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Whenever one of those Turnstile checkboxes show up I'm unable to get past it. It's been that way on most of my computers for over a year. I check it and it just

by mikae1 3y ago

Whenever one of those Turnstile checkboxes show up I'm unable to get past it. It's been that way on most of my computers for over a year. I check it and it just reloads with a blank checkbox again. It's an eternal loop of death. My Firefox installations are not even Arkenfoxed. I just use couple of privacy oriented add-ons and a few about:config tweaks. Cloudflare verifications are destroying the web.

sneak 3y ago
Not really. Website operators should absolutely be able to refuse service to anyone on any grounds.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Only that most website operators are not in the know about the issues they will cause, if the use cloudflare or any third party hosting that in turn makes use of cloudflare.
- mikae1 3y ago
  Yes. Not sure that these checks are always the result of a conscious choice though. They just come with the Cloudflare package. I wonder what percentage of collateral damage they're expecting. I know I'm not alone. They're saying 15% of people don't even attempt to complete the captchas. I wonder how many false positives are they getting with Turnstile. Hopefully less than 15%…
  - jdright 3y ago
    The thing is, with captchas I can retry 2, 3..5 times before giving up. This thing here just doesn't work and I can't do anything.
- december456 3y ago
  I wonder how many site operators are aware of the underlying issue with leasing your site to CF, how much false positives and false negatives Cloudflare has, and if there are any alternatives.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Yes, really. And the cool thing is that users are able to complain about getting arbitrarily blocked even if it is legal.
paulgb 3y ago
> Cloudflare verifications are destroying the web. This line of thinking assumes that without captchas, things that were captcha-walled would remain but be unprotected. I think the actual counter-factual is that those things would either require a nominal payment or some other harder-to-spoof-at-scale action first. I run a service that provides arbitrary compute (Jupyter notebooks) on demand. Without a captcha, there was a period where it would have been overwhelmed by crypto miners to the point that it wouldn’t be available to anyone else.
- Aachen 3y ago
  Let's start with the low-hanging fruit though. How many people have their personal blog behind cloudflare? A lot of things really don't need it, aside from being told by cloudflare that they need their protection. Generously offering free services that incur costs for the hoster are much harder to solve, no doubt about that. You essentially can't have anonymity because, if you did, any normal user will look indistinguishable from a cryptobro. You'll need to either have them cover the costs or have pseudonymity at best. But in instances where anonymity is fine, I share the experience from the person you're responding to: just to read resources, to browse read-only material like a normal person, cloudflare is a barrier to the open web.
  - paulgb 3y ago
    Yes, I agree with you there. I think having static content be captcha-walled is generally dumb. Arguably cloudflare makes it too easy to do this (I think it’s on by default if you use them for DNS?) so I can see blaming them for it.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > A lot of things really don't need it, aside from being told by cloudflare that they need their protection. Anything that has a dynamic backend of any kind (or, let's be real, even stuff that's static-built) will get relentlessly hounded by hackers the very same second it's online on the Internet. Be it spammers trying to sell you dick enlargement pills or questionable supplements, pedos looking for a place they can use to host their shit, botnet operators looking for good connectivity to abuse in DDoS attacks or whatever, targeted attacks against your site by extortion gangs (very common in business), or (particularly if you're active in the gamer/streamer scene) pseudo-"trolls" that just want to cause you harm for the lulz. The problem is, as I've written multiple times here, that our governments are doing nothing against the bad actors, their ISPs and the countries that allow them to operate. That needs to be fixed, and then we won't have to rely on Cloudflare and friends any more.
usr1106 3y ago
I have no problems with turnstyle on my PCs. However, on my phone I cannot get past it. It's just an endless loop. The phone is an older model for the Indian market and the Firefox lags behind. So what, it's perfectly usable on 90% of the sites I want to visit. (Which excludes everything full of ads) I hate today's wasteful computing à la Android. Edit: The article says there would be a report problem form. I have never seen that.
casenmgreen 3y ago
> Cloudflare verifications are destroying the web. Seconded. At least for me, on Tor. A lot of sites are behind Cloudflare. The other killer problem of course are cookie-consent banners, and the considerable proportion of sites which have taken to emitting full-page modal dialogs the instant you view the site, or after you scroll down, or when you move the pointer upwards to pick another tab. The amount of stuff you have to wade through to get to or use a site has reached the point where casual browsing isn't viable, not with Tor, not for me.
- mattl 3y ago
  Cloudflare exposes Tor as a country that can be blocked, so a website operator could choose to block Tor for their website just as they could block any other country. Are you seeing more blocks than that?
maxgashkov 3y ago
You don't even need Firefox or anything privacy-oriented. These checkboxes were forever hit-or-miss for me on a Chrome with the default settings (!). My ISP is using IPoE tunneling which has a side-effect of a shared IPv4 address among bunch of households and surprise-surprise no one in Cloudflare is aware that countries beyond US exist. At this point I'd honestly take CAPTCHA over this bullshit.
itsTyrion 3y ago
I use AdGuard and CanvasBlocker. Zero problems. Even with a VPN, very solvable captcha at worst.

by mikae1 3y ago

sneak 3y ago

Not really. Website operators should absolutely be able to refuse service to anyone on any grounds.

zelphirkalt 3y ago
Only that most website operators are not in the know about the issues they will cause, if the use cloudflare or any third party hosting that in turn makes use of cloudflare.
mikae1 3y ago
Yes. Not sure that these checks are always the result of a conscious choice though. They just come with the Cloudflare package. I wonder what percentage of collateral damage they're expecting. I know I'm not alone. They're saying 15% of people don't even attempt to complete the captchas. I wonder how many false positives are they getting with Turnstile. Hopefully less than 15%…
- jdright 3y ago
  The thing is, with captchas I can retry 2, 3..5 times before giving up. This thing here just doesn't work and I can't do anything.
december456 3y ago
I wonder how many site operators are aware of the underlying issue with leasing your site to CF, how much false positives and false negatives Cloudflare has, and if there are any alternatives.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Yes, really. And the cool thing is that users are able to complain about getting arbitrarily blocked even if it is legal.

paulgb 3y ago

> Cloudflare verifications are destroying the web. This line of thinking assumes that without captchas, things that were captcha-walled would remain but be unprotected. I think the actual counter-factual is that those things would either require a nominal payment or some other harder-to-spoof-at-scale action first. I run a service that provides arbitrary compute (Jupyter notebooks) on demand. Without a captcha, there was a period where it would have been overwhelmed by crypto miners to the point that it wouldn’t be available to anyone else.

Aachen 3y ago
Let's start with the low-hanging fruit though. How many people have their personal blog behind cloudflare? A lot of things really don't need it, aside from being told by cloudflare that they need their protection. Generously offering free services that incur costs for the hoster are much harder to solve, no doubt about that. You essentially can't have anonymity because, if you did, any normal user will look indistinguishable from a cryptobro. You'll need to either have them cover the costs or have pseudonymity at best. But in instances where anonymity is fine, I share the experience from the person you're responding to: just to read resources, to browse read-only material like a normal person, cloudflare is a barrier to the open web.
- paulgb 3y ago
  Yes, I agree with you there. I think having static content be captcha-walled is generally dumb. Arguably cloudflare makes it too easy to do this (I think it’s on by default if you use them for DNS?) so I can see blaming them for it.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > A lot of things really don't need it, aside from being told by cloudflare that they need their protection. Anything that has a dynamic backend of any kind (or, let's be real, even stuff that's static-built) will get relentlessly hounded by hackers the very same second it's online on the Internet. Be it spammers trying to sell you dick enlargement pills or questionable supplements, pedos looking for a place they can use to host their shit, botnet operators looking for good connectivity to abuse in DDoS attacks or whatever, targeted attacks against your site by extortion gangs (very common in business), or (particularly if you're active in the gamer/streamer scene) pseudo-"trolls" that just want to cause you harm for the lulz. The problem is, as I've written multiple times here, that our governments are doing nothing against the bad actors, their ISPs and the countries that allow them to operate. That needs to be fixed, and then we won't have to rely on Cloudflare and friends any more.

usr1106 3y ago

I have no problems with turnstyle on my PCs. However, on my phone I cannot get past it. It's just an endless loop. The phone is an older model for the Indian market and the Firefox lags behind. So what, it's perfectly usable on 90% of the sites I want to visit. (Which excludes everything full of ads) I hate today's wasteful computing à la Android. Edit: The article says there would be a report problem form. I have never seen that.

casenmgreen 3y ago

> Cloudflare verifications are destroying the web. Seconded. At least for me, on Tor. A lot of sites are behind Cloudflare. The other killer problem of course are cookie-consent banners, and the considerable proportion of sites which have taken to emitting full-page modal dialogs the instant you view the site, or after you scroll down, or when you move the pointer upwards to pick another tab. The amount of stuff you have to wade through to get to or use a site has reached the point where casual browsing isn't viable, not with Tor, not for me.

mattl 3y ago
Cloudflare exposes Tor as a country that can be blocked, so a website operator could choose to block Tor for their website just as they could block any other country. Are you seeing more blocks than that?

maxgashkov 3y ago

You don't even need Firefox or anything privacy-oriented. These checkboxes were forever hit-or-miss for me on a Chrome with the default settings (!). My ISP is using IPoE tunneling which has a side-effect of a shared IPv4 address among bunch of households and surprise-surprise no one in Cloudflare is aware that countries beyond US exist. At this point I'd honestly take CAPTCHA over this bullshit.

itsTyrion 3y ago

I use AdGuard and CanvasBlocker. Zero problems. Even with a VPN, very solvable captcha at worst.