Privacy

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Anyone else noticing a lot more "Access Denied" pages while using hardened Firefox lately? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I use Firefox whenever I can.

On first install of the browser I usually end up following a hardening guide which includes stuff like blocking cross site cookies, setting a few things in about:config to disable Pocket/etc, and installing uBlock Origin. I've taken what I consider a relatively balanced approach, I don't use anything like noScript, uMatrix, etc that ultimately just cost a lot of time fiddling to get the 10th website of the week working.

I've been more or less fine browsing the web this way for years, but around the start of 2024 I've started seeing way more "Access Denied" pages than I used to. I think part of it is Cloudflare or similar, but I don't know exactly what's changed or what's triggering it to occur.

It usually goes away and I can re access the site in 10-30 minutes as usual, but I've had it occur in really weird instances, such as trying to change my Minecraft skin and getting blocked by the website. The server block often goes away immediately if I switch my user agent, so I know that it has something to do with how I've got everything set up.

Not sure what anyone else's experience with this has been. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts and tips

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (6 children)

I for one want to offer a heartfelt apology. As someone that works in this space, bots are becoming more and more sophisticated. I can't speak for Cloudflare, but we're definitely not interested in your personal information. As someone who also prefers their privacy on the web, the fact that bot signatures overlap with privacy-centric signatures sucks. I myself have experienced it on my mobile device with Ghostery. It's frustrating, I know.

Would you mind sharing the guide you used for hardening your Firefox? I'm curious to see what could potentially be triggering the issue.

Also, I just want to say, I think it's hilarious that a site blocked you but then allows you to continue browsing after changing your user agent. That right there is bot behavior.

To circle back around to the actual block, I bet changing your skin executes JavaScript which flags something from the anti-bot software.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Mull, Librewolf, Mullvad Browser, Arkenfox user.js

Its basically privacy.resistfingerprinting, a generalized useragent, maybe blocked javascript or ads.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Late reply here too. I'm sorry about that.

You can read my comment that I made here in regards to what I think could be causing you problems.

I do take this seriously and will try to find some time to put together a configuration like this for testing, so thanks for sharing.

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