Disgusting and unsurprising.
Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.
Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.
Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.
Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?
Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!
The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to
monkegopher.Fuck Cloudflare.
I get why you’re frustrated and you have every right to be. I’m going to preface what I’m going to say next by saying I work in this industry. I’m not at Cloudflare but I am at a company that provides bot protection. I analyze and block bots for a living. Again, your frustrations are warranted.
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Even if a site doesn’t have sensitive information, it likely serves a captcha because of the amount of bots that do make requests that are scraping related. The volume of these requests can effectively DDoS them. If they’re selling something, it can disrupt sales. So they lose money on sales and eat the load costs.
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With more and more username and password leaks, credential stuffing is getting to be a bigger issue than anyone actually realizes. There aren’t really good ways of pinpointing you vs someone that has somehow stolen your credentials. Bots are increasingly more and more sophisticated. Meaning, we see bots using aged sessions which is more in line with human behavior. Most of the companies implementing captcha on login segments do so to try and protect your data and financials.
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The rise in unique, privacy based browsers is great and it’s also hard to keep up with. It’s been more than six months, but I’ve fingerprinted Pale Moon and, if I recall correctly, it has just enough red flags to be hard to discern between a human and a poorly configured bot.
Ok, enough apologetics. This is a cat and mouse game that the rest of us are being drug into. Sometimes I feel like this is a made up problem. Ultimately, I think this type of thing should be legislated. And before the bot bros jump in and say it’s their right to scrape and take data it’s not. Terms of use are plainly stated by these sites. They consider it stealing.
Thank you for coming to my Tedx Talk on bots.
Edit: I just want to say that allowing any user agent with “Pale Moon” or “Goanna” isn’t the answer. It’s trivially easy to spoof a user agent which is why I worked on fingerprinting it. Changing Pale Moon’s user agent to Firefox is likely to cause you problems too. The fork they are using has different fingerprints than an up to date Firefox browser.
Thank you for that info, very helpful.
Thank you for reading and considering the information.
Also Cloudflare adds a caching layer, often physically closer to users. Increasing speed of delivery and reducing server costs. It’s a no-brainer for server admins.
Also, I don’t work for Cloudflare either. The animosity is new to me, and certainly something I’ll look into.
Terms of use are plainly stated by these sites. They consider it stealing.
I consider it more trespassing than stealing myself.
You’re definitely right that it’s a game of one-upping each other. Unfortunately, it’s now directed in a path that infringes on privacy of the users it aims to serve.
Since you’re working in the internet security industry, what’s your take on something like Altcha as opposed to more invasive means of protecting against both attacks?
Trust me, my team and I often feel at odds with the part that infringes on privacy. As someone that enjoys and wants more privacy, I wish there were other solutions that didn’t create a type of dragnet. If it assuages some of your fears, I’ve never heard of the fingerprinting being sold or used outside of detections.
ALTCHA uses a proof-of-work mechanism to protect your website, apps, APIs, and online services from spam and unwanted content.
Unlike other solutions, ALTCHA’s Captcha alternative is free, open-source and self-hosted, does not use cookies nor fingerprinting, does not track users.
Emphasis are mine. I honestly do not know how this statement is possible. Captcha-less, proof-of-work solutions have to fingerprint on some level. It’s essentially having the browser prove it is what it claims to be. I get what they’re trying to say but it’s marketing. That said, I don’t know everything and maybe they have some method I’m not aware of. Grains of salt all around.
I definitely understand. That’s good to hear there hasn’t been a direct pipeline to selling fingerprint data established yet.
Thanks for checking it out. Hopefully there is a best of both worlds in what they are advertising but I get that technology isn’t magic either.
Ever heard of counting attempts? Log the IP, present a CAPTCHA after 100 requests in a minute.
Besides, if I wrote a bot I would run a browser dialer from Chrome. It would request your site in a Chrome tab and appear completely legitimate to your stupid fingerprinting scripts
Yes, the industry is well aware of this. We do behavioral detection on both sessions and IPs. This is fairly basic.
Yeah, it’s fine as long as you don’t block legitimate users. For example, when I use a VPN a lot of sites block me. Even when my actual IP is banned when I’m in China (4chan range bans Chinese IPs) or the website is blocked in China.
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Tilde.teams and tilde.club even have outwardly facing email accounts.
We have a newsgroup server.
We have a dedicated irc server.
Member gopher/https/gemini pages.
And other services.
And each tilde has it’s own focus.
Be kind. Contribute as you can to discussions.
What is gemini
https://tilvids.com/videos/watch/e1d6ed23-315a-4fc6-8d5b-6d96d51e4819
Rocking the web bloat.
https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-83-rocking-the-web-bloat-modern-gopher-gemini-and-the-small-internet
Be Free.
Ever been down the gemini rabbit hole? It’s not perfect, but quite interesting.
It is obvious that Cloudflare is being influenced to enforce browser monopolies. Imagine if Cloudflare existed in 2003 and stopped non Internet Explorer browsers. If you use cloudflare to “protect” your site you are discriminating against browser choice and are as bad as Microsoft in 1998.
Agreed. I use cloudflare for domain hosting because they’re cheap, but I have never liked their protections.
I can’t use my Browser without it being created by a tech giant, cant use my new computer without having my software uefi signed by Microsoft, AI will soon need me to have my GPU licensed and registered.
The world is heading to crap.
You can, it’ll cost more and give you less, but you can.
That’s the way this works.
Need to start spoofing user agent strings again.
What doesn’t work with Lynx is a wrong website.
Agree for static content like news and blogs. Disagree for dynamic content like games and social media. And the latter is mostly for scale (having server-side templating is expensive for rapidly changing content).
Then again, there’s a case for snapshotting SM pages every so often for things like crawlers and cli browsers.
Pale Moon still exists? Huh
I feel like I remember reading that the pale moon JavaScript engine was broken and causing the capcha to break repeatedly?
Let me see if I can find sources
EDIT: Looks like I was remembering a previous issue where the captchas were causing the entire pale moon browser to crash. I believe this has been fixed, but the new issue is a much less exciting block.
I just won’t use cloudflare, that’s fine.
But everyone else is
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That’s good in theory, but a site behind Cloudflare won’t necessarily notice that a legitimate user got blocked. If you want them to care, you’ll have to find a way to contact them. For more impact, tell them which competitor you spent money with instead.
That’s analogous to saying you won’t call any numbers on certain carrier
It’s possible, but your overall service is devalued if you can’t connect to a large group of people.
