cloudflare now.
It's not just for the website operator either. All of my users suffer when $5 botnets take down my server too. And it's cheaper and cheaper to do that every year thanks to the internet of shit.
So I'm not sure who this "Tell HN" PSA is for. Are the baddies going to read about your inconvenience and stop being baddies so we don't need to use captchas anymore?
I'm fine with CloudFlare doing DDoS or spam protection. I'm not doing a DDoS nor spam. I'm happy to help them fix their algorithm. Not only did they not respond to the community post, but they auto-closed it to add insult to injury.
Well, until you have an algo that can mind read, "I'm not a spammer guys, gosh!" isn't good enough, I'm afraid.
And yes, it's annoying that we live in that world. In 1999 you could probably assume a request was human with a User-Agent regex.
In 2024, your smart toaster could be saturating your AT&T Fiber uplink without you even knowing while you're rage-posting in Cloudflare's forums about HAR files and how you're not a bot.
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> You're kinda railing against locks on doors
No, definitely not. I'm completely incapable of logging into several different services that have Cloudflare's protection (including their own website) if I use Chrome on my iPad. If I try on mobile Safari on the same device (which has basically an empty history), it goes through just fine.
Something is broken.
The broken thing is that anyone can send any unsolicited traffic anywhere, making Cloudflare a requirement for hosting a website. If we had properly authenticated traffic only that verifiably comes from a human, we would not need all these error prone defenses with false positives.
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Only if, in your analogy, putting the key into the lock, turning it, hearing click, and having the door open reveals the same fucking door instead of what's behind it.
This isn't nearly the intractable problem you seem to think it is. Requiring intense tracking/fingerprinting is done because it's easy and/or profitable. Enough pushback on those decisions will make the internet a better place.
There are many less inhumane ways of treating clients than CF does. Just because you needed them to protect your host doesn't justify their abuse of power.
This isn't true, though. Or at least it's not true if you want a free, set-it-and-forget-it solution, which people do for hobbies and side projects. You might want to take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21719793, which is a story about somebody who started out trying to avoid CloudFlare and eventually had to surrender because there was no other way to keep his site online against attackers.
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Cloudflare DDoS protection and Cloudflare captcha are two different services. As a website owner, you can opt into the first without the latter.
Website owhers usually don't realise that some "nicely advertised tech" they're ticking "to protect my poor website from evil hackers" is a damn grenade launcher in an infant's hands. Ironically, they're also shooting themselves in the feet by blocking their own customers.
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I haven't really had bad luck with Cloudflare, but for reCaptcha, I make it a point of contacting orgs that use it and telling them they've lost a sale as a result of their choice. The replies I've gotten are usually along the lines of "we have to use it for securit" and I know they don't really care, but all I really see that I can do is complain, and if they get enough complaints hopefully they try something else
As someone who had actually recommended a team to use reCAPTCHA and implemented it, it's really not that they don't care about losing a sale, it's that they lose more money by not using reCAPTCHA and letting bots run rampant. It's a business decision: they are still ahead even after accounting for lost sales due to a small minority of people who are opposed to reCAPTCHA and the money they pay for reCAPTCHA (which may be zero).
Obviously most small sites are not actively targeted by bots and using reCAPTCHA is a waste of money and people's time. But if you are, reCAPTCHA is a godsend.
> small minority of people who are opposed to reCAPTCHA
It's not so much that "people … are opposed to reCAPTCHA", but that for some they can't make it work.
Even if the loop is just one iteration, it's already breaking the internet. I cannot stand web sites that show the CloudFlare verification page before you can access. It's just ridiculous.
The page sometimes keeps refreshing literally forever. Completely ignoring my unconfirmed "Allow this page to reload?" prompt. I left it "checking" for hours once. No luck.
This is exactly what the OP is complaining about - endless loops that never complete.
I agree
I've got a Firefox extension that tells me if a site appears to be using Cloudflare - and I avoid all the ones I can
But I'm stuck with that stupid Cloudflare slowdown screen for the portal to my dr's office
Isn't this for stopping DDoS?
Yes, but aren't there more viable options? Like: a transition page that just waits for 5 seconds before loading. Then I don't have to, as an Asian, wonder how American school buses look like when I "click on all squares that have a bus". As though stop signs, buses and yachts are somehow universally the same all over the world.
CAPCHA/RECAPCHA is the internet version of the infamous "regatta" question on SAT [1].
[1] https://www.clearchoiceprep.com/sat-act-prep-blog/the-most-i...
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That's what it is for, but most setups don't have it setup correct (the verification page should ONLY appear during an actual DDoS, and even then only against IPs that appear to be participating).
It wants to do a bit of cryptography, which means that if scripts/WASM/etc are disabled, you can be out of luck.
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No. Cloudflare offers different levels of protection. One level is ‘prevent DDoS.’ Another level is ‘prevent bots from accessing the site at all.’ Not all bots are part of a DDoS. The problem is that many website owners turn on the second setting, because ‘bots are bad,’ without realizing that this means that some of their users are going to have to fill out Captchas.
(Comment written from memory, I may have details wrong.)
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But you know the website might have sooper sekret information they want to protect, which is why it's been published on a public website.
Speaking of bullshit restrictions designed to encourage compliance with surveillance, have imgur links just straight up stopped working for anyone else recently? I'm coming from a datacenter IP. I assume it's just some heavy handed part of the cost cutting push they announced.
Verification isn't about keeping secrets, obviously, it's about restricting the velocity of bots and their ability (intentional or not) to degrade your site's performance/availability.
There are too many bots out there that are very inconsiderate and do not limit or throttle themselves.
We have one right now that crawls every single webpage (and we have 10's of thousands) every couple days, without any throttle or limit. It's likely somebody's toy scraper, and currently it's doing no harm, but not everyone has the server resources we have.
The point is - if you are dealing with inconsiderate bots, a captcha of some type is pretty nearly a bullet proof way to stop them.
With that said, Cloudflare usually is smart enough to detect unusual patterns, and present a challenge to only those who they believe are bots or up to no good. If every person gets a challenge, then the website operator is either experiencing an active attack, or has accidentally set their security configuration too high.
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CloudFlare is usually there to mitigate bots attacking. Without which, the site wouldn't be available to view in the first place.
CloudFlare is merely the symptom of a greater set of problems, which it attempts to mitigate.
If you want to be angry about something, be angry that bruteforce attacks are common, guzzle resources and usually yield zero legal repercussions in most cases.
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Imgur links haven't worked on my VPN for a long time.
Even if they did, I'd still avoid imgur since they censor even worse than reddit.
Adding another comment in general response to folks saying "spam/bots sucks, internet is broken"
I get the reason for these pages. But there needs to be an escape hatch in there somewhere. After N cycles of poor fingerprinting, give me some way of asserting I'm human-ish or even slow me down sufficiently where bots are stifled. I'm happy to pay a tax of some sort as long as there is an escape hatch.
As of now, the page keeps looping. For the sake of curiosity I've let it do it's thing for a few hours and it never stops. I'd even take logic games or math problem at this point if captchas are too easy to break. Give me an escape hatch that isn't "use chrome".
I get the need... but that is one perverse incentive right there.
Yes, this is annoying as hell. It's gotten to the point where I just close out of a site when I see that interstitial come up.
yeah, same here. ( for example, I can't access forum.xda-developers.com anymore.
No kidding, these days if I get prompted from cloudflare bail. I also noticed if using a VPN, cloudflare will block your access in some cases.
Maybe time for a boycott of sites using cloudflare /s :)
I also wonder how hart this is for people who are blind, I think they would have a very hard time. Seems to me blind people in the US could use cloudflare using the American Disability Act.
>Maybe time for a boycott of sites using cloudflare /s :)
Pull the "/s" off, and you've already got one person (me) on your side :)
Cloudflare's verification and blocking means that I regularly have to use a VPN to access sites because having an HK ip address is reason enough to get those verifications or be outright blocked.
In the same way that Google breaks email by blocking any small servers, Cloudflare breaks internet by blocking people randomly, not supporting firefox on linux, etc...
Both are cancers that makes the world a worse place
Cloudflare has some weird thing going on there if you want to report bugs. If you try to open a support request to report the bug it'll be auto-closed stating only paid accounts can submit support tickets. Then it says if you really are sure then post it in the community. Did that but the post was auto deleted as spam. All I was trying to do was report a bug in their dashboard. Did someone internally game the KPI for open support issues? :)
I reported an abuse of their DNS system a few years ago to support@ and legal@ ... got told (paraphrase) "not our problem - you figure it out"
I'm not kidding, I've basically stopped using Google Search at this point because I refuse to disable my VPN or log in, and under these conditions I've been unable to do a Google search without passing several purposefully slowed recaptchas.
I used Google because I got a quick result for what I'm looking for. Now I can't get that I'm better off using a marginally worse search that doesn't force me to spend 2 minutes passing recaptchas to use their service.
I'm probably in a minority of people who use fresh incoginto windows frequently, disable fingerprinting, and always behind a VPN though.
certainly minority but at least not alone
You can email me (jgc@cloudflare.com) the HAR file and I'll get people to look at it.
Thank you very much! Email sent at 11:38 CT although it's 1.5MB so check your spam.
I have received it, spoken to the team and they are looking at it.
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> Tell HN: Cloudflare is breaking the internet
Fixed that for you. Cloudflare is a dark force of centralization operating under the threat of "but what if my forum with 10 users gets DDoSed?!" or "I'm too busy to set up Let's Encrypt so I let some random third party who leaks secrets all over the open internet terminate TLS on my behalf."
And bonus now we all have to jump through 15 captcha hoops to load some stupid website barely worth visiting anyway. Who gives a flying fuck if bots look at your ugly website anyway?
... I don't think people are using cloudflare to protect something willy nilly.
My general experience is, if you host a popular site, it will be DDOS'd.
If you host a site in a 'competitive' space, you will get DDOS'd.
I've seen it all personally, forums, image upload sites, NFT galleries, and SAAS health tech even, people will spend a couple hundred dollars to make you miserable.
If you don't have protection, they can literally see how you are falling and it only encourages further spend.
> ... I don't think people are using cloudflare to protect something willy nilly.
I do, it's a buzzword. Cloudflare, you don't have that? Your not cool unless you do.
With young apprentices learning the ropes of SRE/SysAdmin, DDoS protection has been painted as a #101 of the web when realistically you don't need it.
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Is putting up a HAProxy instance with some DDoS mitigation rules really that hard?
Worth mentioning that Cloudflare also hosts those DDOS services and prevents them from being shut down.
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Congrats you won a self made up argument
Put blame where blame is due. Poor security practices in operating systems of Internet-connected devices are breaking the Internet. Bandwidth is not cheap and only botnets can afford to DDoS major Internet sites. Cloudflare is the mitigation to terrible security practices in software development and system administration that allows botnets to persist. Cloudflare is simply the Schelling point people have arrived at to minimize harm until we have better-secured peers on the Internet (if ever).
The incentives are unfortunate; bandwidth is not free but it's cheap enough that individual owners don't really care if their hosts are part of a botnet until their ISP starts complaining or disconnects them. Individuals also don't really have good choices available to them; consumer devices rarely get patched for very long compared to their useful lifetime.
I think the current compromise is better than some alternatives like an Internet Passport or harsh penalties for making mistakes on the Internet or FDA/FCC levels of scrutiny on Internet-connected devices.
CloudFlare's been "breaking the internet" for years
My favourite is how depending on what hosting provider you use you can't access their own blog's feed. You get a 403 because you are a robot. Imagine that! A robot accessing a machine-readable feed so that humans can read your marketing material! How awful!
My service uses Cloudflare and we get hundreds of millions of bots trying to abuse our service.
The other day I stopped the Cloudflare CAPTCHA for a day just to see what would happen and the next day I saw fake orders with disputes and credit card testing which costed my business thousands.
I don't think this is a major problem for consumers, but for merchants, without CAPTCHA it is even worse for merchants.
I think I'll keep the CAPTCHA turned on, not sure if there is an alternative though.
would a fraud detection solution that you can query for IPs, cards without captcha work?
(if so, I have one =) )
I also hit the CloudFlare verification merry-go-round several times per day using Ubuntu / Chrome.
Reminds me of when I logged into a gmail account I forgot about for like 13 years.
Google asked me to verify I'm a not a robot, so I did. Then it said I "couldn't be verified" anyway so I did it again, but it gave me like 20 questions in a row.
It said I once again "couldn't be verified" at the end of it (I clearly didn't fail) and I would need to verify my phone number and email. So ha! Got you there.
...But I did that, I verified both which was clicking links or entering authentication codes from multiple devices and multiple linked accounts. After running out of excuses it just eventually said something like "You cannot log in at this time," despite having completed every security challenge.
I absolutely didn't fail any, and if I had, it would have immediately kicked me out and stated so which has happened before on other computers in previous years for different accounts. I wasn't on any VPN and didn't have any abnormal operating system or other settings. This was either main stream, up to date Firefox or Chrome or both. It was on my main regular computer in the USA in a popular tech professional city.
I never got the password wrong while it asked me to log in or anything, which it did about 10 times. I got everything and all security questions correct on the first try without any level of failure in regular human time.
Absolutely nothing should be setting off major red flags... If they're not going to approve my login, they shouldn't have me dancing through hoops for hours. I passed every test and verified registered devices associated with my account and verified security emails sent to other accounts that it was indeed me. If I pass every security check, why do they get to still decide no after wasting hours of my time? Why not just reject me straight away?
It's like winning the lottery and jumping through every hoop to verify that I legitimately bought the ticket in a legitimate circumstance with absolutely my money and they keep going through a checklist of loopholes to not pay out. When I don't meet any of the loophole conditions that they're trying to stretch to meet, they just give up and say "No, you didn't win." Actually, that sounds like a recurring real major problem that actually happens in the US now that I think about it.
There are entire websites that simply will not work for me on Linux+Firefox because of Cloudflare. Never before have I wished for a company to go out of business, until now.
I assumed it was due to me being on a VPN and/or having privacy.resistFingerprinting turned on in Firefox, but I encounter this several times a day. Agreed that it sucks. I know Cloudflare is probably damned if they do, and damned if they don't, because they're warring with bots, and some of us are collateral damage. It's that privacy vs. convenience tradeoff our bearded cyber prophets warned us about in the 90s.
I'm working on a crawler and CloudFlare is the cause of 99% of all the headaches and random bugs I encounter doing simple HTTP requests.
I literally have implemented custom logic to deal with sites returning the "Server: Cloudflare" header.
I had the exact same issue for months, and I just checked and it is gone (on Firefox), which has to have happened in the last day, without me having changed a single thing on my end. I'm certain it's because you made some noise, so thank you. It was absolutely ridiculous how many websites Cloudflare was able to render unusable in Firefox. Truly a terrifying power for a company to wield.
CloudFlare is as evil as Google if not more and people don't seem to realize that. Solving their captcha doesn't help; it requires solving about 15 captchas before granting access. I gave up and I always use Chrome when that happens. It wastes a lot of time, it slows humanity - not only by solving those captchas but also by this slow "checking your browser is secure" javascript, it adds up on a massive scale. As more services adopt CloudFlare, users are hostage. And they no longer decide which browser to use. At the same time all traffic goes through CF which acts like a massive surveillance hub. Very depressing. It started as a DDOS protection (which could help some people) but ended up with all this WAF js "browser security" crap. I wish CF never existed.
Cloudflare are just selling a tool to solve a problem in the best way they can conjure.
All of this comes from there being no universal way to prove you are a human on the Internet. If somebody were to invent a physical device (think YubiKey) that atttested that your activity is human without it being usable to identify/track you, we might have a shot at solving this without CAPTCHAs.
The device would be issued to you as an individual and any signs of it being abused could be reported to deactivate it. I have no idea how such a device would work, but I'm sure it's possible. With machine learning becoming more powerful, this is going to be needed one day.
And before somebody makes the argument of "but that's centralised, big brother, blah blah whatever bullshit", let me remind you that every payment you make goes through either Mastercard or Visa.
> All of this comes from there being no universal way to prove you are a human on the Internet. If somebody were to invent a physical device (think YubiKey) that atttested that your activity is human without it being usable to identify/track you, we might have a shot at solving this without CAPTCHAs.
Which is good. That's a desirable property. The distinction isn't available without also allowing fingerprinting. Further, the line between bot and user-agent is not perfectly clear. Something like cost-based attestation where humans and bots are treated equally is ideal.
> And before somebody makes the argument of "but that's centralised, big brother, blah blah whatever bullshit", let me remind you that every payment you make goes through either Mastercard or Visa.
That's an even bigger problem!
>Which is good. That's a desirable property
Is it? That's Cloudflare's whole selling point - keep the bots out. I can understand from a hacker perspective wanting bots to be able to roam the Internet as freely as people but that causes massive headaches for sysadmins, SREs, and DevOps. robots.txt is no good because it's opt-in.
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Let's all note just how much market share cloudflare got before throwing this switch. While they took over a huge part of the web this sort of thing never happened. Now it seems very much harder to even attempt to browse with slightly more anonymity.
Ladies and gentlemen start your conspiracy theories.
Right observation, but wrong conclusion.
Cloudflare skews towards a monopolistic monoculture. (Fastly and Akamai also exist, but present more friction.)
The issue is that with one transparent proxy and application firewall for a large fraction of web traffic, it has to cover uncountable edge-cases to not leave out nonzero users from a large number of sites. It's unlikely to be malicious intention here, but more likely accidents, oversights, and lack of alternatives.
This in fact happened all along and we warned you and got downvoted for it until now.
> I finally went and deleted all my cookies and cache which I had been dreading to do.
You could had just try it in the porn mode. Another option is to use a different profile or a portable version.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable (Windows only, I guess)
I just tried creating another profile and it seems to help! I didn't realize clearing cache/cookies might be insufficient. Maybe it's some other setting that I have in my default profile, although I don't remember changing much at all from factory Firefox settings.
Glad to hear!
There are some things around local storage which isn't cleard even if you clear cookies.
I noticed, when you browse with Linux or a VPN and sites go crazy- that HCaptcha seems far friendlier than Recaptcha in that i never get stuck in a loop like Recaptcha does where it glitches out, or bugs out and makes it so you'll spend 5+ minutes going through 5 or 6 rounds of matching images because it oddly fails.
If captchas are so important - serious point, perhaps different ones are the way to go?
I apologize in advance if this is more of a setting of difficulty from Cloudflare on Recaptcha, and Hcaptcha potentially being able to be set just as difficult/cost you as much time to get past/etc
> bugs out and makes it so you'll spend 5+ minutes going through 5 or 6 rounds of matching images because it oddly fails.
That isn't just a reCaptcha thing. HCaptcha will definitely do that as well -- and if anything it's worse, because some of the "identify this AI-generated image" challenges are pretty awful. (At one point, I recall it asking me to "select the ladybugs" with nine images all containing round spotted bugs in slightly different shades of red and orange.)
Just for debugging, can you please create a fresh Firefox profile and try again?
I am also in Texas. Also using Mozilla Firefox on Fedora, on Spectrum / Road runner / Charter.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
I personally don't mess with profiles. I download firefox developer binaries and put them in ~/bin folder which uses a different profile by default (no extensions for web dev test).
Interesting, you might be on to something! I just tried this and it seems to help. How does this make any sense though as I cleared cache/cookies and have factory settings in my other profile?
I use Firefox on Fedora as well, but with Xfinity (IPv6 support and no CGNAT). I have to solve a lot of CAPTCHAs, but it always lets me through.
I am going to presume that CloudFlare wants an id on the person or it rejects the request. Even through vpns.
...
And yet, miraculously, the internet seem to have survived. It has even survived underwater cable cuts, DNS black holes rouge countries and plain stupid BGP by plainly stupid admins, firewalls - great and less-than-great ones, internal networks with more or less surveillance, more or less hostility towards VPNs, TOR and other anonymizing services.
Cloudflare is large, yet it's not "the Internet". Firefox community is also large, yet there are other browsers and tools to browse "the Internet".
I wish "breaking the internet" would stop being thrown around in such a cavalier manner. </rant>
It does and we can’t do much but avoid using it for our services.
On Firefox it hasn’t worked for a long time.
I have become quite tired of disabling my VPN extension every time I visit a Cloudflare site. If I don't it just reloads the verification page over and over.
I used to do this until I remembered that other alternatives to the site I visit exist. Never opened that abusive site again.
Sucks if your website is unique.
It's not just me then - I thought it was because I was using Tor.
This is exactly the problem I face.
Check -> wait -> check -> wait -> check...
Now when testing with an older browser, I'm straight up getting a message: "Your browser is out of date! Update your browser to view this website correctly."
https://i.imgur.com/FzCIzep.png
So... it's fixed as in it is still very much broken.
I've been getting angry emails about this from our visitors for years. As an enterprise Cloudflare customer, I tried engaging support, but they refused to fix the issue saying it's working as intended.
I would be so happy to see this BS finally get traction and fixed properly.
To be fair, this is not breaking the "internet," it is just breaking access to a subset of popular "websites" which are free to choose this. The Internet itself is much more than this in quality, if not quantity.
The breadth of this impact has surprised me and it's clearly growing. Whether CloudFlare or other services perform this verification, I think it's important to highlight the lack of community support which is what really bothers me. It's fine for them to add reasonable protections for their customers, but they are not working with the community to reduce false positives.
I want the internet to be free/open to all as much as anyone. But specific websites aren’t the internet work itself. You aren’t entitled to them. many websites, most startup websites, are maintained by individuals or small businesses which aren’t inherently profitable. They can’t afford to deal with spambots, ad click through fraud, etc. It’s reasonable for them to deny-by-default and only spend time (money) dealing with user-agents that can pass this proof-of-personhood test (until there are better zip proof of personhoods, a huge opportunity atm)
Cloudfare gets paid when they can deliver session traffic to their clients that A) uniquely identifies users and B) has all the traffic decrypted.
If you can’t meet A&B they don’t want you traversing their network.
I'm not actively trying to avoid detection (e.g. VPN, Tor, etc.). Another user mentioned Firefox's privacy.resistFingerprinting might be the issue, but I don't have that enabled. Maybe there's something else in Firefox that is avoiding (A), and I'm willing to open a Firefox bug report to investigate that, but the core issue here is CloudFlare blocks without any diagnostic information and its community support forum didn't engage. This HN post has caused some amount of engagement from CloudFlare and hopefully it'll be fixed.
I use Safari with 1Blocker, while on private relay. I see surprisingly almost no Cloudflare verifications at all. I can't tell if it's their private access tokens implementation going live yet or just higher levels of trust for traffic for Private Relay since it requires a paid iCloud+ account
https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...
Yes, that due to the higher confidence of a real person using an Apple device with a paid iCloud+ account as well as the simple fact that Private Relay uses Cloudflare underneath to route much of the traffic (as well as other networks).
Fastly's CAPTCHAs refuse to accept from my work's network.
I'm using only FF on Ubuntu and Win10. Sometimes I receive the Verify window (2x per week) mostly on Win10. I'm from Europe. This started less than a month ago.
It's okay. These days I close every website that has a cookies banner, a CAPTCHA or a popup. Do the same and let the market take care of the rest.
If you can't pass the captcha test, you need to ask yourself: Are you really a human being, or have you just been programed to believe that you are?
These very annoying behaviors with Firefox/Linux are the reason why I'm trying to avoid having my customers using cloudflare at all.
Yep, using Librewolf with letterboxing to resist fingerprint, I have encountered basically all type of captcha at all sites.
I find it less annoying than having to fill out captchas - but yes - it's annoying and it makes me not want to visit the website.
How is it less annoying when you can't visit the website in the end? Sometimes the loop is literally infinite - you can click those buttons for hours without any success.
I haven't had that before.
I can’t use phind on one of my machines thanks to this. It’s Just stuck trying to load the checkbox. Windows machine.
Let me say that any website that wants to verify my humanity is an auto backbutton press.
Not sure what issues people have that they need CF in front. Obligatory in 25 years of running my own servers I never needed ddos protection or w/e it is CF is offering.
You didn't personally need ddos protection for any of your web resources? Good for you. Doesn't mean the need isn't real; basically all popular/valuable websites need some level of ddos protection at some point.
In all my life I have also never needed to defend myself in any way; I've never been in a fight. Therefore, no one needs to defend themselves ever and all forms of self-defence are bogus.
All it takes is pissing off the wrong person on the internet; knocking a server offline is surprisingly easy.
It's been breaking by life.
"Your browser is obsolete. Go shoot yourself. Have a nice day."
I've noticed it too. Pretty fucking annoying bug that breaks half the internet. Very bad that so many sites are dependent on the same service provider.
I really hope Privacy Pass Device Attestation can solve this once and for all.
Pathetic that this is what it takes for a company to do the right thing.
There is no other viable solution for hosts. Once we can finally have properly authenticated traffic that verifiably comes from a human all this nonsense with captchas can end.
Use Privacy Pass then if you don't want to use Chrome. https://privacypass.github.io/
That still forces you to go and proactively solve a ton of CAPTCHAs to get points or tokens or whatever it calls them. And some things seem to be just plain irretrievably broken regardless, whether by Cloudflare or by the clients I can't say.
You can't have it both ways.
People use CloudFlare to solve a multitude of problems, some of which include automated attacks by bots, which would make the website unavailable in the first place.
If you're going to use a non-mainstream browser then you're going to compromise in some way. If people are going to defend their website against attackers then there's compromise.
CloudFlare isn't the problem, it's a symptom of other problems left unsolved. Is it a compromise? Yup. What's the alternative? Not using it and thus having constant downtime?
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And what if I have to use 3 browsers and don't want to set up accounts or give up privacy?
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it never worked on my tor browser
I seriously interested: what would happen if Firefox did allow fingerprinting using random() and it would generate a new fingerprint for each tab. Would it violate anything?
I'm starting to believe that CAPTCHAs are anti-human.
Must be some of the filters Firefox has in place. Same already happened me with Brave. Solution might be disabling those Firefox filters...
I’m having the same issue using chatgpt with brave
waiting for someone to solve trust/reputation on the internet like colbert eating popcorn.
> Nothing special (besides being on Linux).
Using Linux shouldn't be considered a special thing
aliexpress is also broken under firefox anti-fingerprinting, except amuzingly, in a private window, aliexpress works again.
I wish to stress, it should not be said as "firefox breaks aliexpress". It doesn't. aliexpress is broken.
you're using linux.. you baddie
look theres lots of linux bots. and theres just no efficient way to really tell em apart from humans on linux. thats fine right? sort of like when the cops pull over a black dude
I have the same issue on Chrome on my corporate laptop.
Offtopic: Quit the rain dances and batten down the hatches for tonight's weather rolling through. Some mighty dark clouds are rolling through these parts as of writing.
Not surprising. Cloudflare is cancer.
Hello, We burnt our hands with Cloudflare! This is our experience with Cloudflare in detail: https://freesoftware.life/how-using-cloudflare-free-plan-des...
This might be the worst write up I've ever read. You don't have a single graph or metric to support any of your theory's. It reads like a rambling of lightly connected ideas intermixed with a poor understanding of how the internet works.
Why is this Cloudflare's problem to fix?
If you get locked out of your hotel room, do you call Assa Abloy to complain?
Complain to the site that their site doesn't work. They are the ones that install and configure their security software.
The analogy doesn't apply because a hotel has an override using a master key. In this case, the website, hopefully, would just open a support ticket with CloudFlare, and add a level of indirection that likely means my HAR file wouldn't even make it to CloudFlare. However, I think you make a good point that reporting to the website will put more pressure on CloudFlare or the website owner may choose a different vendor that has fewer problems. I think it's worth reporting to both in this case.
Now that CloudFlare has engaged with this problem, I'll give them some time to try to fix it, and if they don't, I'll start complaining to every website that uses this CloudFlare feature.
> The analogy doesn't apply because a hotel has an override using a master key.
Website operators can override Cloudflare the same way.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/ip-access-rules/...
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense.
Websites are generally presumed open for business, not get-a-contract-first like a hotel room. A better analogy would be a shop front with an 'open' sign in the window.
An increasing numnber of shops on the street have locks that silently open if you look like the right kind of person, but lock if you don't look right.
And most people look right, so they don't even realise the lock is there.
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there are countless services that do what CloudFlare is doing
but not a single one has the false positive rate that cloudflare has
cloudflare only accepts the very standart users, and locks a lot of others out. and then they offer no convenient way to prove you're a legitimate user, to access the website.
and they have to fix it, because they sell their protection to admins who don't want to set it up themselves. They have the knowledge and are tasked to do that
That is not at all true. Many other WAF or similar anti-abuse configurations are much more ham-fisted. It is not uncommon for some to block entire countries, or block any IP ranges belonging to known VPNs, proxies, and Tor.