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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

What is this crap? I'm running Fedora 14 with Opera 10.63. I guarantee you my computer has no "malware". And if it does, you sure can't detect it from an HTTP request.

Just a guess: I am on a university network shared by lots of humanities majors, many of whom probably browse porn websites on unsecured Windows XP boxes. The company that provides this "service" for Jason sees that many of the computers on this network have been infected by a bot net, and then decides that it's a great idea to block the whole sub net. Now over 5000 people can't read Jason's blog. Is this really effective security? If you want to be really safe, I recommend you block 0.0.0.0/0.

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Sorry - I signed up with cloudflare which promised a faster safer experience for my readers. =( I'll talk to them.

Well, whatever you did worked. Thank you, I enjoyed the article.

Just following up on this - here's how Cloudflare replied. I'm going to set my security levels to low.

Information about how the challenge pages appear can be found here: http://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/DataSources The party could look up their IP to see why the challenge is happening here: http://projecthoneypot.org/search_ip.php

One thing that you can do is set your security settings to low on CloudFlare so only the worst offenders get challenged (attackers, etc.). You can do this by going to settings->CloudFlare settings->Security Level->Change to low.

There will be false positives with data, of course, but there are two options available to challenged visitors: 1. Pass the captcha to gain entry to your site. 2. The site admin can whitelist the ip address of the visitor in their CloudFlare Threat Control Panel, which will (a) override CloudFlare's behavior, and (b) help correct false positives.

Please take the cloudflare off.

I clicked. Got the landing page. Figured you had been hacked. Did not bother going through the captcha. Closed the browser tab.

I am sure I am not unique in this regard. There is far too much content on the web, and not enough time. If the content is not there when I need it, I go somewhere else.

You have basically put up a version of the "free signup to read the rest of the article" ... you see on so many big sites. I cannot even remember when I last completed such a free signup.

The short version, you will lose readers, and just so cloudflare can try and flog me some Windows anti-virus software when I am clearly running linux! Take it off.

It's probably doing something cheap and tacky like checking a DNS blacklist, which you usually get on for "running a proxy" (having ports open, pretty much) or sending spam emails.

Yup, same here with OS X w/ Chrome.

Why are you taking a jab at humanity majors. It seems to me your network admin is at fault here.

If they were IT majors they'd probably be able to browse porn without getting their computers infected, or at least fix their computers if they did get infected. Different people have different areas of expertise. An IT major couldn't write a 2500 word critique on Kant if their life depended on it.

>An IT major couldn't write a 2500 word critique on Kant if their life depended on it.

I can, but that's because I did a philosophy degree before entering CS. At any rate, I still can't believe how many people get viruses from porn. With the proliferation of tube sites, you don't need to download anything. AdBlock takes care of malware-serving ads. You pretty much have to fall for the "this video requires a codec. Click here to download" bullshit. I get that some people can barely google, but it depresses me that there's enough of them to make it worthwhile for people to write viruses.

> You pretty much have to fall for the "this video requires a codec. Click here to download" bullshit.

The less knowledgeable ones fall for the "codec" bit. Those who have been bitten fall for the "your security software needs updating" bit. I've helped plenty of friends and acquaintances, but they're fighting an uphill battle because they don't stay up to date with their knowledge of the new scams.

I even taught a class on this stuff at the library for a while (I was volunteering for the group giving classes, but I created the internet security one on my own). Take it as optimistic or pessimistic if you want, but everything I did was but a drop in the ocean. Still, at least it's my drop.

That wasn't a jab. Specialization exists.

Same here... Really annoying.

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