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Comment by pmdr | Hacker News Reader

> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith.

I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.

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I use firefox and I almost never see cloudflare captchas. I don't think it's the browser that is causing the problem.

I recently saw https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/ on the front-page but then I gave up as that's my daily reality with cloudflare and friends already. I use 3 browsers on linux with Thai IP address because at least one of them is always blocked by cloudflare. Especially if I go work on public wifi I often actually have to hotspot myself to 4g to even get stuff to load.

I've started taking more extreme stance these days of ctrl+w instantly and maybe email the admins if I'm particularly angry that I will not buy whatever they're selling because I simply can't be bothered with their spyware blocking me. Maybe some day people will wisen up on the damage cloudflare is doing to their business.

Determining if traffic is genuine requires the user to completely and totally give up privacy.

I compare Cloudflare to border control. Open up your bag. Answer the questions. Present your papers.

Anecdotally, I'm not. I always use Firefox (or Zen) and get almost no Captchas. Neither at home, nor at work. Not on Windows, not on Linux, not on macOS.

I'm not going to say that Cloadflare isn't doing anything fishy, but if they are, it's probably more complicated.

I am. Try to browse anonymously. On the modern internet you're no longer allowed to do this.

Cloudflare can't determine who you are? No website for you.

> you're no longer allowed to do this

This doesn't resonate with me generally. How are you trying to browse anonymously?

Same experience here. Debian Linux with Firefox or especially using BrowSH, is a depressing experience.

You're bombarded with Cloudflare captchas because bots are heavily scraping the websites you're browsing and they are struggling to stay online by putting in place heavy-handed bot-fighting tactics. Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing.

> Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing

What ridiculous statement.

Or CF could just do better caching, which was their original reason for existence.

CF is not magic, they have limits too. What's the point of serving cached copies to bots while real users experience unavailability?

Unless they're actually dropping the connections with a RST, I wonder how much bots repeatedly hammering at their CAPTCHA pages (which is actually relatively large in comparison to many static sites) costs them, vs. just serving the actual content which could actually be smaller.

The captcha pages are guaranteed to be static while the upstream content could miss the cache at any time.

If you're on a Residential IP, and your IP gets refreshed, like, every day, it's possible that one of the IP has been flagged.

Cannot blame CloudFlare for that; they have an obligation to try protect the users of their CDN.

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