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Worst offenders I come across: official government information that needs to be public, placed behind Cloudflare, preventing even their M2M feeds (RSS, Atom, ..

Worst offenders I come across: official government information that needs to be public, placed behind Cloudflare, preventing even their M2M feeds (RSS, Atom, ...) to be accessed

dylan604 1y ago
Is cloudflare providing some sort of login screen? How is that possible? Surely, you're not confusing a CAPTCHA with a login?
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  No logins, but browser fingerprinting, behavior tracking, straight blocking, captchas and other 'verification', even creating bogus honeypots and serving up unrelated generated spam instead of real page content.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    None of that prevents users from getting to the data though so I’m wondering what your point is
    - PeterStuer 1y ago
      The absurdity of e.g. the RSS feeds, specifically created to be consumed programatically, are blocked from being consumed programatically. Note that in 90% of the cases this was unitentional. Just Cloudflare enabeling lazy contracters with overzealous defaults. And as I said before, yes, you can write to get this corrected, and maybe in the next maitainance update next quarter it might get fixed. Until the next cheapest contracter wins the bid, wipes the config to minimize mai tainance, and upu can startall over again. The temaing 10% in case you wonder are malicious public bodies that want to pretend they do comply in making data public, but will do anything to make it as hard as possible to actually get to or consume yhat data. They love not just these blocking shenanigans, but will also hinder human browsing by putting in no translate pragmas, UX anti patterns, publish as poorly scanned PDFs, do not maintain canonical urls and shift things round constantly, remove things entirely "by mistake" even within the statutory period etc. Then there's very rarely (>.5%) activists IT employees on a true 'anti AI' crusade. This is where you encounter the most ridiculous homebrew 'solutions' that will often result in hurting also normal people accessing the site. This to them is just collateral in their rightous war.

Worst offenders I come across: official government information that needs to be public, placed behind Cloudflare, preventing even their M2M feeds (RSS, Atom, ...) to be accessed

dylan604 1y ago

Is cloudflare providing some sort of login screen? How is that possible? Surely, you're not confusing a CAPTCHA with a login?

PeterStuer 1y ago
No logins, but browser fingerprinting, behavior tracking, straight blocking, captchas and other 'verification', even creating bogus honeypots and serving up unrelated generated spam instead of real page content.
- dylan604 1y ago
  None of that prevents users from getting to the data though so I’m wondering what your point is
  - PeterStuer 1y ago
    The absurdity of e.g. the RSS feeds, specifically created to be consumed programatically, are blocked from being consumed programatically. Note that in 90% of the cases this was unitentional. Just Cloudflare enabeling lazy contracters with overzealous defaults. And as I said before, yes, you can write to get this corrected, and maybe in the next maitainance update next quarter it might get fixed. Until the next cheapest contracter wins the bid, wipes the config to minimize mai tainance, and upu can startall over again. The temaing 10% in case you wonder are malicious public bodies that want to pretend they do comply in making data public, but will do anything to make it as hard as possible to actually get to or consume yhat data. They love not just these blocking shenanigans, but will also hinder human browsing by putting in no translate pragmas, UX anti patterns, publish as poorly scanned PDFs, do not maintain canonical urls and shift things round constantly, remove things entirely "by mistake" even within the statutory period etc. Then there's very rarely (>.5%) activists IT employees on a true 'anti AI' crusade. This is where you encounter the most ridiculous homebrew 'solutions' that will often result in hurting also normal people accessing the site. This to them is just collateral in their rightous war.