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Comment by danielheath | Hacker News Reader

Maybe check your network isn't sending web traffic you're not aware of?

I'm running firefox and seeing the normal amount.

Most people are on a CGNAT these days, drowning in captchas is the new normal. You’re at the mercy of one of your neighbors not hosting a botnet from their home computer.

Not even remotely true, I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about. The only time I get captcha'ed is when I sometimes VPN around, or do some custom browser stuff and etc. I'll even say I get captcha'ed less now than maybe 5 years ago.

Just wait until your ISP puts you behind a CGNAT.

Or if you ever need to travel a lot and tether off your phone. Most mobile devices are IPV6 only (via 464XLAT) behind a CGNAT these days.

Again, no clue what you’re talking about. The only time I had to deal with shit was when I was travelling a bit sketchy countries. I get that “Cloudfare is verifying your connection” loading screen from time to time, but there’s no captchas involved.

Super majority of people don’t use VPNs, or rare browsers, or avoid fingerprinting and etc. When you browse like regular you don’t notice the friction. That’s the selling point of companies like CF, because website owners don’t want to lose real traffic.

For better or for worse, CF's fingerprinting and traffic filtering is a lot more in-depth than just IP trend analysis. Kind of by necessity, exactly because of what you mention. So I'd think that's not as big a worry per se.

Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a while, so it's quite a big worry for me.

Maybe I just have to disable all ad blockers and Safari tracking prevention? Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?

> Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a while, so it's quite a big worry for me.

I think I was sufficiently clear that I was specifically talking about CGNAT-caused IP address tainting being an unreasonably emphasized worry, not the worry about their detections overall misfiring. Though I certainly don't hear much about people having issues with it (but then anecdotes are anecdotal).

> Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?

Sounds good, have you tried?

Not sure what's the point of these comically asinine rhetoricals.

Every so often, usually after a firefox update, CF will get into a "I'm convinced your a bot" mode with me. I can get out of it by solving 20 CAPTCHAs.

It's probably just a higher rate of autonomous vehicles needing stop signs and buses identified at that moment, and cognitive bias causes you to only remember when that happens when you recently performed an update. /s

>It's probably just a higher rate of autonomous vehicles needing stop signs and buses identified at that moment

I can't tell whether you're serious but in case you are, this theory immediately falls apart when you realize waymo operates at night but there aren't any night photos.

Thanks for the comment. Lack of seriousness is now appropriately indicated.

My assumption is that CF has something like a SVM that it's feeding a bunch of datapoints into for bot detection. Go over some threshold and you end up in the CAPTCHA jail.

I'm certain the User-Agent is part of it. I know that for certain because a very reliable way I can trigger the CF stuff is this plugin with the wrong browser selected [1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

Maybe you allow tracking and cookies?

I don't, and I rarely have issues with firefox. Private + blockers + VPN causes, expected, issues but otherwise i'm usually fine?

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