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Tell HN: The web is still broken due to Cloudflare
I still can't curl or wget some website as of 2011 with an arbitrary IP address because Cloudflare controls the vast majority of the web and blocks any request that their bullshit firewall doesn't like. If you use Tor or VPN or any other IP that is "bad", all your traffic will be blocked by default to any website that sits behind Cloudflare (as of 2018 you can get around it by emulating a web browser instead of switching to a new untarnished IP[1]).
It's not even just that. If I type a certain word on a website I'll get some stupid Cloudflare security page. Even on fresh IPs on new computer hardware I still see the Cloudflare security page all the time. IT'S JUST BROKEN GARBAGE THAT NEVER WORKED, LIKE WINDOWS UAC.
Don't tell me some bullshit like "serves you right blah blah", or "security theater is good", or bring up the "oh no there are bots on the internet" meme.
This is a red herring. You can't have a protocol and say it can only be accessed by some specific implementation brought to you by IBM^WMicrosoft^WGoogle. You are literally just wrong, and your concern is that you were not able to serve ads to the user and hijack his browser in various ways or profile him. Just get a real job. Broadcast television did not require any of that. There was no way for anyone to know what TV channel you were watching, yet it still existed and was higher quality than the web. Your bullshit practice is not a right, it's a privilege.
Blocking IPs for any reason other than a temporary DDoS measure is simply an invalid practice and you do not know what you're talking about. I see this opinion so much but I'd like to imagine it's just the average lay people getting involved in subjects above their heads as opposed to the main characters but I know it's probably the latter.
1. Before that, you could not access anything at all from Tor Browser without filling out 2 captchas per website (yes two). Yes, that's SEVEN YEARS that they completely broke Tor for. Remember that Cloudflare is the #1 problem for Tor, not the NSA.
If you are okay with Cloudflare doing this shit just get out of my industry, like seriously, it's not even a moral issue, you're just wrong, it serves no purpose, but it's easy to convince laymen with bad arguments like "it stops sql injection", and is just annoying, how did you even pass FizzBuzz or whatever placebo hiring test they have these days. Don't give me any "wah software is toxic" bullshit, software industry is overly polite bunch of vastly overpaid people with sedentary minds and bodies who sit around all day who mostly don't know what they're doing. You are a bad person and deserve to feel bad.
- PaulHoule 3y agoWindows UAC works just fine now. It's not like it was in Windows Vista where a lot of people just ran as administrator all of the time. It's funny because I've yet to have had Cloudflare get in the way of an automation project but it bugs me all the time as an ordinary user. My first case of getting seriously harassed by it though was a few weeks ago when it was blocking my access to archive.today, it wasn't being decent and telling me to buzz off, instead I was in an endless loop of "click on the traffic lights", "click on the motorcycles", ... I think it's because I have been using it a lot because my RSS reader automatically rewrites many URLs to go there. Using the Tor browser I got different results depending on the exit node, sometimes it would just tell me I was banned, often I'd have to fill out one or two CAPTCHAs and I could see the content. After a few weeks the problem cleared up.
- uconnectlol 3y agoArchive.today (or archive.is archive.fo whatever it's supposed to be) has had some messed up Cloudflare config since 2015 or earlier. It's not the default config the rest of Cloudflare websites have. It's not even purely "I am under attack mode" as it often failed in other ways than what a site in IAUAM would behave like. > Windows UAC works just fine now. What the hell how does it work, it just makes a vague popup for doing anything ever and the user has know way to know what he's being asked or whether it's normal. Almost no user will ever do anything other than click through it.
- PaulHoule 3y agoI do a lot of things that don't generate a UAC popup, I find the cases where it appears to be pretty predictable. Arguably it's a problem that you need it to install almost any piece of software so in principle any malicious software at all can do something evil in the installer. That said Windows does have a reasonable model for people installing software just for themselves that some software actually uses.
- uconnectlol 3y ago