CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) | Hacker News Reader

CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me)

slashgeek.net

26 pointsfarnsworthy6 comments

Similarly, seeing Google's traffic captcha everywhere is ruining the internet for me. I don't want to work for free to classify cars, sign posts, and roads for Google on every site I visit. If you enable that for you site, I'll stop visiting it. It's especially frustrating when they keep changing the images on you and you have to wait like 4-5 seconds before each one loads, and you have to pick like 6-7 of those. Screw everything about that.

For months, that Google classifier captcha was incompatible with iOS Safari, just kept offering infinite rounds.

I realize the odds of a Googler experiencing this are nil thanks to developer employment policies requiring Chrome (ahem), but still surprising this persisted from introduction until just recently.

Out if the office I’m a happy iPad Pro “What’s a computer?” user, so this broke the web. But finally seems to have been fixed a couple months ago.

Lesson here is don’t start all your user stories with “As a mono-culture developer...” Users do exist that prefer the battery-life and privacy preserving Safari browser.

I run into this too. Because I have Comcast as an ISP and they engage in malicious man in the middle attacks on their users I use socks 5 proxies to remote VPS for all my browsing.

That means I end up in IP blocks that get blocked by many services or presented with captchas.

Additionally, both Cloudflare and Google are trying to set up caching services to prevent people from ever leaving their network in the form of AMP.

Two questions come to mind about the author. First, does he have cookies disabled? Because disabling cookies will cause loss of the previous captcha result, thus triggering a new challenge. Second, is he sure his customers (or those who have pwned customer boxes) aren’t tainting his IP ranges through malicious activity?

Cloudflare simply can't solve this problem! Google/FB are more suitable because a large of internet has fb/gmail account, some sort of profile mining or behavioural analysis can reduce captchas. In comparison, i rarely come across Google's recaptcha while i am logged into google services.

I seem to encounter the opposite problem. Cloudflare never puts up a captcha for me, while Google presents me with a captcha >50% of the time. This is regardless of whether I'm logged in to my personal or enterprise Google account, essentially extracting free labor out of paying users.

From my rough observation, it seems Cloudflare weighs IP country heavily, while Google seems to weigh OS and browser combinations more (pretty much all the Linux users at my work hit Google captchas frequently, while Mac/win users never see them).

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