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Comment by nothrows | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare is junk. Their entire billion dollar service can't distinguish my (DAILY) GET request to mainstream news sites from bot traffic, nothing they say or do is of any value. I've had the same IP for decades.

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Have you checked your IP address's reputation with a service such as ipqualityscore.com? If cloudflare thinks your traffic is bot traffic, it's likely that there is bot traffic you don't know about coming from your IP, either from a compromised device on your network or a sketchy VPN product.

Also, it doesnt apply to this person if they've had the same IP for years but if your ISP rotates IPs frequently (mine does everytime I reset modem) or you use 5G and CGNAT is being used, its almost a garuntee that your proxy has been labled as having been used by a residential proxy network.

So many people have sketchy TV boxes or whatever other sketchy IOT decice that is a larp for using your network to sell bandwidth to proxy networks.

However, CF is unnecessarily making people on 5G connections from desktops do turnstiles as it looks like a scraper using a mobile proxy. This will become more and more of an issue as more laptops have 5G modems in them. Not sute how this WAF IP fingerprinting model survives widesprear CGNAT. I guess it will be an excuse to more intensly fingerprint us.

>However, CF is unnecessarily making people on 5G connections from desktops do turnstiles as it looks like a scraper using a mobile proxy. This will become more and more of an issue as more laptops have 5G modems in them.

What makes you think this is the cause, rather than something more straightforward like: CGNAT means more users are sharing IPs, and there's a higher chance that the IP pool gets contaminated by bad behavior? Apparently cloudflare tries to detect CGNAT pools and give them more leeway, but at the same time they can't give them unlimited leeway.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/detecting-cgn-to-reduce-collater...

That could be the case, but Im just speaking from my experience I find I get way more turnstiles when using a 5G modem or proxying through my phone. Whatever they're doing, its not reducing collateral damage.

>it's likely that there is bot traffic you don't know about coming from your IP

Maybe from your IP block even. More common since you don't control that.

Google and Cloudflare mark whole ISPs as "sketchy" and there's fuck all you can do about it.

There's one thing: we can try to get every ISP marked as sketchy.

Some people think they're providing value. They do block some bot traffic (at the cost of many many false positives) and I'll bet that they're providing endless amounts of data to one or more three letter agencies. They also provide lots of value to scammers who use cloudflare to protect their phishing and malware pushing webpages from automated systems that would detect/report them while also making sure visitors have JS enabled so their browser exploits work.

It can be worse; they randomly block my uptime monitoring with 4xx and 5xx status codes once in two months or something like that, despite nothing changing.

Elaborate. Are you getting turnstile challenges? Or blocked entirely? Are you using a weird browser configuration or non-mainstream browser? Do you have extensions that lie about your software/hardware configuration?

That could be plausible deniability. I mean, CF is in fact keeping a tab on who is visiting which websites. Between them and Google, these two companies know everything about everyone.

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