One of the things I really appreciated when I worked for Mozilla was their legal department's policy that Mozilla employees not sign over-reaching NDAs [0]. Some of the points they insisted on:
* It has to be limited in scope. It cannot just be "everything we give or tell you is confidential information."
* Confidential information has to be clearly marked or indicated.
* It has to be limited in duration. Not, "You are required to take this information to your grave."
If your project does not have lawyers backing you up, you might not know to ask for these things, or might not think you have the negotiating leverage to get them. But I think they make a real difference to a developer working on an open-source project, and I encourage anyone presented with an NDA to insist on them.
Michael Tremante here. I'd like to address some points openly as I'm personally mentioned in the forum. I reached out to the Pale Moon community on behalf of the team to try and resolve the issue with the Pale Moon browser.
- We sent our standard NDA to speed things up. I explicitly said in the message that it may not be required, but in the interest of moving fast we sent it to them so they could review it just in case
- We are committed to making our challenge system work on all browsers by clearly documenting what APIs need to be supported. For example, part of the issue with Pale Moon, is that it does not support CSPs correctly
- Notwithstanding the above, to resolve the issue quickly we are willing to lower some of our checks if and only if, we find the right approach. Of course this would introduce some security issues that bot developers may quickly leverage
- Contrary to what many have said in this forum, our challenge has no logic that relies on the user agent strings. We rely on browser APIs. We don't have any special checks for any specific browser
- To address this longer term, we are discussing internally a program for browser developers to have a direct channel with our team and we hope to have something to share soon with the browser developer community
Just because some evil is a standard policy does not mean it's excused. The sending of broad NDA just to address a problem with Cloudflare itself is more throwing it's weight around again ala,
"I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. … It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company. ... Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power." - Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
Requiring every web browser to support every bleeding edge feature to be allowed to access websites is not the status quo of how the web has been for it's entire existence. Promoting this radical ideology as status quo is also seemingly shady but perhaps the above corporate rep is just in so deep so long they've forgotten they're underwater. Corporate use cases are not the entire web's use cases. And as a monopoly like cloudflare they have to take such things into consideration.
But they keep forgetting. And they keep hurting people. The simple solution is for them to make cloudflare defaults much less dependent on bleeding edge features for the captchas. If sites need those extra levels of insulation from the bandwidth/cpu-time to fulfill http requests it should be opt-in. Not opt-out.
The solution for the rest of us humans that can no longer read bills on congress.gov or play the nationstates.net game we've been playing the last 20 years is to contact the site owners when we get blocked by cloudflare and hopefully have them add a whitelist entry manually. It's important to show them through tedious whitelist mantainence that cloudflare is no longer doing it's job.
There is no such intent from us to throw around our weight. The team is challenged with a very hard task of balancing protecting web assets VS ensuring that those same assets remain accessible to everyone. It's not an easy problem.
The features you refer to are not bleeding edge, and not only that, they are security features. We are still discussing internally but I hope we can publish soon the details so that point can be addressed.
Final but not last, this only affects our challenge system, which is never issued by us as a blanket action across Internet traffic. It's normally a configuration a Cloudflare user implements in response to an ongoing issue they have (like a bot problem). We do report challenge pass rates and error rates but we can certainly always improve that feedback loop.
If you can't see how CF is throwing around it's weight I can only assume the traditional Upton Sinclair quote applies.
The vast majority of sites operate without a CSP (only 7% of Alexa’s top 1 million sites have a valid CSP circa 2020, and in the long tail it's much, much less). It's a niche thing and the type of use you do at cloudflare can be considered bleeding edge in practice by comparing to the rest of the web. For most sites on the web CSP is more of a burden than a benefit.
The crashing and freezing of many browsers only affects your challenge system. Your blocking that's impossible to pass with many browsers is either default or so commonly set it doesn't make a difference. You should try using an non-chrome/non-safari/non-edge/non-firefox browser through a non-residential IP sometime and see how many places you can no longer access because of your employer.
"Contrary to what many have said in this forum, our challenge has no logic that relies on the user agent strings."
If that were true then it would be possible to satisfy the challlenge without sending a user agent header. But omitting this header will result in blocking. Perhaps the user agent string is being collected for other commercial purposes, e.g., as part of a "fingerprint" used to support a CDN/cybersecurity services business.
We expect the user agent string to be present, that yes. We don't have any logic based on it's contents though (except blocking known bad ones) and we don't have any exceptions for the major browsers.
These contradict. Blocking "bad ones" is logic. Also such claims are disingenuous without defining what "bad ones" are... For all I know (and it surely seems so), you could be defining "bad ones" is "anything that is not 'the latest chrome without adblock and with javascript on'"
Yes, and I’m pointing out that phrasing it that way makes the whole statement meaningless. Eg: I don’t eat foods except some that I consider edible. I don’t kill kittens, except those I think are evil. See how it works? Adding a vague “except” to an absolute-sounding sentence destroys its very meaning
According to a company representative, CF requires a UA header, checks the contents of the UA header and blocks access to websites based on strings contained in the UA header that match "known bad ones" as part of its commercial "bot protection" services.
None of this implies that using a string that is a "known good one" is enough to satisfy the CF challenge. But CF still requires people to send CF a UA string. Right.
It seems that CF wants to mandate exclusive use of certain clients to access the web, "as a service", presumably ones that are preferred by so-called "tech" companies that sell advertising services.
Imagine if this type of restriction was imposed on CF itself and some third party blocked CF's access to the www unless CF used the software chosen by the third party or the third party's clients.
The www is supposed to be a means of accessing public information. From what I've seen many if not most of these websites blocked by CF "bot protection" are in fact comprised of public information.
We speak of an arms race between cloudflare and (bad actors) that results in unintended consequences for end users and independent browsers ... and we need to stop.
There is an arms race: between end users and cloudflare.
The fact that a human chimes in on a HN discussion carries no information.
We continuously scrape a sizable number of ecommerce sites and have had no trouble whatsoever bypassing CloudFlare's antibot technologies.
CloudFlare representatives often defend user hostile behaviour with the justification that it is necessary to stop bad actors but considering how ineffective cloudflare is at that goal in practice it seems like security theatre.
We’ve worked across a number of equivalent anti-bot technologies and Cloudflare _is_ the AWS of 2016. Kasada, Akamai are great alternatives and are certainly more suitable to some organisations and industries - but by and large, Cloudflare is the most effective option for the majority of organisations.
That being said, this is a rapidly changing field. In my opinion, regardless of where you stand as a business, ensure abstraction from each of these providers is in place where possible - as onboarding and migrating should be table stakes for any project or business onboarding them.
As we’ve seen over the last 3 years, platform providers are turning the revenue dial up on their existing clientele.
It's success as a business aside, at a technical level neither Cloudflare nor its competitors provide any real protection against large scale scraping.
Bypassing it is quite straightforward for most average competency software engineers.
I'm not saying that CloudFlare is any better or worse at this than Akami, Imperva etc, I'm saying that in practice none of these companies provide an effective anti-bot tool, and as far as I can tell, as someone who does a lot of scraping, the entire anti-bot industry is selling a product that simply doesn't work.
In practice they only lock out "good" bots. "Bad" bots have their residential proxy botnets and run real browsers in virtual machines, so there's not much of a signature.
This often suits businesses just fine, since "good" bots are often the ones they want to block. A bot that would transcribe comments from your website to RSS, for example, reduces the ad revenue on your website, so it's bad. But the spammer is posting more comments and they look like legit page views, so you get more ad revenue.
I don't believe that distinction really exists anymore.
These days everyone is using real browsers and residential / mobile proxies, regardless of whether they are a spammer, or a Fortune 500, a retailer doing price comparison of an AI company looking for training data.
Random hackers making a website to RSS bridge aren't using residential / mobile proxies and real browsers in virtual machines. They're doing the simplest thing that works which is curl, then getting frustrated and quitting.
Spammers are doing those things because they get paid to make the spam work.
Every interaction I've ever had with CloudFlare has left me feeling like I needed a bath. The vertical desperately needs some competition but I don't know how that could happen at this point.
Things like Cloudflare are a natural monopoly. They are most useful when they have servers in datacenters worldwide in every possible location. So it takes a lot of capital to start. So competitors are few to none.
Personally, I'd like to see browsers moving away from HTTP for the web, towards something more P2P, so that there is less need for Cloudflare. Something like; look up your site key in DNS, then look up things signed by it in the BitTorrent DHT, and go from there.
We think of the internet as one big flat network, but it's actually a conglomerate of separate networks (interconnected by peering and transit agreements). There are a finite number of networks on the internet. Of those, only some are good CDN locations as you don't need a CDN node on every single network. The number of places where you could possibly ever want a CDN location is finite, with three or four digits.
Cloudflare has a presence in 335 cities - a lot, but not an impossible lot. We're not talking about ten million. Ten million dollars, maybe. (Ten million dollars would be $30k per city - respectable)
How many of Cloudflare's customers even care about all 335 cities? If you're a European business with European customers, you only care about the ~10 mainstream internet exchange sites in Europe (e.g. Frankfurt, London). Cloudflare has 59, but I don't think they need 59. If you want to be a Cloudflare competitor and support European businesses, you only need ~10 physical locations. That's an extremely manageable number.
What you want is at least one peering connection to every major European network, and ideally, a hotline to their NOC or a detailed BGP community agreement, to block attack traffic as close to the source as possible.
I should point out that due to the ongoing collapse of US hegemony, a lot of European institutions would like to reduce their dependence on Cloudflare right now.
It's not a monopoly, there are lots of CDNs. Volunteer run P2P networks are vastly more vulnerable to DDoS. CDNs basically are P2P networks of a kind, they're just run by one organization and use dedicated network links for nodes to talk to each other so you can't disrupt the internal network comms too badly by doing DoS.
And the core issue here is that the site owners want it, so a P2P network that couldn't offer bot protection wouldn't get adopted.
If we went to P2P, how would you get around caching issues/slow propagation of new versions when updates are pushed to a given website? That seems like a dealbreaker unless I’m overlooking something.
Same as in the not-P2P Cloudflare world, get the data from the only node that has a copy of it, which would be the HTTP server or the P2P node run by the website owner.
So CDN with extra steps? In your world Cloudflare or anything like it would be in the best position to make itself indispensable for such a network.
Regular client nodes won’t be the backbone of your P2P network these days since many of them are going to be mobile devices. So you are back to a tiered system where you have nodes which are more suitable for hosting (servers) and most suitable for consumers (clients).
From what I can see, there’s reasonable competitors for CF’s offerings, but extremely limited parallels to their free tier. The free tier is the killer.
Exactly this. If I’m doing something big enough to pay for it, I would almost never choose Cloudflare. But as much as I dislike them, for my small projects there just isn’t an option better than their free tier.
This feels like email all over again. In the early days of email, everyone had their own IMAP server, and it was good. Then spam happened. Slowly it got harder and harder to jump through all the hoops needed to ensure your email was delivered to users of gmail and other large email hosts. Even if you were willing to filter all the spam out from your own inbox, it became practically impossible to get delivered to most other users.
I wonder if we will see something similar happen with browsers now. Cloudflare and other proxies will rely on increasing levels of fingerprinting to sift out scrapers and bots. Already it's not uncommon to get false positives on Linux+Firefox. Maybe if our overlords are feeling particularly benevolent, Firefox might make the cut for browsers allowed to access the vast majority of sites behind CF, but anything smaller will be blocked. Effectively this will kill rolling your own browser.
Interesting analogy. But in the email world, smaller clients are allowed. The banning happens on IP/domain level. So I'm guessing that's where we're going to head towards on the browser side?
The entire premise that "bots" need to be blocked is, in most contexts, just a social hysteria and not coming from actual technical or economic requirements. "Bot" blocking causes far more harm to human persons than would occur if we just lets all agents access public web sites.
- If you don't want traffic don't put up a website on the public web.
- If you don't want comments don't have comments.
- If you don't want your website to be public then don't put it on the public web.
And companies are getting just that from Cloudflare. They are no longer on the public internet. They're putting themselves on the modern AOL: Cloudflare.
Pretty much every story posted to Hacker News related to Cloudflare has some people making excuses for Cloudflare - how they couldn't possibly have the development resources to test, much less "fix" access for less popular browsers, how the supposed good they do outweighs the bad, and therefore the marginalized people should just accept things, et cetera.
It's easy to handwave about how costly / difficult a thing is when you're ignorant, and you're preaching to others who are also ignorant about the subject matter, but people who actually understand programming can read the bug reports, the read about debugging methods and results, about the tests, et cetera, and can deduce when an action really can't be anything but monumental ignorance or, more likely, deliberately chosen. The ignorance of the apologists isn't equal to the actual experience of the people doing the work.
"triggering script hang/out-of-memory issues through what seems to be deliberate behaviour when the script does not pass a collection of Web API checks (since the same behaviour was observed on their "officially supported browsers" as well if the user-agent was spoofed to Pale Moon!)"
I'd love to see how those people try to spin this.
Also, this is a perfect example of how large companies can both try to create the illusion of being open - several high profile Cloudflare people post on this site regularly - yet there's no way to actually communicate with a human who can do more than copy and paste from a script, unless you're a paying customer. No company should get to operate as a gatekeeper for much of the world yet have zero methods of communication unless you pay them.
To be fair (not that they deserve it, and to be clear: I do agree with you 1000%), Cloudflare has been known to push crazy shit to production that breaks MAJOR browsers without seemingly noticing or caring, as in this story of my debugging a change they made which caused sites using one of their features to entirely lock up Safari (as in, the entire browser): https://www.saurik.com/cloudflare.html
> Consequentially, our project is currently losing daily active users, and we're being damaged with our traffic-based income being undermined as a result.
I'd like to know more about this "traffic based income". Does PaleMoon show ads? Or are they saying this somehow affects traffic to their download site?
Apparently there is a lot going in to fingerprinting a browser (Tsl analysis, HTTP headers etc), and changing User Agent string is definitely not enough. By accepting only major browsers, smaller ones are forced to adopt the same standard. Seems it would create a market for standardized bots. The result would be a monoculture of browsers and more advanced standardized bots.
Hope someone from cloudflare chimes in. If even part of this is true I'll make sure to never do business with cloudflare, they sound like a massive liability.
The browser blocking is a massive liability? Wait until you hear about their treatment of shared gateways (both cgnat and tor), hosting ddos operators, and helping protect attempted murders in court... The CF hole goes deep.
If anyone on the Pale Moon forums is reading this, contacting media outlets (suggested in one of the posts) is a good idea. Ars Technica may be a good one to start with (with its focus and readership). Media outlets may also formally contact Cloudflare PR for responses and bring more attention to this within Cloudflare.
Another — not the best of moves — is to email jgc at Cloudflare for his direct attention.
You'd think Cloudflare would be more helpful in order to draw attention away from people increasingly realizing it has too much power over access to the internet.
I'm glad that the developers of Palemoon are standing up for themselves here and decided to double my monthly donation to them in light of this. Even though I haven't used Palemoon in years I'm glad they continue to develop it and want to foster that.
> triggering script hang/out-of-memory issues through what seems to be deliberate behaviour when the script does not pass a collection of Web API checks (since the same behaviour was observed on their "officially supported browsers" as well if the user-agent was spoofed to Pale Moon!).
I think the majority of contributors to that thread are being very reasonable and measured. CF should not be in a position to determine which UAs are viable on the Internet.
> CF should not be in a position to determine which UAs are viable on the Internet
Site operators explicitly subscribe to their DDoS protection service. They're not intercepting random traffic they don't terminate.
How do you propose we solve the bot problem? The Internet is a digital Mos Eisley cantina. The "come one, come all" approach isn't viable in 2025.
What if a server operator decided to block Pale Moon user agents? Is that his right? What about blocking bot user agents? How is that any different?
They are fighting a losing battle. Like running your own SMTP server in 2025 and expecting the big dogs (Google and Microsoft) to accept your mail and play by anyone's rules but their own.
A new account that dismisses, but offers not the slightest bit of technical reasoning. Please point out something that the Palemoon people have said that's incorrect, or that is even exagggerated.
CloudFlare sucks ass, they are the cancer of the modern internet. They block users for no good reasons with their captchas. There's no way to get any feedback. Fuck them. I started to stop visiting the sites that have this idiotic gatekeeping bullshit.
By default the browser checks for available updates, whether for the browser or the add-ons (in the latter case, it's most probable that at least one installed add-on is hosted in the Pale Moon add-ons site). There's also the sync service, and default start page at start.palemoon.org. You can probably gather some stats from those sources.
Since the title mentions the NDA, I have to say that sending an NDA in this situation does not sound malicious to me, it's just bureaucratic incompetence from the legal department. It's the Cloudflare engineers that are being malicious.
That would be believable if they then retracted this demand and worked with PaleMoon in good spirit. This has not transpired. How long can an "oopsie, honest mistake" continue without an apology or a correction before it is obviously not an honest mistake but a slightly veiled "go fuck yourself"?
Are they blaming Cloudflare’s code for triggering a situation that they did not account for thereby causing the browser to crash? Sounds like a browser problem.
Those bugs also exist(ed?) in other browsers, and from what I understand they worked on fixing them, but they still can’t get through CloudFlare’s blocking after fixing the crash.
One of the things I really appreciated when I worked for Mozilla was their legal department's policy that Mozilla employees not sign over-reaching NDAs [0]. Some of the points they insisted on:
* It has to be limited in scope. It cannot just be "everything we give or tell you is confidential information."
* Confidential information has to be clearly marked or indicated.
* It has to be limited in duration. Not, "You are required to take this information to your grave."
If your project does not have lawyers backing you up, you might not know to ask for these things, or might not think you have the negotiating leverage to get them. But I think they make a real difference to a developer working on an open-source project, and I encourage anyone presented with an NDA to insist on them.
[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Legal/Confidential_Information
Michael Tremante here. I'd like to address some points openly as I'm personally mentioned in the forum. I reached out to the Pale Moon community on behalf of the team to try and resolve the issue with the Pale Moon browser.
- We sent our standard NDA to speed things up. I explicitly said in the message that it may not be required, but in the interest of moving fast we sent it to them so they could review it just in case
- We are committed to making our challenge system work on all browsers by clearly documenting what APIs need to be supported. For example, part of the issue with Pale Moon, is that it does not support CSPs correctly
- Notwithstanding the above, to resolve the issue quickly we are willing to lower some of our checks if and only if, we find the right approach. Of course this would introduce some security issues that bot developers may quickly leverage
- Contrary to what many have said in this forum, our challenge has no logic that relies on the user agent strings. We rely on browser APIs. We don't have any special checks for any specific browser
- To address this longer term, we are discussing internally a program for browser developers to have a direct channel with our team and we hope to have something to share soon with the browser developer community
I am happy to answer any constructive questions.
Just because some evil is a standard policy does not mean it's excused. The sending of broad NDA just to address a problem with Cloudflare itself is more throwing it's weight around again ala,
"I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. … It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company. ... Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power." - Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
Requiring every web browser to support every bleeding edge feature to be allowed to access websites is not the status quo of how the web has been for it's entire existence. Promoting this radical ideology as status quo is also seemingly shady but perhaps the above corporate rep is just in so deep so long they've forgotten they're underwater. Corporate use cases are not the entire web's use cases. And as a monopoly like cloudflare they have to take such things into consideration.
But they keep forgetting. And they keep hurting people. The simple solution is for them to make cloudflare defaults much less dependent on bleeding edge features for the captchas. If sites need those extra levels of insulation from the bandwidth/cpu-time to fulfill http requests it should be opt-in. Not opt-out.
The solution for the rest of us humans that can no longer read bills on congress.gov or play the nationstates.net game we've been playing the last 20 years is to contact the site owners when we get blocked by cloudflare and hopefully have them add a whitelist entry manually. It's important to show them through tedious whitelist mantainence that cloudflare is no longer doing it's job.
There is no such intent from us to throw around our weight. The team is challenged with a very hard task of balancing protecting web assets VS ensuring that those same assets remain accessible to everyone. It's not an easy problem.
The features you refer to are not bleeding edge, and not only that, they are security features. We are still discussing internally but I hope we can publish soon the details so that point can be addressed.
Final but not last, this only affects our challenge system, which is never issued by us as a blanket action across Internet traffic. It's normally a configuration a Cloudflare user implements in response to an ongoing issue they have (like a bot problem). We do report challenge pass rates and error rates but we can certainly always improve that feedback loop.
If you can't see how CF is throwing around it's weight I can only assume the traditional Upton Sinclair quote applies.
The vast majority of sites operate without a CSP (only 7% of Alexa’s top 1 million sites have a valid CSP circa 2020, and in the long tail it's much, much less). It's a niche thing and the type of use you do at cloudflare can be considered bleeding edge in practice by comparing to the rest of the web. For most sites on the web CSP is more of a burden than a benefit.
The crashing and freezing of many browsers only affects your challenge system. Your blocking that's impossible to pass with many browsers is either default or so commonly set it doesn't make a difference. You should try using an non-chrome/non-safari/non-edge/non-firefox browser through a non-residential IP sometime and see how many places you can no longer access because of your employer.
"Contrary to what many have said in this forum, our challenge has no logic that relies on the user agent strings."
If that were true then it would be possible to satisfy the challlenge without sending a user agent header. But omitting this header will result in blocking. Perhaps the user agent string is being collected for other commercial purposes, e.g., as part of a "fingerprint" used to support a CDN/cybersecurity services business.
We expect the user agent string to be present, that yes. We don't have any logic based on it's contents though (except blocking known bad ones) and we don't have any exceptions for the major browsers.
No commercial uses around this.
> We don't have any logic based on it's contents
> blocking known bad ones
These contradict. Blocking "bad ones" is logic. Also such claims are disingenuous without defining what "bad ones" are... For all I know (and it surely seems so), you could be defining "bad ones" is "anything that is not 'the latest chrome without adblock and with javascript on'"
that's what the word "except" means that you quoted around.
Yes, and I’m pointing out that phrasing it that way makes the whole statement meaningless. Eg: I don’t eat foods except some that I consider edible. I don’t kill kittens, except those I think are evil. See how it works? Adding a vague “except” to an absolute-sounding sentence destroys its very meaning
Those are different products. BIC prevents requests such as empty UAs or corrupted HTTP requests to pass CF without a challenge.
Turnstile/Challenges per se don't rely on the UA at all.
According to a company representative, CF requires a UA header, checks the contents of the UA header and blocks access to websites based on strings contained in the UA header that match "known bad ones" as part of its commercial "bot protection" services.
None of this implies that using a string that is a "known good one" is enough to satisfy the CF challenge. But CF still requires people to send CF a UA string. Right.
It seems that CF wants to mandate exclusive use of certain clients to access the web, "as a service", presumably ones that are preferred by so-called "tech" companies that sell advertising services.
Imagine if this type of restriction was imposed on CF itself and some third party blocked CF's access to the www unless CF used the software chosen by the third party or the third party's clients.
The www is supposed to be a means of accessing public information. From what I've seen many if not most of these websites blocked by CF "bot protection" are in fact comprised of public information.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
We speak of an arms race between cloudflare and (bad actors) that results in unintended consequences for end users and independent browsers ... and we need to stop.
There is an arms race: between end users and cloudflare.
The fact that a human chimes in on a HN discussion carries no information.
We continuously scrape a sizable number of ecommerce sites and have had no trouble whatsoever bypassing CloudFlare's antibot technologies.
CloudFlare representatives often defend user hostile behaviour with the justification that it is necessary to stop bad actors but considering how ineffective cloudflare is at that goal in practice it seems like security theatre.
I disagree.
We’ve worked across a number of equivalent anti-bot technologies and Cloudflare _is_ the AWS of 2016. Kasada, Akamai are great alternatives and are certainly more suitable to some organisations and industries - but by and large, Cloudflare is the most effective option for the majority of organisations.
That being said, this is a rapidly changing field. In my opinion, regardless of where you stand as a business, ensure abstraction from each of these providers is in place where possible - as onboarding and migrating should be table stakes for any project or business onboarding them.
As we’ve seen over the last 3 years, platform providers are turning the revenue dial up on their existing clientele.
It's success as a business aside, at a technical level neither Cloudflare nor its competitors provide any real protection against large scale scraping.
Bypassing it is quite straightforward for most average competency software engineers.
I'm not saying that CloudFlare is any better or worse at this than Akami, Imperva etc, I'm saying that in practice none of these companies provide an effective anti-bot tool, and as far as I can tell, as someone who does a lot of scraping, the entire anti-bot industry is selling a product that simply doesn't work.
In practice they only lock out "good" bots. "Bad" bots have their residential proxy botnets and run real browsers in virtual machines, so there's not much of a signature.
This often suits businesses just fine, since "good" bots are often the ones they want to block. A bot that would transcribe comments from your website to RSS, for example, reduces the ad revenue on your website, so it's bad. But the spammer is posting more comments and they look like legit page views, so you get more ad revenue.
I don't believe that distinction really exists anymore.
These days everyone is using real browsers and residential / mobile proxies, regardless of whether they are a spammer, or a Fortune 500, a retailer doing price comparison of an AI company looking for training data.
Random hackers making a website to RSS bridge aren't using residential / mobile proxies and real browsers in virtual machines. They're doing the simplest thing that works which is curl, then getting frustrated and quitting.
Spammers are doing those things because they get paid to make the spam work.
Every interaction I've ever had with CloudFlare has left me feeling like I needed a bath. The vertical desperately needs some competition but I don't know how that could happen at this point.
Things like Cloudflare are a natural monopoly. They are most useful when they have servers in datacenters worldwide in every possible location. So it takes a lot of capital to start. So competitors are few to none.
Personally, I'd like to see browsers moving away from HTTP for the web, towards something more P2P, so that there is less need for Cloudflare. Something like; look up your site key in DNS, then look up things signed by it in the BitTorrent DHT, and go from there.
It's nowhere near as much as you think it is.
We think of the internet as one big flat network, but it's actually a conglomerate of separate networks (interconnected by peering and transit agreements). There are a finite number of networks on the internet. Of those, only some are good CDN locations as you don't need a CDN node on every single network. The number of places where you could possibly ever want a CDN location is finite, with three or four digits.
Cloudflare has a presence in 335 cities - a lot, but not an impossible lot. We're not talking about ten million. Ten million dollars, maybe. (Ten million dollars would be $30k per city - respectable)
How many of Cloudflare's customers even care about all 335 cities? If you're a European business with European customers, you only care about the ~10 mainstream internet exchange sites in Europe (e.g. Frankfurt, London). Cloudflare has 59, but I don't think they need 59. If you want to be a Cloudflare competitor and support European businesses, you only need ~10 physical locations. That's an extremely manageable number.
What you want is at least one peering connection to every major European network, and ideally, a hotline to their NOC or a detailed BGP community agreement, to block attack traffic as close to the source as possible.
I should point out that due to the ongoing collapse of US hegemony, a lot of European institutions would like to reduce their dependence on Cloudflare right now.
It's not a monopoly, there are lots of CDNs. Volunteer run P2P networks are vastly more vulnerable to DDoS. CDNs basically are P2P networks of a kind, they're just run by one organization and use dedicated network links for nodes to talk to each other so you can't disrupt the internal network comms too badly by doing DoS.
And the core issue here is that the site owners want it, so a P2P network that couldn't offer bot protection wouldn't get adopted.
If we went to P2P, how would you get around caching issues/slow propagation of new versions when updates are pushed to a given website? That seems like a dealbreaker unless I’m overlooking something.
Same as in the not-P2P Cloudflare world, get the data from the only node that has a copy of it, which would be the HTTP server or the P2P node run by the website owner.
So CDN with extra steps? In your world Cloudflare or anything like it would be in the best position to make itself indispensable for such a network.
Regular client nodes won’t be the backbone of your P2P network these days since many of them are going to be mobile devices. So you are back to a tiered system where you have nodes which are more suitable for hosting (servers) and most suitable for consumers (clients).
Yes, I love Cloudflare’s products, but the way they interact with the community and the internet ecosystem at large leaves a lot to be desired.
Back in a day around ~2014 there were multiple alternatives with meaningful market share. However all of these products
- Lacked free trial
- Had multiple times more expensive price point for the first twee ($2000/mo)
- Where just worse (bad UI, documentation, etc.)
Cloudflare won and grow so big because it was just better product.
> Every interaction I've ever had with CloudFlare has left me feeling like I needed a bath.
And let's not forget they are MITM'm all internet traffic that passes through them, which is a lot of it.
If a company wants to succeed in this space, they have to be killers. Cloudflare is positioning for domination.
From what I can see, there’s reasonable competitors for CF’s offerings, but extremely limited parallels to their free tier. The free tier is the killer.
Exactly this. If I’m doing something big enough to pay for it, I would almost never choose Cloudflare. But as much as I dislike them, for my small projects there just isn’t an option better than their free tier.
Like who?
Akamai or Imperva maybe? No personal experience, but they seem to offer similar suites of WAF/DDoS/CDN products.
What about Workers?
https://fly.io/
This feels like email all over again. In the early days of email, everyone had their own IMAP server, and it was good. Then spam happened. Slowly it got harder and harder to jump through all the hoops needed to ensure your email was delivered to users of gmail and other large email hosts. Even if you were willing to filter all the spam out from your own inbox, it became practically impossible to get delivered to most other users.
I wonder if we will see something similar happen with browsers now. Cloudflare and other proxies will rely on increasing levels of fingerprinting to sift out scrapers and bots. Already it's not uncommon to get false positives on Linux+Firefox. Maybe if our overlords are feeling particularly benevolent, Firefox might make the cut for browsers allowed to access the vast majority of sites behind CF, but anything smaller will be blocked. Effectively this will kill rolling your own browser.
Interesting analogy. But in the email world, smaller clients are allowed. The banning happens on IP/domain level. So I'm guessing that's where we're going to head towards on the browser side?
The entire premise that "bots" need to be blocked is, in most contexts, just a social hysteria and not coming from actual technical or economic requirements. "Bot" blocking causes far more harm to human persons than would occur if we just lets all agents access public web sites.
There are bots that hurt the expected operation of your server, of course:
- those that cause far too much traffic
- (comment) spam bots
- (for some companies) bots from companies that steal data & resell it verbatim
- …?
Whether CloudFlare is actually the best (or even a good) tool to fight all those, I have some doubts…
- If you don't want traffic don't put up a website on the public web.
- If you don't want comments don't have comments.
- If you don't want your website to be public then don't put it on the public web.
And companies are getting just that from Cloudflare. They are no longer on the public internet. They're putting themselves on the modern AOL: Cloudflare.
Pretty much every story posted to Hacker News related to Cloudflare has some people making excuses for Cloudflare - how they couldn't possibly have the development resources to test, much less "fix" access for less popular browsers, how the supposed good they do outweighs the bad, and therefore the marginalized people should just accept things, et cetera.
It's easy to handwave about how costly / difficult a thing is when you're ignorant, and you're preaching to others who are also ignorant about the subject matter, but people who actually understand programming can read the bug reports, the read about debugging methods and results, about the tests, et cetera, and can deduce when an action really can't be anything but monumental ignorance or, more likely, deliberately chosen. The ignorance of the apologists isn't equal to the actual experience of the people doing the work.
"triggering script hang/out-of-memory issues through what seems to be deliberate behaviour when the script does not pass a collection of Web API checks (since the same behaviour was observed on their "officially supported browsers" as well if the user-agent was spoofed to Pale Moon!)"
I'd love to see how those people try to spin this.
Also, this is a perfect example of how large companies can both try to create the illusion of being open - several high profile Cloudflare people post on this site regularly - yet there's no way to actually communicate with a human who can do more than copy and paste from a script, unless you're a paying customer. No company should get to operate as a gatekeeper for much of the world yet have zero methods of communication unless you pay them.
To be fair (not that they deserve it, and to be clear: I do agree with you 1000%), Cloudflare has been known to push crazy shit to production that breaks MAJOR browsers without seemingly noticing or caring, as in this story of my debugging a change they made which caused sites using one of their features to entirely lock up Safari (as in, the entire browser): https://www.saurik.com/cloudflare.html
Testing all (or at least most) browsers should be quite easy to automate…
> Consequentially, our project is currently losing daily active users, and we're being damaged with our traffic-based income being undermined as a result.
I'd like to know more about this "traffic based income". Does PaleMoon show ads? Or are they saying this somehow affects traffic to their download site?
Taking a guess here: they may have funding sources (e.g. default search engine referrals) whose payment scales based on how much traffic they provide.
IIRC that browser had a custom new tab page years ago, so probably they had some kind of revenue from affiliate links
https://archive.is/xa218
Apparently there is a lot going in to fingerprinting a browser (Tsl analysis, HTTP headers etc), and changing User Agent string is definitely not enough. By accepting only major browsers, smaller ones are forced to adopt the same standard. Seems it would create a market for standardized bots. The result would be a monoculture of browsers and more advanced standardized bots.
Hope someone from cloudflare chimes in. If even part of this is true I'll make sure to never do business with cloudflare, they sound like a massive liability.
The browser blocking is a massive liability? Wait until you hear about their treatment of shared gateways (both cgnat and tor), hosting ddos operators, and helping protect attempted murders in court... The CF hole goes deep.
If anyone on the Pale Moon forums is reading this, contacting media outlets (suggested in one of the posts) is a good idea. Ars Technica may be a good one to start with (with its focus and readership). Media outlets may also formally contact Cloudflare PR for responses and bring more attention to this within Cloudflare.
Another — not the best of moves — is to email jgc at Cloudflare for his direct attention.
You'd think Cloudflare would be more helpful in order to draw attention away from people increasingly realizing it has too much power over access to the internet.
I'm glad that the developers of Palemoon are standing up for themselves here and decided to double my monthly donation to them in light of this. Even though I haven't used Palemoon in years I'm glad they continue to develop it and want to foster that.
> triggering script hang/out-of-memory issues through what seems to be deliberate behaviour when the script does not pass a collection of Web API checks (since the same behaviour was observed on their "officially supported browsers" as well if the user-agent was spoofed to Pale Moon!).
This is a federal crime.
Seems like there should be plenty of troubleshooting that could be done without going anywhere near Cloudflare's IP.
Upvoted as it is relevant to everyone that cares about an open web.
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I think the majority of contributors to that thread are being very reasonable and measured. CF should not be in a position to determine which UAs are viable on the Internet.
> CF should not be in a position to determine which UAs are viable on the Internet
Site operators explicitly subscribe to their DDoS protection service. They're not intercepting random traffic they don't terminate.
How do you propose we solve the bot problem? The Internet is a digital Mos Eisley cantina. The "come one, come all" approach isn't viable in 2025.
What if a server operator decided to block Pale Moon user agents? Is that his right? What about blocking bot user agents? How is that any different?
They are fighting a losing battle. Like running your own SMTP server in 2025 and expecting the big dogs (Google and Microsoft) to accept your mail and play by anyone's rules but their own.
Huh? Malicious actors would just use a Chrome user agent. The only people being hurt by such blocking are legitimate Palemoon users.
If your so-called "bot blocking" is nothing more than a string.contains() on the user agent, it's literally less than worthless.
A new account that dismisses, but offers not the slightest bit of technical reasoning. Please point out something that the Palemoon people have said that's incorrect, or that is even exagggerated.
Thank you for your input, Mr Cloudflare CEO
What do you think about the substance though?
CloudFlare sucks ass, they are the cancer of the modern internet. They block users for no good reasons with their captchas. There's no way to get any feedback. Fuck them. I started to stop visiting the sites that have this idiotic gatekeeping bullshit.
CloudFlare, eat shit and die.
> our project is currently losing daily active users
How do you know how many users you have, unless you are actively spying on them?
There might be ways to deduct that from total traffic/referral/… numbers without spying on individual users.
Not unlike how they (roughly) deduct deaths by an epidemic from peaks in deaths compared to averages.
By default the browser checks for available updates, whether for the browser or the add-ons (in the latter case, it's most probable that at least one installed add-on is hosted in the Pale Moon add-ons site). There's also the sync service, and default start page at start.palemoon.org. You can probably gather some stats from those sources.
Since the title mentions the NDA, I have to say that sending an NDA in this situation does not sound malicious to me, it's just bureaucratic incompetence from the legal department. It's the Cloudflare engineers that are being malicious.
That would be believable if they then retracted this demand and worked with PaleMoon in good spirit. This has not transpired. How long can an "oopsie, honest mistake" continue without an apology or a correction before it is obviously not an honest mistake but a slightly veiled "go fuck yourself"?
Are they blaming Cloudflare’s code for triggering a situation that they did not account for thereby causing the browser to crash? Sounds like a browser problem.
Those bugs also exist(ed?) in other browsers, and from what I understand they worked on fixing them, but they still can’t get through CloudFlare’s blocking after fixing the crash.