15 ms·
Tell Cloudflare: You're Breaking Tor/VPN/Shared IPs Again
Right now if anyone tries to load a Cloudflared website over Tor or any "bad" IP, they get a captcha which breaks something like 90% of the time. It seems to only be "under attack mode" websites, by the fact that only a fraction of Cloudflared websites are doing this. We click the checkbox and it just shows a spinning wheel forever. If this is meant to be a block then show an actual block page instead of dodging the issue and wasting everyone's time (I'm sure you already know about the problem). It also breaks when our IP changes now, which is a regression from the other 8 years you blocked Tor for (so please fix that too, don't just fix one thing and leave a new bug).
I searched "list of sites behind cloudflare" and got hunter.io which exhibits this behavior.
The catpcha page now contains a mix of embarrassingly wrong statements and nonsense propaganda like:
- "Checking if the site connection is secure"
- "Did you know the first botnet in 2003 took over 500-1000 devices? Today, botnets take over millions of devices at once"
- "Did you know 43% of cyber attacks target small businesses?"
- "Did you know bots historically made up nearly 40% of all Internet traffic?"
Stop doing that. Who actually believes botnets only had thousands of nodes in 2003?
You (just you) are making the web a dystopia. There was not rampant blocking before Cloudflare, and even during Cloudflare nobody else does this except a small amount of copycat companies, which is still your fault for spreading the bad idea.
You broke Tor between 2010-2018, but it was far worse: Everyone had to solve a captcha per session per website to visit any Cloudflared website at all. We had to solve two per site per session if they had a separate "cdn" subdomain. And you used Recaptcha, which gave unreadable captchas to Tor. Every single captcha had ambiguous text, which you have a 1/4 chance of guessing right (since they typically had at least 2 ambiguous characters). Recaptcha itself also just blocks some IPs (!!). When it wasn't blocking our IP it would still also often say "connection failed" in a popup for what was obviously no real reason while loading or submitting the captcha. Those are just the main issues with Recaptcha, which was and still is horse shit. This is still your fault though because even with a normal captcha instead of Recaptcha, we'd still have to solve 50 captchas just for say a 1 hour research session. All of the behavior explained here happened regardless of whether we used Tor Browser or any other browser.
And then you "fixed" this in 2018 by just skipping the captcha for anyone that emulated Tor Browser. This is terrible flawed protocol implementation and was documented as harmful and stupid in early RFCs, and I have no idea why HNers put up with it considering only shit companies like Microsoft would do this back in the early 2000s. There was absolutely no correlation of how easy it was to hack a site and whether they had a WAF. Nobody uses Cloudflare for the WAF or anti scraping, so please stop pretending there is any dilemma here, just remove it by default and let the idiots who like that stuff enable it if they want it. Then we'd be back to the 2003-2010 web where only a few unhinged web admins mass blocked IPs.
JUST STOP MASS BLOCKING. You literally have no reason to. The only reason would be if you have an agenda to stop people from anonymously accessing information.
- tmpburning 4y ago[dead]
- jmclnx 4y ago> JUST STOP MASS BLOCKING. You literally have no reason to. The only reason would be if you have an agenda to stop people from anonymously accessing information This is my take, who cares were people accessing the site is from. The only places that should kind-of care are Banking Sites.
- tentacleuno 4y agoI wouldn't login to my bank via Tor. So far though, both the financial websites I use don't care that I use a VPN.
- uconnectlol 4y agoI logged into my bank through Tor for 10 years no problem. Until they blocked it.
- officialjunk 4y agoi've never used tor, but wouldn't it be better operational security to not use tor for banking to avoid being fingerprinted/identified, if one cared about remaining anonymous?
- teawrecks 4y agoFingerprinted/ID'ed by who? There is effectively no difference in security with tor when it comes to the end points. The main purpose of tor is to prevent anyone in the middle from getting any information.
- sweetjuly 4y agoAll they'll get is a strong ID on your exit node. That node is, of course, shared by a ton of people and so trying to pick apart the traffic is going to be very difficult