this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025

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346

Cloudflare blocking Pale Moon and other browsers with smaller user bases (www.theregister.com)

submitted 11 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 107 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

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 ~~monke~~ gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (4 children)

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.

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.
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.
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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Dude, thank you for this context. I was already aware of these considerations but just wanted to thank you for sharing this with everyone. Its participation like this that makes the internet a better place. 🍻

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

That's very kind of you. Thank you for the kind words. 🍻

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Yes, the industry is well aware of this. We do behavioral detection on both sessions and IPs. This is fairly basic.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you for that info, very helpful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

Thank you for reading and considering the information.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

LibreWolf is next, and it's not exactly niche. I'm seeing it more and more, and LW defaults, even dropping resist settings, gets bounced by CloudFlare every time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

Fire dragon here and yeah, sometimes Google won't even let me log in either.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

https://tildeverse.org/

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

So cute :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

It's not much, but it's home. :)

[–] [email protected] 71 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

These bastards haven’t MITMed half the internet for nothing. This isn’t the first time they abuse that either.

I hate that I once fell for it too when I just started out hosting stuff and put it behind their proxy.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 hours ago

What do you use now instead of cloudflare?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

What is MITMed?

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

"Man in the middle". They are used by a lot of web services as a proxy, usually to prevent DDOS attacks.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago

And when Cloudflare is the proxy for a web site, it's Cloudflare that provides the HTTPS connection, meaning that you don't actually have an encrypted channel directly to the site. Cloudflare is the man-in-the-middle eavesdropping on all of your communications with that site. Your bank transactions, your medical records, your personal messages, etc.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

On librewolf, i get blocked. its a firefox fork and still it happens. had to set up a Firefox User Agent plugin.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago

Its kind of funny but thats how user agents have been for a while. It's historically just been browsers pretending to be one another.

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

[–] [email protected] 51 points 10 hours ago

Lol... You gonna browse how daddy told you or you won't get to browse

[–] [email protected] 44 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I would be very interested to know how they plan to resolve these issues with "Ladybird." Using a new engine will likely clash with the FALSE "security measures" of many websites and harm the browsing experience. It’s often said that users should demand respect for web standards, but in the meantime, as usability declines, users will gradually drift away. Firefox learned this lesson the hard way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Servo is another wip web browser, managed by the Linux foundation's European branch. It's a little less far along but is making relatively quick progress now. Apparently discord already mostly works, with sending messages currently being a problem.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago

Pale Moon still exists? Huh

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I just duplicated this. I downloaded Pale Moon and went to https://hear-me.social/ and clicked on "Register". It puts up a Cloudflare "managed challenge" which loops endlessly when using Pale Moon, but not the other browsers I've tried it with, including Zen, another Firefox fork.

It's a problem, for sure.

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

As a staunch Pale Moon user, Cloudflare is just being a bully and I circumvent their nonsense when I need to desperately use a particular site or just don't go to that site anymore if I can do without.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

Greed. I honestly don't know if they're even aware of the problem. Most corporations have cut teams to the bone and I can't see Cloudflare being an exception. The janitor is probably writing detection rules now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I wonder what happens if you use Pale Moon but set the user agent to Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

Another comment suggested that helped with LibreWolf, but that is a closer fork than Pale Moon, so not sure

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

How can I test, if I get blocked? I just started using Waterfox and so far no issues.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

You can go to https://hear-me.social/ and click on the register button. This puts up a Cloudflare managed challenge screen which endlessly loops when using Pale Moon. It would be interesting to see if Waterfox has the same issue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Took a minute and a refresh, but it worked on Ironfox on android.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Works with librewolf.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago

Works fine with Waterfox.

[+] [email protected] -20 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 children)

I just won't use cloudflare, that's fine.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

But everyone else is

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

then I guess they don't value us as much as they should and need to be reminded of their place under the consumers boot.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago

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.

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

That’s a good bit of small business which is already pretty aware of the boot they are under.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Then you won’t browse about 20% of the Internet, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s disproportionately impacting sites you would generally want to browse

I posted to this effect in a Firefox alternatives thread: if you use an alternative low adoption rate FOSS browser you trade increased privacy via less/no data harvesting for decreased privacy via much higher susceptibility to browser fingerprinting by google/meta/etc. doesn’t matter if you resize your windows if your browser reports its one that only 5,000 people use. And something tells me the tech giants have a way around user agent spoofing

And now even if you don’t care about that? Fuck you. Cloudflare locks you out of the modern internet because of course anyone not using chrome or safari is a bot

I have pretty draconian privacy protections on my devices and home network. It makes the internet hostile. Captchas regularly fail and I have to try them many times. Embedded youtube videos always think I am a bot and refuse to play unless I sign in, I get weird interstitial pages with captchas on google search, yandex, etc (kagi and searx don’t so I use searx), etc.

Advertisers have pushed companies to make the internet openly hostile to anyone who wants to maintain privacy. And to be clear google and meta are advertisers first and foremost. Fuck them

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

I have given up hiding from the tracking. Instead flood them with a torrent of bullshit data. AdNauseam, click on all the adverts. If the internet is going to be hostile then I shall be actively malicious to it in response.