> I temporarily disabled extensions. I opened a private browsing window.
FYI When using Chrome, incognito window carries a lot of baggage. For issues like this use Guest profile as it doesn't include extensions, caches, storage, etc. Optionally do a Google search first to seed it with cookies.
This is a bit tangential to the author's point but it does seem to indicate that IPv6 is mostly pointless for human users for exactly this reason.
Since it's so much easier to hide behind a new unique address, compared to IPv4, that any service such as Cloudflare would need to be extremely aggressive in blocking to meet their internal metrics and customer advertised minimum thresholds.
So much so that it actually costs more to use IPv6 then sticking with IPv4.
I imagine the scenario described by the author would become more and more common as time goes on as more of the world's internet users becomes harder to distinguish.
You're basically saying this behavior is acceptable and should be considered normal and should be expected to become the norm.
If you think IPv6 is mostly pointless, I think you're unaware of the fact that a significant majority of phones already use IPv6 most of the time they're on cellular.
> You're basically saying this behavior is acceptable and should be considered normal and should be expected to become the norm.
If you think IPv6 is mostly pointless, I think you're unaware of the fact that a significant majority of phones already use IPv6 most of the time they're on cellular.
Can you point to where I suggested that? Or did you misread the comment?
'johnklos' did not quote a single word from anyone in the comment I linked, nor a single word from my original comment you linked, let alone an entire phrase, and that was the only response he made from what I can see.
Are you confusing him with a different HN user?
You don't have to believe me, it's accessible to every passing reader right there in the comment chain...
he wrote: "If you think IPv6 is mostly pointless, I think you're unaware of the fact that a significant majority of phones already use IPv6 most of the time they're on cellular" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051011)
As you so helpfully put it, "You don't have to believe me, it's accessible to every passing reader right there in the comment chain..." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37056142)
Feel free to continue to deny what you wrote, how he responded, and me repeatedly showing you where quotes your words if you want - no one stop you from ignoring your own words (eventhough they're right there on display for all) ...but he used your own words in response to your own comment :)
There's no sign of 'johnklos' quoting me as you claim. It literally appears in his own words, and he even wrote it in a manner that could not possibly be confused with my style of writing. Just check my recent comment history?
Frankly, it's just impossible for there to be a 17 word phrase in that comment that can be interpreted as a quotation, even by a teenager who only started learning English.
And in any case, you are free to contact dang, or any other HN user you trust, and ask them to double check whether such a thing occurred.
You can also review HN norms, other examples of HN users quoting each other and explicitly acknowledging it, the popular dictionary definitions of 'quote', etc...
Since your HN account is nearly 11 years old I'm fairly confident you know various methods to verify these things to a reasonable degree of certainty.
Since presumably your a different person from 'warrenm', though with some degree of uncertainty due to the pseudonym, why lower your account's built up credibility with obvious low-effort trolling?
'warrenm' clearly needs some help with resolving confusion regarding HN norms, or something along those lines, not piling on and exploiting the odd comment chain at his expense.
thanks for the laughs - anyone who can straightfacedly deny what they wrote, and people referencing it such an obvious manner that you still deny must be in it for the humor value
Like I said, contact dang, or any other HN user you trust, and ask for their opinion on this 'gaslighting', on the meaning of quoting another HN user, that you believe to be happening.
If they confirm your view then post it here, because I think many passing readers would be curious in seeing it too.
Last time I checked when I hotspotted my T-Mobile (US) phone, hotspot clients got only an IPv6 address, with 6to4 [edit: no, NAT64] translation used to reach IPv4 addresses.
This breaks OpenVPN, which insists on both endpoints being one or the other.
> Last time I checked when I hotspotted my T-Mobile (US) phone, hotspot clients got only an IPv6 address, with 6to4 [edit: no, NAT64] translation used to reach IPv4 addresses.
You would have the same problem without IPv6 - your phone doesn't have a spare IPv4 address to give out, it would have to give you some kind of internal-only address and then NAT it when talking to the public internet.
> This breaks OpenVPN, which insists on both endpoints being one or the other.
That seems unlikely (also why would your server not have a v6 address?). You can't connect to IPv4 addresses by IP because you don't have an IPv4 connection, but connecting to your server by hostname or by v4-address-embedded-in-v6-address should work.
IPv6 doesn't allow you to easily get a new completely random address. You get a subnet allocated by your ISP, and you can use any address within that subnet. Rather than blocking a single IPv6 address, a service like Cloudflare can just block the entire IPv6 subnet prefix and get the same result as blocking an IPv4 address.
> any service such as Cloudflare would need to be extremely aggressive in blocking
Cloudflare needs an algorithm to deduce the IPv6 prefix size controlled by a given entity, but the details of that algorithm are not obvious. You are jumping to the conclusion that they must be doing a bad job because the problem is challenging.
IPv4 abuse detection is also challenging because of (e.g.) the prevalence of CGNAT with multiple users sharing an IP address.
Which problem is harder? Which solution is better? I don't know, without a lot of proprietary data and analysis.
I would imagine they have a list of the default / max DHCPv6 blocks that ISPs hand out. They are generally public knowledge so it would be easy for them to say Comcast hands out /56 so when blocking they block at that level for the ASN.
It probably makes more sense to derive that information from measurements. There are a lot of ISPs in the world, and allocation policies can change, even if you manage to find a person who knows what they are.
I've been getting stuck in the “browser integrity check” loop a lot on firefox lately. Not an issue in chrome, not using a vpn, etc. I assume it is some combination of extensions and/or settings in firefox.
I also have maxed out anti fingerprinting etc on FF, so it comes with the territory. I have to slowly enable JS on some sites to see if the loop will break, or i just navigate away.
I use all browsers except chrome, but i only navigate the web with FF
Their scope is the same [0], both in terms of stated intent as well as what kind of things they could be used to attest. The only significant differences are that one is already deployed in prod while one isn't, one got a marketing blitz while the other didn't, and that they're done by different companies.
There are no vast technical differences, only incredibly subtle ones.
> The next day, I tried accessing a web page internal to my company… […] I couldn’t get past a security check page because of issues in Cloudflare’s software. […] The silliness of it all is that I was on my work device the whole time, which was behind my workplace VPN.
This seems more like an "IT department gone mad" problem than a Cloudflare problem. I'm surprised they'd rather switch to Chrome than submit a support ticket.
Having used passkeys for a month+ now via macOS/iOS/1Password betas, I don't understand how they're related or the author's concerns. Couldn't you just replace "passkey" with "password" in all of their questions?
Passkeys have optional attestation payloads, which is basically what WEI is doing. Google in particular doesn't recommend requiring attestation except in corporate-security scenarios, but the fear is that banking and media sites will require attestation anyway, which locks users into whatever attestation mechanisms supported by the server; so basically Google, Apple and Microsoft.
Yeah, unfortunately the point of passkeys is to replace multi-factor authentication. Usually you have a username+password as the primary factor, and a secret that's hard to copy and replay as a second factor (TOTP, non-resident WebAuthn credential/FIDO, SMS code). Passkeys replace the primary factor with a signed challenge, but the second factor is up to the authenticator (such as biometrics). WebAuthn relying parties verify that the authenticator is locking the primary factor behind the second factor, and they do that with attestation.
Does Microsoft have much control over Windows Hello's key attestation? It's not clear to me how they could pull that off, other than just relying on TPM attestations which are easy to obtain as long as you can buy a TPM that works with your motherboard.
Any time a large portion of internet traffic is controlled by a single source it brings problems like this with it. All cloudflare has to do is arbitrarily decide who and who can't use the internet and effectively their word becomes law. Like most things it starts with an innocent premise (e.g. "an easy way to stop bad actors") and ends up extended to any number of arbitrary things. Worse, the argument from privacy advocates rings hollow because defending privacy means you have to allow Bad People (TM). The average drooler using the internet cannot understand the nuance. Even in the most innocent of cases, a bad commit getting merged, can bring down the internet. It has happened before with Cloudflare.
Companies like Cloudflare, Google, Meta, etc are the reason anti-trust law exists. Unfortunately, it appears there is no one with any power that is willing to use the laws for their purpose. The internet in 20 years will be nothing like we've seen before. That's not a good thing.
But cloudflare references robots.txt a lot ( which i mentioned before => to respect robots.txt)
Additionally, they solve the authentication problem here. As a website owner that got bad crawlers ( that copied user agents), i just whitelisted Google's IP's and blocked all the other crawlers.
It seems that cloudflare is actually fixing this problem and making competition for Google possible here.
I recall an article that Bing actually circumvented robots.txt a bit, because site owners were only allowing Google and blocked all the rest => Bing. Which gave Google an unfair advantage ( searched for it, couldn't find it)
Hah, you know, most crawlers were fine. The only one that actively DDOSed websites was fucking Yandex. It doesn't respect robots.txt and it will actively fight against any rate limits by spawning connections on new IPs the moment one is blocked
Same, and when more than half your links are dynamic search results, it can pile on and really bring things to a crawl. I worked on a fairly popular auto classifieds website, and more than 90% of traffic was various scrapers, and some were definitely a burden. Worse, is that it doesn't show up in analytics as it's not running client-js... Ironically equally bad was when bing started scraping with JS and it skewed google analytics.
If all we had to deal with were the users, wouldn't need nearly the spend on the site. Started manually blocking some of the worst offenders.
> Had a lot of spammers with Russian language. Implemented expanding xml-bombs, Google Captcha, hidden input fields and a couple of other things against bots.
But the block on the russian language was most effective ( and since I was dogfooding it, I didn't see the harm at the time. But it's out of scope at this very moment, yes).
It seems like a lot of people are pretending that because there's a contractual relationship between Cloudflare and many websites, that Cloudflare can't cause outsized harms to other parties.
It really sucks for a third party to claim you're a bot and as a result you lose access to resources. And the potential for harm is only increasing.
Worse still, the false positive rate appears unacceptably high (look at all the people here with substantial issues) and there's no recourse unless you get a highly voted thread on hacker news.
Every blocked request is logged with the corresponding rule. I’ve had multiple times where someone complained about being blocked and didn’t realize that they had malware on their PC.
> the large DDOS your ISP can handle for you if you are willing to pay for it
That's exactly what people are paying Cloudflare for, because contrary to your local ISP they are actually competent at blocking a DDOS attack.
People use services like Cloudflare exactly because they don't want to spend a fortune on complex infrastructure just to deal with abuse. Even a mostly-static page running on a reasonably-specced server can easily be overwhelmed by an attack. Why spend $1000 / month on hardware when you can spend $100 / month on Cloudflare's protection?
> That's exactly what people are paying Cloudflare for
Cloudflare actually provides this service for free (for simple use cases at least).
I don't know how to come down on this issue. On one hand, I am against the centralization of cloudflare and the risks that come with it.
On the other hand, cloudflare allows almost anyone to set up a simple website and serve it to large numbers of people with very little resources/cost and advanced protection from DDOS attacks.
Similar mindset... also really intrigued with their developer tools as well. Workers, pages, D1, KV, etc. I was playing with a static site generator that deploys directly to a Cloudflare Pages setup, and it's lighning fast everywhere.
They [effectively] do prevent you from moving - they're guilty of vendor lock-in and running a passive, public man-in-the-middle attack platform (how many folks are using Cloudflare for DNS - either directly, or because their ISP is?)
You don’t pay Cloudflare money nor are you customer. The customers are the sites that pay them money to protect their infrastructure. The customers have many choices in CDN/WAF providers and Cloudflare isn’t even largest, Akamai is. Fastest growing CDN is cloudfront. There is healthy competition so why would anti trust laws apply?
Maybe some kind of public nuisance law applies then? Akamai knows their place and doesn't tell me to go pound sand when I'm trying to read somebody's obituary. Incidentally:
I've had the exact same problem for a while. Here are some of the sites I've been unable to access (found by searching for "just a moment" in my browser history):
It's really annoying and Cloudflare is apparently doing nothing to fix it as this has been going on for months if not years. I guess Cloudflare just hates the open web and really wants to enforce Chrome/Chromium/Blink hegemony.
Sadly, the fact a given site works for you or me is no guarantee it works for someone else.
These bot detection systems tend to use all manner of imprecise statistical heuristics and weird fingerprinting.
Perhaps AegirLeet has a graphics card that a popular web scraper pretends to have. Maybe they're in a suspicious timezone. Maybe they've installed a font usually only found on a different operating system. Maybe I'm never blocked because I have an excellent IP reputation, due to regular visits to approved websites.
yeah, starting that that invisible pixels and cookie tracking are way in the past and unless you're using something like tor (and not changing the resolution) then they know who you are. I mean you can still block ads and cookies, but I figure they really do know who you are.
Somehow, it doesn't matter. Like the fact that the author shared non-repudiable identification information with the site also didn't matter and he was classified as a robot anyway.
Yeah, gitlab also blocks me from logging in (via its cloudflare use). It did so even when we paid for it. We no longer do. (for other reasons, but anyway, good riddance)
If only there was some open standard for browsers to verify that a real human is visiting a website, so that website owners wouldn't have to rely on bespoke hacks that only work in chrome.
This would be great if it didn’t have any downsides. China has a system like that: QR code to login everywhere. Everything is linked to your phone number which is given after taking a picture of you and official ID.
We are gonna have to live in a slightly bot-rich society to keep this at bay.
It starts with browser control. And then, ends with needing human verification to ssh into a server that you own. Let’s just build better security.
The problem isn't that the hack only works in Chrome, it's that the system being proposed is inherently terrible regardless of how it's implemented.
There is no such thing as a reliable standard for browsers to verify that users are human that does not harm the open web or threaten user autonomy and accessibility. Every single accessibility standard and user choice about extensions and access is abusable by malicious actors, and every security measure to block abuse of automated scraping or access also blocks valid use cases.
Yes, an open standard that any browser could use to prove human interaction would be great. It's also impossible, of course; all attempts so far lock in specific software or hardware stacks and then pretend that bots can't use those systems, guaranteeing both false negatives and false positives.
It happens to me all the time. And it has been going on for years, but it's getting noticeably worse over time. One way or another you have to pay to use the web, be it costing you loss of access because of your strict privacy settings or paying by giving away your privacy. There's no win here..
Would you be willing to share a rayID you see during one of these looping challenges? I'm the PM for Cloudflare's challenge platform, and we'd love to look into this. RayIDs contain no PII so you can share publicly, or feel free to drop me an email at amartinetti at cloudflare.
We'll also release a reporting mechanism soon, so in the future you can let us know when you see these issues and we can react to them quickly.
Thanks for the examples! Would you be able to share browser and extension information with me? If you don't want to share publicly I've dropped my email in this thread.
Easily can recreate at least the never ending loop by flipping on ublock origin's 3rd party scripts and 3rd party frame blocking, which matches their recommended medium settings.
It would be nice, once the investigation is concluded, if you guys posted the findings on the cloudflare blog. Otherwise it would just feel like a "your call is very important to us, please hold" kind of situation.
I think this is fair! I can promise a public blog update in the next 90 days that includes a progress update on the work we're doing now to reduce real humans being blocked and announcing the feedback form users can click on to easily let us know when there's a problem.
Would you be able to clarify your comment about ublock origin? Cloudflare's challenge page (any captcha provider as well) is a third party script. If I enable these settings I don't see the challenge load as all. Are you enabling ublock origin before entering the challenge or sometime later?
I'd love to get more information from you on this. We don't see any suspicious signals from these attempts, and it looks like they were completed 100% successfully from our perspective. You can drop me an email at amartinetti at cloudflare dot com.
Would you be able to drop me an email at amartinetti at cloudflare dot com with more information on your setup? Some of the signals we're getting from your browser don't seem to match what we'd expect to see. We'd love to better understand what's causing the mismatch so we can improve our logic.
Such a classic and incredibly annoying SaaS PM move. Pinky-promise that you mean well, pretend to be invested in the issue, ask customers to supply evidence and say you'll look into it, followed by radio silence and no follow up whatsoever.
Incidentally, another Cloudflare PM for Pages asked me to do the same thing--I shared my account ID, the request, the problem, timestamps, etc...never heard back ever, request went straight into the void.
A service has injected itself between you and your goal, it's going to periodically impede you from reaching that goal and then lie to you about why, all while making money off of the arrangement.
It's it more the like the owner of the website has intentionally gone out of their way to add a service between you and the website to solve issues the website owner feels are more important then you?
Adammartinetti, I appreciate your interest in doing this, but would love to hear that CF maintains a giant white board in the developer area with the name of every TLS 1.3 web browser known to mankind (the same data on a Group Policy-enforced internal home page would be even better), to reinforce the idea that it takes more than Google to make the world go round.
Personally, I'll add myself to the list of people who think you've created a game you can never win, and thus shouldn't be playing.
Users want to chrome hegemony and don't care about the open web or Firefox. Its the number #1 browser on desktop even though it doesn't come with the OS. Windows comes with edge and macs come with safari. Users have to download Chrome.
Just yesterday I realized that I couldn't log into Paypal on Safari or Firefox, only a Chromium-based browser. We're getting deeper all the time into "this site is best viewed in Google Chrome".
I've been experiencing the PayPal one for a while. Firefox on Windows, Linux or Android. Thankfully the app is still signed in, but I've used credit card for things that I have PayPal money just sitting there ready to spend as I can't get into PayPal on Firefox.
In the UK, you have Single European Payment Area payments. (Despite Brexit, the UK chose to stay within the SEPA zone.) The US didn't have a bank-level national service for consumer to consumer payments until FedNow. Just PayPal, Venmo, etc., which are second-tier services, which becomes an issue when they break.
I have this on Twitch. I can't log in with Firefox + fingerprint resistance. Apparently 2FA isn't strong enough for account protection, I have to let Twitch uniquely identify my computer or it won't let me log in.
If you've ever tried to take apart Cloudflare's various session cookies, MITMed scripts sent for "high integrity" pages (or when in "super bot-fight" mode), etc., you'll have observed that it's basically running a web-worker to heuristically do browser-integrity checking. That is, Cloudflare is trying to run a series of tests that real browsers operated by users pass, but which headless browsers operated by bots will fail.
These range from pretty simple things that check that the browser is actually a browser rather than a raw HTML parser (e.g. "draw an image on a <canvas>, export it to PNG, hash the PNG, compare to an expected result"); to things that check for low-effort headless-browsing techniques like the one you get by default using Puppeteer in a Lambda/Cloud Function (e.g. "do we have the weirder fonts you'd expect to exist on a consumer OS, but which these default batteries-included container images don't bother to bake in"); to things that work really hard to detect the "scent of humanity" through the browser (e.g. "before the user activated the integrity-check prompt, did we record a sequence of 'extraneous' mouse movements and key events that look like a human making individualized mistakes on their way to completing the form, and don't look like a recorded capture of such similar to other ones we've seen recently.")
If you're getting caught in a verification loop, it's because you're using a browser or device or extension that obscures/disables enough of these heuristics that Cloudflare can't get proof positive that you're a person rather than a bot — and so, under whatever settings the site-owner has it set at, it will just keep trying to get that proof, rather than telling you you've failed and been blocked. (Why? Because telling a bot they've failed tells them that they should stop trying something that's not working and instead — in the words of Star Trek technobabble — "rotate their shield frequency" before trying again.)
Heuristics are about optimizing between false positives and false negatives.
Many headless-browser stealth techniques involve rotating between the signatures and reflected metrics of real — but niche and/or ancient — User-Agents. (For some reason, the developers of these stealth systems think that variety beats commonality. Maybe it makes sense if they're specifically trying to overcome Apache mod_security's signature-based UA blocking or something.)
It turns out that when you actually see one of these UAs in your server logs, it's far more (99.99%) likely to be a stealthed bot that picked that UA out of a bag, than it is to be an actual niche/ancient UA.
In the case of the niche UAs, this is a tragedy of the commons.
In the case of the ancient UAs, though, there's no downside to blocking them entirely — because if the traffic is going through Cloudflare at all, then you're already requiring of the client a minimum version of TLS that the real old UAs can't even speak. So the only things actually saying they're that old device — but managing to get through an HTTP request at all — are stealthed bots.
> Many headless-browser stealth techniques involve rotating between the signatures and reflected metrics of real — but niche and/or ancient — User-Agents
I work in this space and we just use fingerprints we collect from actual users over the previous month. The hardest work is: 1) reverse-engineering the javascript of the CAPTCHA/fingerprinting solutions so that we can collect and encapsulate the fingerprints correctly in a way that looks native to cloudflare/recaptcha/etc, and 2) Training AI models to solve the captchas well enough.
Sounds like most of the people you catch are using ancient user-agents. But I doubt most of the people you want to catch are.
I mean, when I'm talking about stealth techniques, I'm not talking about what I'm seeing in my own server logs, but rather about what I find built into various bits of, ahem, "anti-detect software for affiliate marketing" tech that I dredge up from fraud Telegram groups, carding marketplaces, etc. that the attackers I do catch seem to frequent. (Gotta stay five steps ahead!)
I suppose there are verticals where the data is so valuable, and the garden around it so walled-in, that you could build a whole IT business with a custom scraping stack just around extracting that data to then resell it. (I presume that's the business you're in.)
But for most verticals, the "attackers" you'll see in your logs aren't people building a data-broker business, and so aren't building their own secret-sauce anonymity from scratch; rather, they're end-users who want to do an end-run around your rate-limits, commit promotion fraud, etc., and so want to buy anonymity as a product, script-kiddie style. And "anonymity as a product", sold publicly (rather than through high-value contracts) tends to suck. It's script-kiddies buying from script-kiddies, with no real engineering in sight.
> I work in this space and we just use fingerprints we collect from actual users over the previous month.
Are you sure you're not in a citogenesis cycle? How sure are you that some of those "real users" aren't your peers' stealthed bots, who in turn picked up those fingerprints from unknowningly observing other stealthed bots in their logs, who...
> Are you sure you're not in a citogenesis cycle? How sure are you that some of those "real users" aren't your peers' stealthed bots, who in turn picked up those fingerprints from unknowningly observing other stealthed bots in their logs, who...
Doesn't matter, they work (at least when used in combination with high-quality proxy IP's). If they stopped working I'd do something else. We only apply hard science when absolutely needed, otherwise it's mostly wire and duct tape holding things together -- ruthless focus on creating business value.
We definitely only sell this via high-value contracts, so you're probably mostly correct there. Though puppeteer-stealth deserves at least a quiet shout-out for not completely sucking.
That said, we do pay attention to a lot of the research in the field, even if we only apply the absolute bare minimum needed to create business value. Eric Wustrow[0] at UC Boulder does really, really good work in an adjacent space, and we've found some his papers/software to be helpful, as well as those of some of the colleagues he works most closely with. I don't think he'd love our applications of his research, but our technological needs dovetail well with the needs of the anti-censorship research that he works on.
If you were interested in the degree of "citogenesis", I think that's something that academic researchers like Wustrow et. al would be very well-positioned to investigate. Highly recommend any of their papers, they make front page of HN surprisingly often.
While I'm inclined to agree, it's an old rule-of-thumb to give a potential attacker as little information as possible so they have to do the legwork to get un-broken.
(I yearn for a world where auth challenge failures give proper error messages so I can figure out why my regular, human-used authentication channels aren't working).
Keep in mind that a bot will be picking some permutation of its stock library of UA+metrics info, and generating truly-random values for other more continuously-valued parameters (e.g. timing between actions), to try to find a combination that satisfies a backend integrity-check.
A "try again" just means "you haven't succeeded yet." If that's all you get, you're getting zero bits of new information — so you can't do anything other than to assume it was your timing that looked weird, and keep trying. (And you might be dealing with even more noise, e.g. trying to have the bot calibrate itself toward a very low human-tuned request rate limit, where above-rate-limit responses look no different than integrity-fail "try again" responses.)
Suddenly getting a (maybe permanent) hard-fail, meanwhile, means that you said something the integrity-checker really didn't like.
Presuming you have a lot of IP addresses to send requests from, you can then do many experiments to bisect the difference between a hard-fail and soft-fail, and use that to blacklist values from your UA+metrics library. It's free entropy!
Cloudflare is a huge part of the internet. Often they won't respond and it appears that for whatever reason, their IP range is blocked in Egypt.
We probably get 10 support emails per week. I contacted Cloudflare and they simply said there is nothing they can do.
If you don’t want to stop using CloudFlare or need a temporary solution ask your users from Egypt to use VPN- many already do as they come across similar problems for other services
Egypt do block VPNs in much more aggressive way than Cloudflare. Also this is my first time to hear that cloudflare is blocked in Egypt. People will even complain that they cannot connect to their cooperate VPNs.
Blocking cloudflare ip addresses means that half of the internet wouldn't be accessible from Egypt. its closw to blocking port 443 because some people use DNS over https.
Have someone in Egypt look at our site. Its been blocked for about 3 months.
Apparently there is a pool of IP's that Cloudflare use for their CDN and some of them are blocked in Egypt. If you are unlucky enough to be one of the websites that is using that IP, it's blocked. Apparently they rotate them, but I haven't seen it yet, so chances are, when they do rotate them, more will be blocked.
I'm surprised to hear that. I actually used Cloudflare Tunnel to connect to a corporate intranet about 8 months ago while in Egypt, not sure if things have changed though.
I use Firefox (stable and dev) and Waterfox, and Cloudflare doesn't block me. My settings are close to the defaults though, I don't enable things like privacy.resistFingerprinting.
For a while I did notice that when using certain IP blocks, they would show me more captchas when using Firefox than when using Chrome, but I haven't had that problem in a while.
It's also annoying how that check page ends up breaking page reload in Firefox. When Cloudflare redirects you back to the page it will happen via POST. This initial POST gets captured by Cloudflare, but if you reload the page that POST will go to page itself and there's pretty good chance it doesn't know what to do with that and just shows error.
The only fix is to navigate back to page somehow, either by going to address bar and pressing enter (to navigate there again instead of reloading) or finding some link that points you back to the page.
I wouldn't be surprised if those POSTs will end up banning you from some website since they "know" you shouldn't POSTing to that page so clearly you are evil bot trying to hack them.
I was going to assume that the corp VPN is the reason as maybe someone is abusing that connection for something else and it’s getting flagged, but the fact that the site worked using chrome says otherwise.
Will using chromium for such cases work while having Firefox for the rest of sites?
And what’s cloudflare alternative that provides similar services for free including traffic analysis?
This would then require Cloudflare to request a client certificate. This is great for securing websites using corporate identity that is derived from AD certs for example to make sure the device being used has a valid cert on it.
Alongside MDM for example forcing the certificate to have a short lifespan (my $CORP uses 7 days) you can validate that the device has the correct security posture to access the resources.
If for example I let my device not update the version of macOS often enough my cert expires and I can't access internal resources until I update my OS and MDM software checks that and provisions me a new device certificate.
I cannot access flyertalk.com, which hosts lot of useful airline content from any IP from my country.
I tried reaching out via email as mentioned in the error page and admin does even have a valid email posted anywhere.
I know cloudflare is not to blame here, but they provide way easy access to blocking to bad admins.
The big problem I have with Cloudflare's integrity check is that all the spam domains use a fake version which mimics it, and tries to trick you into completing a captcha.
This has been my experience for a handful of years but of course it's getting worse. In the past I'd just be getting blocked from access commercial websites or applications and things I didn't really need. But in the last few years many scientific publishers have put all their content behind cloudflare walls. Pretty much my only hope of being able to read a paper these days is that it came out long enough ago to be on sci-hub or they published the pre-print on arxiv/bioarxiv/etc. Once arxiv goes behind a cloudflare I don't know what I'll do.
Hi there, I'm the PM for Cloudflare's challenge platform. I'd love to look into what the cause of the problem is, so you don't see these difficulties.
> Cloudflare detected the high frequency of requests and denials (but not their faulty loop that caused this pattern of requests, of course), and tagged my browser as suspicious.
I can tell you at least that we don't penalize users for this looping behavior, so this wouldn't cause us to see your browser as suspicious. I hope we can dig into this more and uncover the cause of the problem.
Personally, I'm a big Firefox user, and this isn't behavior I see. If there were a widespread Firefox wide issue, automated alerts would trigger and we'd consider this a critical incident.
You can drop me an email at amartinetti at cloudflare if you're interested in troubleshooting.
Anecdotaly... I use Firefox and have noticed the Cloudflare interception pages verifying I'm human appearing more often recently. Usually it is all automatic and isn't a big deal, but I have noticed a increase in how often I see these the past week.
I use a VPN 99% of the time and I definitely see more cloudflare on my systems (as opposed to when I'm bored and surfing in the library) and see the "checking" screen. It does seem to be a lot better than last year though when it seemed I was getting a captcha every time I turned around
I have the same issue and often just reconnecting using a different node/city resolves it Annoying as hell, but sometimes the problem is the nodes in the US show as being in EU for some reason.
I've definitely seen this from time to time. I used to work for an ISP and we would occasionally, in the office, get "Your system is sending too many automated requests" from Google. Usually one of our customers had gone off the rails with some sort of amateur scraping, but this was always a pain to debug. I think we talked with Google's NOC and just had our rate limit increased or something like that.
I see the challenge almost always and most of the time it passes after I manually interact with it but I'll get a looping challenge every once in a while and it persists until I change VPN servers.
I don't think I've seen it for a week or two now but I've certainly encountered it in the past for spans where it'd occur at a frequency of maybe once every two or three days and then go away for a while.
Also anecdotally, I use Firefox and I haven't noticed an uptick in the amount of CAPTCHAs I need to solve. I don't even see the "connection secure" page.
Could it have something to do with that ticket extension I'm using (Privacy Pass, looks like it's called)? I don't know if it does anything.
The cause of the problem is that your software is faulty by design.
1. IP addresses are to be used for packet routing. Certainly not for assigning
"behavior scores" to users in the background. IP addresses say nothing about
your visitors, my IP address could have been a complete stranger's IP
address yesterday.
2. Deciding who can access half the web based on their TLS signature achieves
nothing in the long run except reinforce browser monopolies, and goes
completely against the spirit of the open web.
I guess now I have to use Chrome for browsing the web from home. Yes, I do
run a crawler-like bot as a hobby project, I got what I was asking for.
(Funnily enough, it still works if I just emulate Chrome's TLS signature). But
I also have friends who have done absolutely nothing of sorts (no technical
skills), and still got caught up in this latest ban wave.
Let's be honest here. Your service has likely caused millions of people
harm who one day to the other are suddenly blocked from half the WWW -
not just nerds, who can get around that one way or the other, real users
who just got unlucky and now are potentially blocked from accessing websites
required for their daily lives (welcome to the 21th century). This is not
a one time problem, it has been going on for years; this time it just came
too suddenly for too many people. And this kind of harm is a logical conclusion
to the heuristics you use for determining who can view a website.
Never mind that it's ridiculous how a single company from outside my country
has the power to decide on whether I can use the web or not. That's kind of
on website owners unconditionally giving this power to CF anyway.
Now, allow me to return to purchasing proxies from shady sources for myself,
so I can keep using Firefox. Thanks and keep up the good work.
You're being a little dramatic. It's incredibly unlikely that millions of innocent users have been blocked, and unless you have data to the contrary you shouldn't make such a claim.
You know what else is harmful to the concept of the open internet? The enormous malicious botnets and other endemic problems that require a solution like CloudFlare.
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
Imagine if people still thought like this about computers and software.
@adammartinetti : maybe you could consider developing a new product where you display a GDPR consent banner once, and then these settings apply to all Cloudflare-proxied websites (by passing this consent information as an additional header to the proxied site)
Sounds inferior to the "no cookies no banner" solution.
The GDPR does not mandate gratuitous and pointless personalised spying, which is the only case that requires consent. Normal operations (say a shop collecting payment details and shipping address to fulfil an order) do not require a consent banner.
I believe you're mistaken. GDPR allows you to record IP addresses for normal operation of a site, which specifically includes logging. No banner is required.
GDPR is not "vague" about this; perhaps you haven't read it (as laws go, it's pretty easy to read).
It's easy to read because it's vague, and it's going to allow some regulator to decide whether my use of IP addresses constitutes "normal operation." Puts a hell of a lot of trust in government officials to decide who is worthy of prosecution.
It reminds me of the war on drugs in a lot of ways.
ReCAPTCHA was designed with this in mind: given that we had the need to distinguish humans from bots, it presents problems that are hard for bots to solve, where the resulting output is valuable. So the time consumed isn't wasted.
Not when the end user turns around and uses Google Maps which is now populated with higher quality fine feature information due to the training of the machine learning system on what traffic controls look like.
Data point of N+1, but I haven't been able to place online orders at Petco for about a year now because they use some Cloudflare feature that hates my browser + home internet connection. Other Cloudflare-proxied sites seem unaffected, and I'm not doing any botting/crawling, nor do I have any IoT devices on my home network. There's not enough information provided to be able to do any substantive troubleshooting.
This became irritating enough that it caused two side effects: (a) I stopped shopping at Petco, and (b) I moved a pile of sites off of Cloudflare and stopped recommending them, and now sometimes recommend against them.
Cloudflare is still a good, quick, cheap option for sites that receive unusual volumes of malicious traffic, so I'll still recommend them as a solution to some problems. But, they're not a good default.
So you're mad at Cloudflare because Petco enabled a feature that blocked you? If Petco had developed something in-house that blocked you, would you be mad at the compiler?
...no, I've changed my recommendations for Cloudflare because it may prevent ordinary users from using a site, and insufficient information is provided for troubleshooting purposes, and those users are likely not going to go to extraordinary lengths to report the problem. Even if they do report it, the site won't be able to troubleshoot it either. So, if you don't need it, you're probably better off without it.
Cloudflare offers this service. If Cloudflare offered a service that enabled Petco to do something amazing would you be grateful to Cloudflare? If Cloudflare advertised on its homepage about blocking a DDOS attack on a website would you say, "meh, Cloudflare wasn't responsible for blocking that attack, they only provided a feature. The website blocked the attack."? If not, then why should Cloudflare be immune from criticism when the opposite happens?
Cloudflare offered Petco the features to do this as a product and makes money off of Petco's usage of those features. I do sympathize with the perspective that ultimately tools need to be somewhat neutral and it can be dangerous to forward around responsibility. But "tools are neutral" can also be taken to an absurd degree. This isn't 5 levels of indirection here and it's not Petco going and installing a neutral piece software that they downloaded from Github. Petco is a client. They're turning on toggles that Cloudflare built into their user interface and advertises as features.
There's some level of moral accountability there for how those features are abused. I'm not saying it should be illegal, I'm not saying it shouldn't be allowed, but Cloudflare is definitely at least eligible for criticism. This is a product, it's not Petco abusing Cloudflare's infrastructure; they're using the product as intended and advertised.
I dont get your second point. Two things can be harmful to the open web at once. CloudFlare is definitely not taking the right approach at it, which damages the open web alongside botnets. Also, botnet owners are for some reason extraordinarily nerdy and smart so they probably will find a way to fool CF every other month. Its a cat and mouse game for them while actively harming everyone else both with their botnets and the increased aggressiveness of CF caused by their incorrect solution
I agree with the premise that most people don't know how to identity or visibly complain about a given technical problem, and so an HN thread with N anecdotes about the problem likely corresponds to N * F actual amount of real-world incidents, for some value of F > 1.... but claiming it's a factor of a million without any backing evidence is absolutely an overreach.
> An open web is open for everyone/thing not just classes of beings you select. Bots and users can both be malicious and both can be positive.
This I agree with. I run an archiver ~monthly on a subset of my month's browsing history, and I'd hate if that got me blacklisted from Cloudflare-backed sites for a benign purpose. (See also the idea of remote attestation)
Assembling the list of links to archive is a manual process--I just log them in an Obsidian notebook with a category and summary, and I later post it to my blog. (I don't really think other people care, it's more for me to be able to find past things I've found interesting.)
For the archival process I use ArchiveBox[1] running as a container on my NAS; I just grep through the note for `http|https` and feed the resulting list to the archiver. For everything not-hackernews I set the depth to 1, but for HN threads I do 2 so I grab whatever people may have linked in the comments.
I think there's ways to hook into like, ALL Firefox history or saved posts on reddit, but that's way heavier than what I care for.
Interesting! Firefox history is just SQLite. I might do something like, take all non-search URLs and archive them once a month or so. Thanks for the inspiration.
>You know what else is harmful to the concept of the open internet? The enormous malicious botnets and other endemic problems that require a solution like CloudFlare.
You know what's infinitely worse? Monopolies.
Half these problems can be fixed by banning certain parts of the world. It's just politically shifted out of the Overton window to do that so CF profits greatly.
Right. It feels silly to point out specific things when just about everything about these verification checks deployed by every megacorp throws you into a universe of suffering.
If there's a place to start, it would be with eliminating the infinite challenge loops. Bad enough that IP blocks get outright blocked. Bad enough that I have to decide whether or not that blurred sliver of the edge of the wheel+shadow constitutes being part of the bicycle. Not to mention the humanitarian betrayal of the absolute highest form to farm the free human labor to train AI models when they are simply trying to browse the $#@%ing internet.
You're going by the specified, designed use cases of those technologies.
Every spec is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent of the spec, and the use of the spec in the wild.
In practice, Cloudflare does a pretty good job on far-more-than average of gluing together some heuristics in an unspec'd way to filter traffic. It sucks because you can't plan around it, but that's rather the point because the malicious actors are trying to plan around it also.
(ETA: Hacker News rate-limited this post. In theory, I could have set up a sock-puppet to try and work around that, but then they would catch that too and I'd be out two accounts. So I just waited out the limit. Measure and counter-measure. ;) ).
I don't have this information first hand, but that's my assumption.
Dang was handing them out like candy on January 6th. And I think he was justified in doing so; there was a coup in progress in the United States, so discourse here went completely off the rails.
But it's a very easy to implement method of throttling volume, which helps improve the conversation by minimizing opportunities for people to gish-gallop. You can email and ask to have it removed; I have refrained from doing so because it serves as a gentle reminder not to get dragged down in the lowest common denominator of what passes for discourse on the site from time to time.
I sympathize with your frustration, but you also have to admit that Cloudflare is tasked with an impossible problem: from a sea of requests, identify those that are coming from robots that are disguised as humans.
So there is no perfect solution. You can't use strong identity because a user can share their identity with a robot. You have to use a crapy heuristic that only works most of the time (or tell site owners it's an application layer problem and use this SASS solution to solve the problem).
I mean you admitted that you run a crawler. Cloudflare has detected that you run a crawler and has wants you to prove that you're human to access sites on their network. It actually sounds like their product worked.
In any event, there should probably be better regulation around how this blocking is handled so that users aren't being unjustly blocked. If you want to run a crawler, how do you do it ethically so that you aren't targeted and your traffic blocked? If Cloudflare blocks you from accessing one site should that block extend across their whole network? How long should it last? How do you appeal the block if Cloudflare's heuristics falsely block you? If you're in a life and death situation and need immediate access to medical information and Cloudflare unjustly blocks your access and it causes harm, who's at fault? Etc.
Why are humans only allowed and shouldn't we be proactive and accept robots as equals now. We have a history of prejudice against groups and we seem clueless that we are heading their again.
Of course I'd agree that if a robot is following the rules and behaving indistinguishably from a human but maybe just a little more quickly, then it shouldn't be pre-judged (and our detection should accommodate). But here we're talking about robots without agency being e.g. used in botnets to abuse services, or otherwise not following the rules.
All clients follow the rules if you enforce them. Break rate limit and get a timeout. Settle your payment before you send the product using bitcoin instead of Visa which is not able to do this.
And what exactly should the rate limit key be? From your username I’m sure you are aware that it can’t be the IP address.
It sounds like you’re coming at this from an authenticated API perspective where client identity is a given and anonymous access is the exception. The web inverts this, making everything much more difficult and necessitating the sort of fingerprinting that is at issue in this article and I presume you are opposed to.
Have you ever run an open resource with significant traffic before? People are absolutely abusive with their use of public websites and APIs. “This is why we can’t have nice things” is as relevant as ever.
Cloudflare provides a vital service that solves a real problem that breaks non-pragmatists brains.
Often times when people say this, what they really mean is that they have different opinions about which tradeoffs are tolerable and which tradeoffs aren't.
Captchas are a nightmare for accessibility. Turnstile was designed to solve that problem, but is a nightmare for privacy-oriented and non-standard setups. Getting rid of both systems and blocking based purely on behavior or building entirely new metrics to block on would absolutely be a nightmare for website security.
It's all tradeoffs, but some of those tradeoffs get labeled as "pragmatic" and some of them get labeled as "idealistic" -- mostly just based on the personal values of whoever is making that distinction. The reality is that no matter which direction we go, somebody is going to get the short end of the stick. We all want to minimize harm, but we disagree about who that somebody getting the short end of the stick should be and how short of a stick they should get.
I agree that it's idealistic to claim that we can just let automated agents access any website and that it wouldn't be a nightmare for security. However it is equally idealistic to claim that it is possible to fully secure websites against automated attacks without restricting disabled people, violating user autonomy, or harming the overall health of the open web. I do have sympathy for Cloudflare; they are trying to solve an impossible challenge. That's the key word: it's actually impossible. It's a challenge that can't be solved, we can only do the best we can do and that means accepting tradeoffs both for site security and for accessibility and access.
I disagree with Cloudflare about the exact degree to which solving that challenge justifies and excuses harming the open web and I disagree with Cloudflare's idealistic fantasy that fully solving that challenge is possible without significantly harming the open web. I disagree with some of their product directions and metrics not because I'm idealistic about alternatives but because I'm realistic about the outcomes of what Cloudflare is doing right now.
> but you also have to admit that Cloudflare is tasked with an impossible problem
They're not tasked with anything. They choose to sell a bot detection and mitigation platform as a product, and that's a hard business to be in. If they think they can do it, great. If they can't, they shouldn't try.
The thing I don't understand is why all of the blame is being placed on Cloudflare as a company.
Why not place the blame on the people who are configuring Cloudflare to behave in this way?
I'm a happy Cloudflare Enterprise customer, and our DDoS settings are "Off", we don't present captchas to end users, we don't block any traffic, and we've disabled all of Cloudflare's managed rulesets.
It's very possible to use Cloudflare with all of the security features switched off. The features causing the author's issues are features that can be disabled by the site owner. Cloudflare has power over what they recommend as the default settings, but ultimately it's up to the site owner to choose how to configure Cloudflare for their site.
I think there could be a healthy debate around Cloudflare's default account settings, but I'm surprised by the number of people here dismissing the fact (or maybe not aware of the fact?) that all of these are features that can be turned off. The owner of the site chose to keep bot protection, visitor verification and related features turned on.
I agree 100%. While I wouldn't go so far as turning off all of the DDoS settings and managed rulesets (why pay for it then?), you can certainly set the "secure/strict" level to medium or low and still retain benefits.
I'm wondering if it's related to Cloudflare's new/updated Bots features, especially the "Super Bot Fight Mode" feature -- which I believe gets a default setting that is super strict.
As others have mentioned, saner defaults might help, but I guess they want to error on the side of "more secure" vs a less secure default.
But they are doing it and succeeding. No product is 100% perfect. The problem is that when it’s not perfect people can ostensibly (and arguably actually) be harmed if they can’t access content on the Cloudflare network. This is why we need more scrutiny around how large internet platforms deploy bot mitigation technology. We don’t need to tell people “sorry just suffer DoS attacks”.
Cloudflare is not tasked with anything, they have chosen to take on a task. That that task happens to be impossible does not get them any sympathy for the collateral damage they do while trying.
And even when it doesn't block you completely, it delays website loading, makes you jump through frustrating captchas, etc.
It's probably third in the list of frustrating web behaviors in the past couple of years (behind GDPR popups and registration/paywalls that seem to have gotten much worse recently).
And somehow there are some sites that I get CF delay walls on every time I visit.
This feature is utterly broken for a good web experience; it pushes users away from sites which use it.
Every time that "checking your browser" page comes up for a legitimate user should be considered a failure. Sure, it can maybe happen a few times in a thousand, but the feature is utterly broken if it comes up every time I visit the same site from the same browser not in private mode.
It's worth noting that the websites that you are visiting chose Cloudflare, and have enabled the features that irritate you. They have browser integrity enabled, have bot protection enabled, maybe turned the security level up (gitlab famously is a nuisance because they lean heavily on Cloudflare for protection). Sometimes they've wholly barred VPNs or entire geographic areas! And that is entirely the decision of website operators, and note that they did all of this before Cloudflare came along.
Cloudflare's customers are website operators, not you the end user. Those website operators seem pretty pleased with the service, so clearly they are doing a good job for the people who they are building it for.
Agreed. The same goes for the 3rd party "data privacy" popups which simply hide a long list of opt-outs several layers deep in a Vendors list. I refuse to use such sites and I let them know by email.
In what way is it an attack? (I know what a mitm is, I'm not asking you to explain that - I'm pretty conversant in the concept of a proxy, I'm asking you to explain why it's an attack specifically)
I don't get it. They offer a service that that people choose to sign up for and take active steps to use. I don't see how that's an attack. Honestly I'm still trying to understand who is being attacked.
Like is it an attack on the site owner - are you saying cloudflare is extorting them or something? That seems unlikely but I agree that would be a form of attack... it also doesn't seem to be what you're saying.
Is it an attack on the user of the website because the website owner successfully denies visitors it does not want? Does that mean that login credentials are a form of attack too? Would an on-prem load balancer or WAF that dropped all traffic from a region or matching patterns still be an attack?
Man in the middle attack typically implies an unwanted third party, which in this case is not true since Cloudfare is explicitly and voluntarily trusted by the host server. It wouldn't be all that different if the web server had the browserintegrity checks developed themselves.
This is precisely what Cloudflare is doing to end users - causing problems like OP (and myriad others) experience by slowing down and/or blocking major chunks of the internet
I understand that it may be viewed as unpleasant, but ultimately if you install a proxy on your end that the server does not like (say an ad-blocker), I don't think it would be fair for the server to say its suffering a MITM attack. Likewise, even if the client is not happy with the third party the server is requesting, it still doesn't make sense to call it a MITM, IMO.
The cloudflare customers who benefit from the bot protection do not see it as an attack. On the contrary, they see it as a defense from an attack.
Also, it’s quite disingenuous to label cloudflare as only slowing things down. One of their primary functions is a global CDN/cache which significantly speeds up otherwise bandwidth constrained sites.
And this is precisely why I don't bother reporting Cloudflare's failures to site operators anymore. I used to do it, when it was pretty infrequent. Site operators were usually concerned that something was blocking customers, but most were clueless about what was causing it or how to fix it.
Eventually I gave up. I don't even bother with their captchas or other stupid human tricks anymore. Whenever Cloudflare gets between me and the site I'm trying to use, I move on and shop somewhere else. Life's too short for this.
Why not take a screenshot of the CF error and send it to the website owner? It would freak me out if I thought a significant number of my website's users were being blocked by CF.
+1 to anybody who creates a site to name and shame CF customers who block legitimate traffic. For a few months now I've been taking screenshots every time this happens, but with no end goal. Complaining to the individual site owners feels like a lifetime commitment, and there are virtually none I need that badly.
How do you send them that when you can't access the contact form and/or contact information on their site because Cloudflare blocks it? (assuming a normal visitor, not someone who knows about whois etc.)
I have done that numerous times. Even sent a screen recording of the Cloudflare spinner of hell. The response is always the same: you must be running some shady software on your machine.
Cloudflare is acting as judge and executioner, and site owners never accept that the product may be faulty.
Excluding people who are poor, weird, privacy-conscious or otherwise inconvenient from your site is a feature not a bug, especially when you can pretend it's an accident.
That's a false dichotomy. It is both a good and a bad product, depending on perspective.
To a large firm, 1% failure is acceptable. To the affected 1%, it's a disaster. Consider wrongful imprisonment as an example.
The penalties for being excluded from the web are fairly severe, and looking to become more so. CF is fairly lean; there is no available human to operate an escape hatch for when things go wrong.
When I'm king, every block or account suspension must provide a phone number, and hang the inefficiency.
It must be intentional. Not unlike the endless loop of frustratingly slow-fading reCAPTCHA challenges that don't go anywhere. The user gives up after some time, but doesn't see any explicit error or page blocking their access. I imagine it must be quite effective.
in my opinion, the admins do not enable the option to ban lower trust users (or set the threshold high), so CF tries over and over again instead of doing that.
I dont know which type of Firefox you use, but any reasonably tuned browser (in the privacy sense) fails your systems. I literally didnt have a single instance of passing them without handing over a pixel perfect fingerprint.
Would you be able to send me a rayID of a failed challenge so I can take a loop? It sounds like you can use https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in to generate one.
You can either reply in the comments with the ID (no PII), or email me at amartinetti at cloudflare.com and I'd love to dig into it.
We're building Turnstile because we want to make challenges a better system than CAPTCHA. It sounds like for you it's worse, and we want to fix that.
Could also be web workers if you're restricting those? Turnstile won't even load if web workers are disabled, it has no backup logic for that scenario.
I can get into the linked site but only if I turn on web workers (I also have WebGL turned off), and while I don't have the RayIDs on me, I have run into scenarios where Turnstile refuses to let me on websites before. I'll add a second vote on here that Turnstile has been worse for me than the system it replaced.
It's kind of wild to me that Turnstile doesn't seem to have a fallback. Users can specify one I guess? But they're not required to, and Cloudflare does have some responsibility for giving website operators the option to just turn off alternate challenges.
The end result is that if something goes wrong while Turnstile is loading, it's just... done. It just sits there. No captcha, no advice, no feedback, no error message, we couldn't load the code we wanted and now you get to look at a spinner for eternity with no indication of whether you're blocked because of a browser config or because you don't have cookies turned on or what. And captchas have a ton of problems, but Turnstile is openly designed to test for browser API presence, it's openly designed to use black-box AIs to test how similar your browser is to other people's who have passed before. It's no wonder at all to me that it's tougher on less common browser setups. I'm grateful there are people from Cloudflare willing to help debug these issues, and I don't doubt Cloudflare's intentions, but if I was trying to build a system to encourage browser homogeneity, Turnstile is what I would build.
I used to resent being asked to prove I wasn't a robot. Now I resent not even being given the option to prove I'm not a robot.
Enabled them and restarted, still nothing (although there's a chance I messed it up somewhere, I haven't tested it thoroughly). But honestly, I don't really care given that 99% of the web works otherwise.
here is one. I'm not on my PC so i used a privacy enchanted fork of Mobile Chrome. Enabled WebGL, WebRTC and WASM. Disabled all the fingerprint resistant features i could easily (the only thing messing with your systems could be the HTTP Referrer or Timezone)
Perhaps its a DNS-level issue? Does cloudflare use any google related APIs to provide the integrity check?
I run dnscrypt-proxy and I have seen CloudFlare protected sites reject me based on that. I haven't been able to pinpoint which upstream resolver provider causes it as I have it set to automatically cycle through and it's intermittent enough that I haven't bothered getting to the bottom of it (ie. doesn't happen for several weeks and then happens for 15 minutes or so before resolving).
Perhaps it's one of the default DOH providers being used by Firefox?
Anecdotally I notice this same issue. In your Firefox install do you have `resistFingerprinting` turned on, and do you have Firefox's anti-tracking protections turned on? It's possible if you're using a default install and if you're not using VPNs that you might never see a difference between behaviors. But that's only a guess.
My experience is that Firefox as a policy is not blocked, but if anything about my setup looks sketchy (I'm on a VPN, I have Javascript disabled, I'm blocking cookies, etc...) being on Firefox seems to make Cloudflare a lot less "tolerant" for lack of a better word.
I don't think Cloudflare has a policy against Firefox, but I do vaguely suspect that certain behaviors that wouldn't trigger blocks for Chrome do trigger blocks for Firefox (particularly if it's hardened). I don't have any hard data to back that up, maybe it's my imagination -- but it is what I personally notice.
I think your automated alerts are probably too low sensitivity (understandably, because it's probably an impossible scale to handle if they're able to catch false positives). FWIW I've seen similar for a short period of time, and know people who've had it more persistently.
But my biggest practical complaint at the moment with cloudflare is that it intermittently inserts captchas in the json responses sent from Roundcube webmail - pretty amazing.
(The webmail server in question is hosted on a uni network that paid for cloudflare between themselves and the internet, so being indirect cloudflare "customers" there's no support channel. Hooray for scale)
I've seen this behavior on sites with CSPs that'd break the challenge, They somehow get loaded from cache and cause failed requests.
This somehow even persisted into the browser's incognito mode, and I had to use an entirely different browser. This wasn't on a small unknown site either.
(It looks like pinned CSPs are a dead standard, but did anyone implement it?)
Adam, the problem I'm running into is due to the IP proxy I normally use having been changed from ARIN to RIPE due to an ownership change at the hosting datacenter, which is still in NYC. Thus, nevertheless, I show up as coming from the UK, it looks like, when I access Cloudflare-protected sites in the US, and I'm running into more and more of them. The local newspaper, grocery store, credit card co's, etc., It seems that Cloudflare IPv6 geolocation is broken, and interferes even if you're coming from an IPv4. This is just asking for trouble if you ask me.
Troubleshooting done. If it's any consolation, I don't think Cloudflare is the only offender. Geolocation is a crappy idea to begin with, if you ask me.
I can’t get through any cloudflare challenges on a standard iPhone when I use iCloud Relay. Your product is as anti-user as it gets. It’s obvious you avoid user testing and instead look the other way because claiming to have solved the bot problem is just too profitable.
Anecdote: For my programming classes, one example I use is a simple browser. It doesn't do CSS or Javacript, so display is primitive, but it works.
On some sites. Many sites, especially the big ones, see that it's an unknown browser, and refuse to send content. Probably they think it's a bot. But even if it were, what's wrong with bots, as long as they're well-behaved?
What kind of closed web have we let the megacorps build?
In principle? Of course. I mean I remember blocking Yandex bots from hammering some e-commerce site on shoestring budget.
But each person developing a web scrapping bot realizes at most after a week that being honest with User-agent has negative impact on how well it works, and changing it to existing browser takes literally seconds.
Long term, I can imagine this becoming a corollary to Net Neutrality. Whenever that finally becomes a thing, the next step could be a law/rule that "public web sites need to be accessible by the public". Not that developers need to test their work in dozens of different browsers, but that they can't actively choose their customers.
The amount of times Cloudflare is making me sit through their 15 to 30 second "checking your connection" page is insane.
For people going through life with ADHD such as myself, the impact of all these delays and disruptions throughout the day can be severe. Despite being properly medicated this measure is absolutely debilitating and makes for a dreadful and very taxing online experience.
Both of these mechanisms are similar to Google's web DRM proposal in that they rely on external issuers to generate tokens, but unlike Google's attempt they don't guarantee that ad blockers are disabled on pages that try to use tokens.
Which is honestly surprising in this area where it feels like privacy, anonymity and human verification are incompatible with each other.
I am trying to minimise my time wasted by websites, which is hard to balance with privacy, one other one is the repetitive consent forms (if you don't retain cookies, it's a never ending process). I think consent forms and human verification are the 2 biggest human time wasters.
> Which is honestly surprising in this area where it feels like privacy, anonymity and human verification are incompatible with each other.
The thing is, it still allows for some correlation between attestation provider and the websites themselves, potentially exposing part of your browsing history to these companies based on how many tokens you use and what websites consume them.
That doesn't matter much for Cloudflare's implementation (now Cloudflare knows when you visit Cloudflare, oh no!) but with Apple's attestation provider the risks increase. The smaller the attestation provider gets or the fewer parties trust that particular attestation provider, the higher the risk becomes.
It's better for your privacy than the current norm (de-anonimisation through fingerprinting while you fill out a CAPTCHA) but it's still not great. It also allows for attestation providers (and their algorithms) to arbitrarily deny you access to the web if other websites decide to start using them.
Privacy in exchange for power, I'm not so sure about that. I imagine for someone suffering from ADHD the small risk that Cloudflare decides to screw you in particular is worth the massive improvement in browsing experience, but everyone will have to determine the pros and cons for themselves.
Cloudflare is "helping" more than enough already, but thanks for the suggestions.
Besides, those solutions have far too much in common with blackmail/extortion to my liking. Either you continue to suffer this structural harassment, or hand over all your bits and maybe in specific cases suffer slightly less! :)
What information do you think this addon gathers? Cloudflare already receives every bit of information this addon collects when you visit a Cloudflare website without it.
No need to simplify so much that only false dichotomies remain. My brain might be wired up differently but its capacity for nuance and reason is fully intact :)
No one is forcing the website owners to sign up with Cloudflare to enable this service with these aggressive configurations, and yet I understand why they would even just pre-emptively. It's cheap and effective, there's no denying that.
It is Cloudflare Inc. (66,59USD, +23.57USD/54.79% YTD), however, that architected the solution, markets it as a service, and controls it as a core part of their (i.e. everyone's) internet architecture.
As a serviceprovider they could be better at informing their customers of these unintentional side-effects and how they impact otherwise innocent visitors, but whose mental disorders/impairments cause them to be flagged for and having to undergo additional verification steps disproportionately more than others, likely due to some atypical behavioural patterns they show and their often adjusted hardsoftware setups producing an unconventional signature.
Some modifications to the system could probably be made on the architectural level too. We can get people in wheelchairs to the top of the empire state building, surely we can also find a solution that allows us to enjoy the benefits of these protective measures without wrecking the web's inclusivity and accessibility this much every time the measures need to be stepped up.
Being "pretty sure" is an opportunity and a starting off point, not a dead end. Not to forget the classic "Assumptions are the mother of all fuck ups".
Things aren't set in stone either. The most effective method to communicate over long distances used to be carrier pigeons, but only because they hadn't yet invented the telegraph.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadFYI When using Chrome, incognito window carries a lot of baggage. For issues like this use Guest profile as it doesn't include extensions, caches, storage, etc. Optionally do a Google search first to seed it with cookies.
Since it's so much easier to hide behind a new unique address, compared to IPv4, that any service such as Cloudflare would need to be extremely aggressive in blocking to meet their internal metrics and customer advertised minimum thresholds.
So much so that it actually costs more to use IPv6 then sticking with IPv4.
I imagine the scenario described by the author would become more and more common as time goes on as more of the world's internet users becomes harder to distinguish.
If you think IPv6 is mostly pointless, I think you're unaware of the fact that a significant majority of phones already use IPv6 most of the time they're on cellular.
Can you point to where I suggested that? Or did you misread the comment?
>it does seem to indicate that IPv6 is mostly pointless for human users for exactly this reason
> >it does seem to indicate that IPv6 is mostly pointless for human users for exactly this reason
Huh? There is no quote in that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051011.
Unless you are referring to a different comment?
Maybe you're misremembering - but you wrote it :)
'johnklos' did not quote a single word from anyone in the comment I linked, nor a single word from my original comment you linked, let alone an entire phrase, and that was the only response he made from what I can see.
Are you confusing him with a different HN user?
You don't have to believe me, it's accessible to every passing reader right there in the comment chain...
you wrote: "it does seem to indicate that IPv6 is mostly pointless for human users for exactly this reason" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37050359)
he wrote: "If you think IPv6 is mostly pointless, I think you're unaware of the fact that a significant majority of phones already use IPv6 most of the time they're on cellular" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051011)
As you so helpfully put it, "You don't have to believe me, it's accessible to every passing reader right there in the comment chain..." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37056142)
Feel free to continue to deny what you wrote, how he responded, and me repeatedly showing you where quotes your words if you want - no one stop you from ignoring your own words (eventhough they're right there on display for all) ...but he used your own words in response to your own comment :)
There's no sign of 'johnklos' quoting me as you claim. It literally appears in his own words, and he even wrote it in a manner that could not possibly be confused with my style of writing. Just check my recent comment history?
Frankly, it's just impossible for there to be a 17 word phrase in that comment that can be interpreted as a quotation, even by a teenager who only started learning English.
And in any case, you are free to contact dang, or any other HN user you trust, and ask them to double check whether such a thing occurred.
You can also review HN norms, other examples of HN users quoting each other and explicitly acknowledging it, the popular dictionary definitions of 'quote', etc...
Since your HN account is nearly 11 years old I'm fairly confident you know various methods to verify these things to a reasonable degree of certainty.
'warrenm' clearly needs some help with resolving confusion regarding HN norms, or something along those lines, not piling on and exploiting the odd comment chain at his expense.
I think he's in it for the humor value
I doubt that either of you are in this for the humor; that simply emerges from the duration and pointlessness of the argument.
you're a comedian!
thanks for the laughs - anyone who can straightfacedly deny what they wrote, and people referencing it such an obvious manner that you still deny must be in it for the humor value
If they confirm your view then post it here, because I think many passing readers would be curious in seeing it too.
This breaks OpenVPN, which insists on both endpoints being one or the other.
You would have the same problem without IPv6 - your phone doesn't have a spare IPv4 address to give out, it would have to give you some kind of internal-only address and then NAT it when talking to the public internet.
> This breaks OpenVPN, which insists on both endpoints being one or the other.
That seems unlikely (also why would your server not have a v6 address?). You can't connect to IPv4 addresses by IP because you don't have an IPv4 connection, but connecting to your server by hostname or by v4-address-embedded-in-v6-address should work.
IPv6 doesn't allow you to easily get a new completely random address. You get a subnet allocated by your ISP, and you can use any address within that subnet. Rather than blocking a single IPv6 address, a service like Cloudflare can just block the entire IPv6 subnet prefix and get the same result as blocking an IPv4 address.
Cloudflare needs an algorithm to deduce the IPv6 prefix size controlled by a given entity, but the details of that algorithm are not obvious. You are jumping to the conclusion that they must be doing a bad job because the problem is challenging.
IPv4 abuse detection is also challenging because of (e.g.) the prevalence of CGNAT with multiple users sharing an IP address.
Which problem is harder? Which solution is better? I don't know, without a lot of proprietary data and analysis.
I also have maxed out anti fingerprinting etc on FF, so it comes with the territory. I have to slowly enable JS on some sites to see if the loop will break, or i just navigate away.
I use all browsers except chrome, but i only navigate the web with FF
Especially since Apple has partnered with Cloudflare on PAT.
[0] https://jrhawley.ca/2023/08/07/blocked-by-cloudflare#implica...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-enable-private-access-tok...
There are no vast technical differences, only incredibly subtle ones.
[0] https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2023-07-25-web-integri...
That's interesting.
This seems more like an "IT department gone mad" problem than a Cloudflare problem. I'm surprised they'd rather switch to Chrome than submit a support ticket.
Having used passkeys for a month+ now via macOS/iOS/1Password betas, I don't understand how they're related or the author's concerns. Couldn't you just replace "passkey" with "password" in all of their questions?
Companies like Cloudflare, Google, Meta, etc are the reason anti-trust law exists. Unfortunately, it appears there is no one with any power that is willing to use the laws for their purpose. The internet in 20 years will be nothing like we've seen before. That's not a good thing.
Website owners specifically choose for cloudflare to protect against this, it's not forced upon them by cloudflare.
Could anybody still create a new search engine nowadays?
https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ge...
https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/verified-bots
https://blog.cloudflare.com/friendly-bots/
> At Cloudflare, we manually “verify” good bots, so they don’t get blocked.
But cloudflare references robots.txt a lot ( which i mentioned before => to respect robots.txt)
Additionally, they solve the authentication problem here. As a website owner that got bad crawlers ( that copied user agents), i just whitelisted Google's IP's and blocked all the other crawlers.
It seems that cloudflare is actually fixing this problem and making competition for Google possible here.
I recall an article that Bing actually circumvented robots.txt a bit, because site owners were only allowing Google and blocked all the rest => Bing. Which gave Google an unfair advantage ( searched for it, couldn't find it)
Similar article to highlight the issue: https://www.fastcompany.com/90709672/the-little-known-reason...
Our opinions about this seem to differ severely. Cloudflare actually enables good bots to start competing ( while respecting robots.txt).
I’ve had to deal with these things easily bringing sites down.
If all we had to deal with were the users, wouldn't need nearly the spend on the site. Started manually blocking some of the worst offenders.
Feel free to prove me wrong and disrupt cloudflare by only handling that use-case
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101988
> Had a lot of spammers with Russian language. Implemented expanding xml-bombs, Google Captcha, hidden input fields and a couple of other things against bots. But the block on the russian language was most effective ( and since I was dogfooding it, I didn't see the harm at the time. But it's out of scope at this very moment, yes).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37050774
Eg. If you live in a dictatorship and use a VPN. You're traffic is together with a lot of people.
The website owner can disable cloudflare their checks and that will leave their site unprotected. The choice of that is up to the website owner, no?
It really sucks for a third party to claim you're a bot and as a result you lose access to resources. And the potential for harm is only increasing.
Worse still, the false positive rate appears unacceptably high (look at all the people here with substantial issues) and there's no recourse unless you get a highly voted thread on hacker news.
And their technical skills probably skews perception ( exotic browsers, behavior, VPN, Tor, ... )
As such, can you say, by indication, what percentage of web surfers "a lot" is? ( = Including non technical)
I don't disagree that people can have problems. I'm just wondering how representative "a lot" in reality is.
Yeah but what sort of transparency does Cloudflare offer website owners about what kind of traffic was blocked and *why*?
There are all kinds of tools that you can easily deal with bots and the large DDOS your ISP can handle for you if you are willing to pay for it.
That's exactly what people are paying Cloudflare for, because contrary to your local ISP they are actually competent at blocking a DDOS attack.
People use services like Cloudflare exactly because they don't want to spend a fortune on complex infrastructure just to deal with abuse. Even a mostly-static page running on a reasonably-specced server can easily be overwhelmed by an attack. Why spend $1000 / month on hardware when you can spend $100 / month on Cloudflare's protection?
Cloudflare actually provides this service for free (for simple use cases at least).
I don't know how to come down on this issue. On one hand, I am against the centralization of cloudflare and the risks that come with it.
On the other hand, cloudflare allows almost anyone to set up a simple website and serve it to large numbers of people with very little resources/cost and advanced protection from DDOS attacks.
Note: light use-cases ( or should I say shared models?). Not heavy GPU tasks
input: This is fucking badass!
result: [ { "label": "NEGATIVE", "score": 0.9994425177574158 } ]
No one "forgets" this because it isn't true.
Only if Cloudflare stops you moving to a competitor.
[0] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/statistically-speaking-wh...
legacy.com
Ray ID: 7f3e7bad3afbb731
That's the difference to me.
[0] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/statistically-speaking-wh...
- https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in
- https://steamdb.info/login/
- https://www.zabbix.com/forum/
- https://casetext.com/
- https://namemc.com/login
- https://spinroot.com/
- https://camelcamelcamel.com/
It's really annoying and Cloudflare is apparently doing nothing to fix it as this has been going on for months if not years. I guess Cloudflare just hates the open web and really wants to enforce Chrome/Chromium/Blink hegemony.
These bot detection systems tend to use all manner of imprecise statistical heuristics and weird fingerprinting.
Perhaps AegirLeet has a graphics card that a popular web scraper pretends to have. Maybe they're in a suspicious timezone. Maybe they've installed a font usually only found on a different operating system. Maybe I'm never blocked because I have an excellent IP reputation, due to regular visits to approved websites.
We are gonna have to live in a slightly bot-rich society to keep this at bay.
It starts with browser control. And then, ends with needing human verification to ssh into a server that you own. Let’s just build better security.
There is no such thing as a reliable standard for browsers to verify that users are human that does not harm the open web or threaten user autonomy and accessibility. Every single accessibility standard and user choice about extensions and access is abusable by malicious actors, and every security measure to block abuse of automated scraping or access also blocks valid use cases.
Making it a web standard won't change that fact.
We'll also release a reporting mechanism soon, so in the future you can let us know when you see these issues and we can react to them quickly.
- 7f395b5ddfe43a54
- 7f395ca09bfa3a54
- 7f395d8afaf73a54
- 7f395f075e33690d
- 7f396102afef35fd
- Gitlab; Ray ID: 7f3961b4ec46c443
- Zabbix; Ray ID: 7f39624d982bc32e
- NameMC; Ray ID: 7f3962e68d251871
- Camelcamelcamel; Ray ID: 7f3962eb9cbb421f
Easily can recreate at least the never ending loop by flipping on ublock origin's 3rd party scripts and 3rd party frame blocking, which matches their recommended medium settings.
- Zabbix: 7f3970eabe8ff196
- SteamDB: 7f396f534b0400d2
- Casetext: (works)
- NameMC: 7f3971a01a22d5a8
- Spinroot: (works)
- Camelcamelcamel: (works)
casetext 7f39762f693733e4
steam 7f397694995aa3b7
all over firefox
ray id 7f3a169d4e630306
I previously had the same problem with ungoogled-chromium as well (regular chromium worked), but I guess it works now after 2-3 loops.
Incidentally, another Cloudflare PM for Pages asked me to do the same thing--I shared my account ID, the request, the problem, timestamps, etc...never heard back ever, request went straight into the void.
A service has injected itself between you and your goal, it's going to periodically impede you from reaching that goal and then lie to you about why, all while making money off of the arrangement.
https://steamdb.info/login/ 7f3cc161bf85dbd9
https://www.zabbix.com/forum/ works
https://casetext.com/ works
https://namemc.com/login 7f3cc182b8c20ccf
https://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html works
https://camelcamelcamel.com/ 7f3cc171f96d2b9b
- https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in 7f3e45c3cebfb90f
- https://steamdb.info/login/ 7f3e4a04bf7a0e39
- https://www.zabbix.com/forum/ 7f3e4b681f8f1cc6
- https://casetext.com/
7f3e4cab4af40b05
- https://namemc.com/login 7f3e4debdf6cb7f1
- https://spinroot.com/ loads normally, no delay or blocking
- https://camelcamelcamel.com/ loads normally, no delay or blocking
Adammartinetti, I appreciate your interest in doing this, but would love to hear that CF maintains a giant white board in the developer area with the name of every TLS 1.3 web browser known to mankind (the same data on a Group Policy-enforced internal home page would be even better), to reinforce the idea that it takes more than Google to make the world go round.
Personally, I'll add myself to the list of people who think you've created a game you can never win, and thus shouldn't be playing.
That's a little different
Like you have the illusion of choice, that's what I'm talking about and that's different
Browser engines are now open source a lot more than they were.
I don’t think it’s about illusion of choice as much as some browsers actively working to degooglify themselves from Chromium and maintain it.
Some browsers are maintaining their own forks, others aren’t.
I just stopped watching Twitch streams.
These range from pretty simple things that check that the browser is actually a browser rather than a raw HTML parser (e.g. "draw an image on a <canvas>, export it to PNG, hash the PNG, compare to an expected result"); to things that check for low-effort headless-browsing techniques like the one you get by default using Puppeteer in a Lambda/Cloud Function (e.g. "do we have the weirder fonts you'd expect to exist on a consumer OS, but which these default batteries-included container images don't bother to bake in"); to things that work really hard to detect the "scent of humanity" through the browser (e.g. "before the user activated the integrity-check prompt, did we record a sequence of 'extraneous' mouse movements and key events that look like a human making individualized mistakes on their way to completing the form, and don't look like a recorded capture of such similar to other ones we've seen recently.")
If you're getting caught in a verification loop, it's because you're using a browser or device or extension that obscures/disables enough of these heuristics that Cloudflare can't get proof positive that you're a person rather than a bot — and so, under whatever settings the site-owner has it set at, it will just keep trying to get that proof, rather than telling you you've failed and been blocked. (Why? Because telling a bot they've failed tells them that they should stop trying something that's not working and instead — in the words of Star Trek technobabble — "rotate their shield frequency" before trying again.)
Many headless-browser stealth techniques involve rotating between the signatures and reflected metrics of real — but niche and/or ancient — User-Agents. (For some reason, the developers of these stealth systems think that variety beats commonality. Maybe it makes sense if they're specifically trying to overcome Apache mod_security's signature-based UA blocking or something.)
It turns out that when you actually see one of these UAs in your server logs, it's far more (99.99%) likely to be a stealthed bot that picked that UA out of a bag, than it is to be an actual niche/ancient UA.
In the case of the niche UAs, this is a tragedy of the commons.
In the case of the ancient UAs, though, there's no downside to blocking them entirely — because if the traffic is going through Cloudflare at all, then you're already requiring of the client a minimum version of TLS that the real old UAs can't even speak. So the only things actually saying they're that old device — but managing to get through an HTTP request at all — are stealthed bots.
I work in this space and we just use fingerprints we collect from actual users over the previous month. The hardest work is: 1) reverse-engineering the javascript of the CAPTCHA/fingerprinting solutions so that we can collect and encapsulate the fingerprints correctly in a way that looks native to cloudflare/recaptcha/etc, and 2) Training AI models to solve the captchas well enough.
Sounds like most of the people you catch are using ancient user-agents. But I doubt most of the people you want to catch are.
I suppose there are verticals where the data is so valuable, and the garden around it so walled-in, that you could build a whole IT business with a custom scraping stack just around extracting that data to then resell it. (I presume that's the business you're in.)
But for most verticals, the "attackers" you'll see in your logs aren't people building a data-broker business, and so aren't building their own secret-sauce anonymity from scratch; rather, they're end-users who want to do an end-run around your rate-limits, commit promotion fraud, etc., and so want to buy anonymity as a product, script-kiddie style. And "anonymity as a product", sold publicly (rather than through high-value contracts) tends to suck. It's script-kiddies buying from script-kiddies, with no real engineering in sight.
> I work in this space and we just use fingerprints we collect from actual users over the previous month.
Are you sure you're not in a citogenesis cycle? How sure are you that some of those "real users" aren't your peers' stealthed bots, who in turn picked up those fingerprints from unknowningly observing other stealthed bots in their logs, who...
Doesn't matter, they work (at least when used in combination with high-quality proxy IP's). If they stopped working I'd do something else. We only apply hard science when absolutely needed, otherwise it's mostly wire and duct tape holding things together -- ruthless focus on creating business value.
We definitely only sell this via high-value contracts, so you're probably mostly correct there. Though puppeteer-stealth deserves at least a quiet shout-out for not completely sucking.
That said, we do pay attention to a lot of the research in the field, even if we only apply the absolute bare minimum needed to create business value. Eric Wustrow[0] at UC Boulder does really, really good work in an adjacent space, and we've found some his papers/software to be helpful, as well as those of some of the colleagues he works most closely with. I don't think he'd love our applications of his research, but our technological needs dovetail well with the needs of the anti-censorship research that he works on.
If you were interested in the degree of "citogenesis", I think that's something that academic researchers like Wustrow et. al would be very well-positioned to investigate. Highly recommend any of their papers, they make front page of HN surprisingly often.
0: https://ericw.us/trow/
In my humble opinion if your bot is stuck in a CloudFlare loop for 10 minutes that's a pretty strong signal that something's not working...
(I yearn for a world where auth challenge failures give proper error messages so I can figure out why my regular, human-used authentication channels aren't working).
A "try again" just means "you haven't succeeded yet." If that's all you get, you're getting zero bits of new information — so you can't do anything other than to assume it was your timing that looked weird, and keep trying. (And you might be dealing with even more noise, e.g. trying to have the bot calibrate itself toward a very low human-tuned request rate limit, where above-rate-limit responses look no different than integrity-fail "try again" responses.)
Suddenly getting a (maybe permanent) hard-fail, meanwhile, means that you said something the integrity-checker really didn't like.
Presuming you have a lot of IP addresses to send requests from, you can then do many experiments to bisect the difference between a hard-fail and soft-fail, and use that to blacklist values from your UA+metrics library. It's free entropy!
Cloudflare is a huge part of the internet. Often they won't respond and it appears that for whatever reason, their IP range is blocked in Egypt. We probably get 10 support emails per week. I contacted Cloudflare and they simply said there is nothing they can do.
Blocking cloudflare ip addresses means that half of the internet wouldn't be accessible from Egypt. its closw to blocking port 443 because some people use DNS over https.
disclaimer: I'm Egyptian living in the US.
Apparently there is a pool of IP's that Cloudflare use for their CDN and some of them are blocked in Egypt. If you are unlucky enough to be one of the websites that is using that IP, it's blocked. Apparently they rotate them, but I haven't seen it yet, so chances are, when they do rotate them, more will be blocked.
For a while I did notice that when using certain IP blocks, they would show me more captchas when using Firefox than when using Chrome, but I haven't had that problem in a while.
The only fix is to navigate back to page somehow, either by going to address bar and pressing enter (to navigate there again instead of reloading) or finding some link that points you back to the page.
I wouldn't be surprised if those POSTs will end up banning you from some website since they "know" you shouldn't POSTing to that page so clearly you are evil bot trying to hack them.
Will using chromium for such cases work while having Firefox for the rest of sites?
And what’s cloudflare alternative that provides similar services for free including traffic analysis?
It doesn’t make sense for Cloudflare to request any client certificates.
I think there are real bugs somewhere.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/client-certificates/en...
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/identity/de...
This would then require Cloudflare to request a client certificate. This is great for securing websites using corporate identity that is derived from AD certs for example to make sure the device being used has a valid cert on it.
Alongside MDM for example forcing the certificate to have a short lifespan (my $CORP uses 7 days) you can validate that the device has the correct security posture to access the resources.
If for example I let my device not update the version of macOS often enough my cert expires and I can't access internal resources until I update my OS and MDM software checks that and provisions me a new device certificate.
I know cloudflare is not to blame here, but they provide way easy access to blocking to bad admins.
> Cloudflare detected the high frequency of requests and denials (but not their faulty loop that caused this pattern of requests, of course), and tagged my browser as suspicious.
I can tell you at least that we don't penalize users for this looping behavior, so this wouldn't cause us to see your browser as suspicious. I hope we can dig into this more and uncover the cause of the problem.
Personally, I'm a big Firefox user, and this isn't behavior I see. If there were a widespread Firefox wide issue, automated alerts would trigger and we'd consider this a critical incident.
You can drop me an email at amartinetti at cloudflare if you're interested in troubleshooting.
2-3x per day i get some sort of "click here if you're a human" thing from cloudflare.
It could be caused by someone else's bad behavior on the VPN but I'd hazard a guess that it's more than that.
I don't think I've seen it for a week or two now but I've certainly encountered it in the past for spans where it'd occur at a frequency of maybe once every two or three days and then go away for a while.
Could it have something to do with that ticket extension I'm using (Privacy Pass, looks like it's called)? I don't know if it does anything.
1. IP addresses are to be used for packet routing. Certainly not for assigning "behavior scores" to users in the background. IP addresses say nothing about your visitors, my IP address could have been a complete stranger's IP address yesterday.
2. Deciding who can access half the web based on their TLS signature achieves nothing in the long run except reinforce browser monopolies, and goes completely against the spirit of the open web.
I guess now I have to use Chrome for browsing the web from home. Yes, I do run a crawler-like bot as a hobby project, I got what I was asking for. (Funnily enough, it still works if I just emulate Chrome's TLS signature). But I also have friends who have done absolutely nothing of sorts (no technical skills), and still got caught up in this latest ban wave.
Let's be honest here. Your service has likely caused millions of people harm who one day to the other are suddenly blocked from half the WWW - not just nerds, who can get around that one way or the other, real users who just got unlucky and now are potentially blocked from accessing websites required for their daily lives (welcome to the 21th century). This is not a one time problem, it has been going on for years; this time it just came too suddenly for too many people. And this kind of harm is a logical conclusion to the heuristics you use for determining who can view a website.
Never mind that it's ridiculous how a single company from outside my country has the power to decide on whether I can use the web or not. That's kind of on website owners unconditionally giving this power to CF anyway.
Now, allow me to return to purchasing proxies from shady sources for myself, so I can keep using Firefox. Thanks and keep up the good work.
You know what else is harmful to the concept of the open internet? The enormous malicious botnets and other endemic problems that require a solution like CloudFlare.
Is there a 'town square' where we can talk about being presented captchas and similar things from 3rd party intermediates.
I think it's incredibly likely that millions of hours have been wasted on such challenges.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
Imagine if people still thought like this about computers and software.
Not to take away from your point, just that it's all a hindrance.
The GDPR does not mandate gratuitous and pointless personalised spying, which is the only case that requires consent. Normal operations (say a shop collecting payment details and shipping address to fulfil an order) do not require a consent banner.
Technically, I think if you have the default Apache logging configured and you read those logs, you should probably float that banner.
GDPR is not "vague" about this; perhaps you haven't read it (as laws go, it's pretty easy to read).
It reminds me of the war on drugs in a lot of ways.
This became irritating enough that it caused two side effects: (a) I stopped shopping at Petco, and (b) I moved a pile of sites off of Cloudflare and stopped recommending them, and now sometimes recommend against them.
Cloudflare is still a good, quick, cheap option for sites that receive unusual volumes of malicious traffic, so I'll still recommend them as a solution to some problems. But, they're not a good default.
Cloudflare offered Petco the features to do this as a product and makes money off of Petco's usage of those features. I do sympathize with the perspective that ultimately tools need to be somewhat neutral and it can be dangerous to forward around responsibility. But "tools are neutral" can also be taken to an absurd degree. This isn't 5 levels of indirection here and it's not Petco going and installing a neutral piece software that they downloaded from Github. Petco is a client. They're turning on toggles that Cloudflare built into their user interface and advertises as features.
There's some level of moral accountability there for how those features are abused. I'm not saying it should be illegal, I'm not saying it shouldn't be allowed, but Cloudflare is definitely at least eligible for criticism. This is a product, it's not Petco abusing Cloudflare's infrastructure; they're using the product as intended and advertised.
An open web is open for everyone/thing not just classes of beings you select. Bots and users can both be malicious and both can be positive.
> An open web is open for everyone/thing not just classes of beings you select. Bots and users can both be malicious and both can be positive.
This I agree with. I run an archiver ~monthly on a subset of my month's browsing history, and I'd hate if that got me blacklisted from Cloudflare-backed sites for a benign purpose. (See also the idea of remote attestation)
For the archival process I use ArchiveBox[1] running as a container on my NAS; I just grep through the note for `http|https` and feed the resulting list to the archiver. For everything not-hackernews I set the depth to 1, but for HN threads I do 2 so I grab whatever people may have linked in the comments.
I think there's ways to hook into like, ALL Firefox history or saved posts on reddit, but that's way heavier than what I care for.
[1]: https://archivebox.io/
You know what's infinitely worse? Monopolies.
Half these problems can be fixed by banning certain parts of the world. It's just politically shifted out of the Overton window to do that so CF profits greatly.
If there's a place to start, it would be with eliminating the infinite challenge loops. Bad enough that IP blocks get outright blocked. Bad enough that I have to decide whether or not that blurred sliver of the edge of the wheel+shadow constitutes being part of the bicycle. Not to mention the humanitarian betrayal of the absolute highest form to farm the free human labor to train AI models when they are simply trying to browse the $#@%ing internet.
Every spec is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent of the spec, and the use of the spec in the wild.
In practice, Cloudflare does a pretty good job on far-more-than average of gluing together some heuristics in an unspec'd way to filter traffic. It sucks because you can't plan around it, but that's rather the point because the malicious actors are trying to plan around it also.
(ETA: Hacker News rate-limited this post. In theory, I could have set up a sock-puppet to try and work around that, but then they would catch that too and I'd be out two accounts. So I just waited out the limit. Measure and counter-measure. ;) ).
Is it a theory about increasing quality of communications? It can't be a tech bottleneck.
Dang was handing them out like candy on January 6th. And I think he was justified in doing so; there was a coup in progress in the United States, so discourse here went completely off the rails.
But it's a very easy to implement method of throttling volume, which helps improve the conversation by minimizing opportunities for people to gish-gallop. You can email and ask to have it removed; I have refrained from doing so because it serves as a gentle reminder not to get dragged down in the lowest common denominator of what passes for discourse on the site from time to time.
So there is no perfect solution. You can't use strong identity because a user can share their identity with a robot. You have to use a crapy heuristic that only works most of the time (or tell site owners it's an application layer problem and use this SASS solution to solve the problem).
I mean you admitted that you run a crawler. Cloudflare has detected that you run a crawler and has wants you to prove that you're human to access sites on their network. It actually sounds like their product worked.
In any event, there should probably be better regulation around how this blocking is handled so that users aren't being unjustly blocked. If you want to run a crawler, how do you do it ethically so that you aren't targeted and your traffic blocked? If Cloudflare blocks you from accessing one site should that block extend across their whole network? How long should it last? How do you appeal the block if Cloudflare's heuristics falsely block you? If you're in a life and death situation and need immediate access to medical information and Cloudflare unjustly blocks your access and it causes harm, who's at fault? Etc.
It sounds like you’re coming at this from an authenticated API perspective where client identity is a given and anonymous access is the exception. The web inverts this, making everything much more difficult and necessitating the sort of fingerprinting that is at issue in this article and I presume you are opposed to.
Cloudflare provides a vital service that solves a real problem that breaks non-pragmatists brains.
Often times when people say this, what they really mean is that they have different opinions about which tradeoffs are tolerable and which tradeoffs aren't.
Captchas are a nightmare for accessibility. Turnstile was designed to solve that problem, but is a nightmare for privacy-oriented and non-standard setups. Getting rid of both systems and blocking based purely on behavior or building entirely new metrics to block on would absolutely be a nightmare for website security.
It's all tradeoffs, but some of those tradeoffs get labeled as "pragmatic" and some of them get labeled as "idealistic" -- mostly just based on the personal values of whoever is making that distinction. The reality is that no matter which direction we go, somebody is going to get the short end of the stick. We all want to minimize harm, but we disagree about who that somebody getting the short end of the stick should be and how short of a stick they should get.
I agree that it's idealistic to claim that we can just let automated agents access any website and that it wouldn't be a nightmare for security. However it is equally idealistic to claim that it is possible to fully secure websites against automated attacks without restricting disabled people, violating user autonomy, or harming the overall health of the open web. I do have sympathy for Cloudflare; they are trying to solve an impossible challenge. That's the key word: it's actually impossible. It's a challenge that can't be solved, we can only do the best we can do and that means accepting tradeoffs both for site security and for accessibility and access.
I disagree with Cloudflare about the exact degree to which solving that challenge justifies and excuses harming the open web and I disagree with Cloudflare's idealistic fantasy that fully solving that challenge is possible without significantly harming the open web. I disagree with some of their product directions and metrics not because I'm idealistic about alternatives but because I'm realistic about the outcomes of what Cloudflare is doing right now.
They're not tasked with anything. They choose to sell a bot detection and mitigation platform as a product, and that's a hard business to be in. If they think they can do it, great. If they can't, they shouldn't try.
Why not place the blame on the people who are configuring Cloudflare to behave in this way?
I'm a happy Cloudflare Enterprise customer, and our DDoS settings are "Off", we don't present captchas to end users, we don't block any traffic, and we've disabled all of Cloudflare's managed rulesets.
It's very possible to use Cloudflare with all of the security features switched off. The features causing the author's issues are features that can be disabled by the site owner. Cloudflare has power over what they recommend as the default settings, but ultimately it's up to the site owner to choose how to configure Cloudflare for their site.
I think there could be a healthy debate around Cloudflare's default account settings, but I'm surprised by the number of people here dismissing the fact (or maybe not aware of the fact?) that all of these are features that can be turned off. The owner of the site chose to keep bot protection, visitor verification and related features turned on.
Sane defaults. Of course everyone would turn DDoS protection on.
I'm wondering if it's related to Cloudflare's new/updated Bots features, especially the "Super Bot Fight Mode" feature -- which I believe gets a default setting that is super strict.
As others have mentioned, saner defaults might help, but I guess they want to error on the side of "more secure" vs a less secure default.
Blocking all crawlers except Google bot is itself a problem.
There should not be any bot protection, only abuse (e.g. DDOS) protection. Block disruptive behaviors, not fingerprints.
It's probably third in the list of frustrating web behaviors in the past couple of years (behind GDPR popups and registration/paywalls that seem to have gotten much worse recently).
And somehow there are some sites that I get CF delay walls on every time I visit.
This feature is utterly broken for a good web experience; it pushes users away from sites which use it.
Every time that "checking your browser" page comes up for a legitimate user should be considered a failure. Sure, it can maybe happen a few times in a thousand, but the feature is utterly broken if it comes up every time I visit the same site from the same browser not in private mode.
Cloudflare's customers are website operators, not you the end user. Those website operators seem pretty pleased with the service, so clearly they are doing a good job for the people who they are building it for.
Cloudflare is running the single biggest, most blatant man-in-the-middle attack in history, and far too many people are happy about it
if that's not an "attack", I don't know what is
Like is it an attack on the site owner - are you saying cloudflare is extorting them or something? That seems unlikely but I agree that would be a form of attack... it also doesn't seem to be what you're saying.
Is it an attack on the user of the website because the website owner successfully denies visitors it does not want? Does that mean that login credentials are a form of attack too? Would an on-prem load balancer or WAF that dropped all traffic from a region or matching patterns still be an attack?
It just doesn't make sense that it's an attack.
How can you not see that as anything but an "attack"?
This is precisely what Cloudflare is doing to end users - causing problems like OP (and myriad others) experience by slowing down and/or blocking major chunks of the internet
Also, it’s quite disingenuous to label cloudflare as only slowing things down. One of their primary functions is a global CDN/cache which significantly speeds up otherwise bandwidth constrained sites.
Eventually I gave up. I don't even bother with their captchas or other stupid human tricks anymore. Whenever Cloudflare gets between me and the site I'm trying to use, I move on and shop somewhere else. Life's too short for this.
Cloudflare is acting as judge and executioner, and site owners never accept that the product may be faulty.
And soon with Web Integrity API they may start telling you to use Chrome on Windows or MacOS, rendering Linux completely unusable.
But I'm pretty sure that millions of users aren't using stuff like w3m pager ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34175754 )
We're all technical here, we are the edge cases. We use exotic software / combos. Let's not get carried away here
The PM of cloudflare uses Firefox, I sometimes use Firefox and I don't notice any difference ( concerning this use-case at least).
If you want help, perhaps describe the actual use-case that is blocking you to him. He shared his email.
- country
- software ( VPN, ... )
- browser
- OS
- traceid
- ...
Either way, buying shady proxies as you mentioned is already a warning flag.
While using Firefox is not :)
If this was true, Cloudflare wouldn't be a good product used by a lot of sites.
To a large firm, 1% failure is acceptable. To the affected 1%, it's a disaster. Consider wrongful imprisonment as an example.
The penalties for being excluded from the web are fairly severe, and looking to become more so. CF is fairly lean; there is no available human to operate an escape hatch for when things go wrong.
When I'm king, every block or account suspension must provide a phone number, and hang the inefficiency.
What causes such loops? Just a challenge over and over.
It must be intentional. Not unlike the endless loop of frustratingly slow-fading reCAPTCHA challenges that don't go anywhere. The user gives up after some time, but doesn't see any explicit error or page blocking their access. I imagine it must be quite effective.
You can either reply in the comments with the ID (no PII), or email me at amartinetti at cloudflare.com and I'd love to dig into it.
We're building Turnstile because we want to make challenges a better system than CAPTCHA. It sounds like for you it's worse, and we want to fix that.
7f3b42d2bee22efb
I can get into the linked site but only if I turn on web workers (I also have WebGL turned off), and while I don't have the RayIDs on me, I have run into scenarios where Turnstile refuses to let me on websites before. I'll add a second vote on here that Turnstile has been worse for me than the system it replaced.
It's kind of wild to me that Turnstile doesn't seem to have a fallback. Users can specify one I guess? But they're not required to, and Cloudflare does have some responsibility for giving website operators the option to just turn off alternate challenges.
The end result is that if something goes wrong while Turnstile is loading, it's just... done. It just sits there. No captcha, no advice, no feedback, no error message, we couldn't load the code we wanted and now you get to look at a spinner for eternity with no indication of whether you're blocked because of a browser config or because you don't have cookies turned on or what. And captchas have a ton of problems, but Turnstile is openly designed to test for browser API presence, it's openly designed to use black-box AIs to test how similar your browser is to other people's who have passed before. It's no wonder at all to me that it's tougher on less common browser setups. I'm grateful there are people from Cloudflare willing to help debug these issues, and I don't doubt Cloudflare's intentions, but if I was trying to build a system to encourage browser homogeneity, Turnstile is what I would build.
I used to resent being asked to prove I wasn't a robot. Now I resent not even being given the option to prove I'm not a robot.
here is one. I'm not on my PC so i used a privacy enchanted fork of Mobile Chrome. Enabled WebGL, WebRTC and WASM. Disabled all the fingerprint resistant features i could easily (the only thing messing with your systems could be the HTTP Referrer or Timezone)
Perhaps its a DNS-level issue? Does cloudflare use any google related APIs to provide the integrity check?
I run dnscrypt-proxy and I have seen CloudFlare protected sites reject me based on that. I haven't been able to pinpoint which upstream resolver provider causes it as I have it set to automatically cycle through and it's intermittent enough that I haven't bothered getting to the bottom of it (ie. doesn't happen for several weeks and then happens for 15 minutes or so before resolving).
Perhaps it's one of the default DOH providers being used by Firefox?
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/DOH-resolver-policy#Confor...
Presumably not CloudFlare themselves, though.
I'm not a Chrome user, but does Chrome automatically use Google DNS these days?
My experience is that Firefox as a policy is not blocked, but if anything about my setup looks sketchy (I'm on a VPN, I have Javascript disabled, I'm blocking cookies, etc...) being on Firefox seems to make Cloudflare a lot less "tolerant" for lack of a better word.
I don't think Cloudflare has a policy against Firefox, but I do vaguely suspect that certain behaviors that wouldn't trigger blocks for Chrome do trigger blocks for Firefox (particularly if it's hardened). I don't have any hard data to back that up, maybe it's my imagination -- but it is what I personally notice.
But my biggest practical complaint at the moment with cloudflare is that it intermittently inserts captchas in the json responses sent from Roundcube webmail - pretty amazing.
(The webmail server in question is hosted on a uni network that paid for cloudflare between themselves and the internet, so being indirect cloudflare "customers" there's no support channel. Hooray for scale)
No, you don't. Tor Browser is constantly blocked by Cloudflare and the captchas cannot be solved. And you know it.
This somehow even persisted into the browser's incognito mode, and I had to use an entirely different browser. This wasn't on a small unknown site either.
(It looks like pinned CSPs are a dead standard, but did anyone implement it?)
Troubleshooting done. If it's any consolation, I don't think Cloudflare is the only offender. Geolocation is a crappy idea to begin with, if you ask me.
On some sites. Many sites, especially the big ones, see that it's an unknown browser, and refuse to send content. Probably they think it's a bot. But even if it were, what's wrong with bots, as long as they're well-behaved?
What kind of closed web have we let the megacorps build?
But each person developing a web scrapping bot realizes at most after a week that being honest with User-agent has negative impact on how well it works, and changing it to existing browser takes literally seconds.
For people going through life with ADHD such as myself, the impact of all these delays and disruptions throughout the day can be severe. Despite being properly medicated this measure is absolutely debilitating and makes for a dreadful and very taxing online experience.
It should significantly reduce the amount of CAPTCHAs you see in a way that's not terrible for privacy.
For Safari, you can enable Private Access Tokens: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-enable-private-access-tok...
Both of these mechanisms are similar to Google's web DRM proposal in that they rely on external issuers to generate tokens, but unlike Google's attempt they don't guarantee that ad blockers are disabled on pages that try to use tokens.
Which is honestly surprising in this area where it feels like privacy, anonymity and human verification are incompatible with each other.
I am trying to minimise my time wasted by websites, which is hard to balance with privacy, one other one is the repetitive consent forms (if you don't retain cookies, it's a never ending process). I think consent forms and human verification are the 2 biggest human time wasters.
The thing is, it still allows for some correlation between attestation provider and the websites themselves, potentially exposing part of your browsing history to these companies based on how many tokens you use and what websites consume them.
That doesn't matter much for Cloudflare's implementation (now Cloudflare knows when you visit Cloudflare, oh no!) but with Apple's attestation provider the risks increase. The smaller the attestation provider gets or the fewer parties trust that particular attestation provider, the higher the risk becomes.
It's better for your privacy than the current norm (de-anonimisation through fingerprinting while you fill out a CAPTCHA) but it's still not great. It also allows for attestation providers (and their algorithms) to arbitrarily deny you access to the web if other websites decide to start using them.
Privacy in exchange for power, I'm not so sure about that. I imagine for someone suffering from ADHD the small risk that Cloudflare decides to screw you in particular is worth the massive improvement in browsing experience, but everyone will have to determine the pros and cons for themselves.
Besides, those solutions have far too much in common with blackmail/extortion to my liking. Either you continue to suffer this structural harassment, or hand over all your bits and maybe in specific cases suffer slightly less! :)
No one is forcing the website owners to sign up with Cloudflare to enable this service with these aggressive configurations, and yet I understand why they would even just pre-emptively. It's cheap and effective, there's no denying that.
It is Cloudflare Inc. (66,59USD, +23.57USD/54.79% YTD), however, that architected the solution, markets it as a service, and controls it as a core part of their (i.e. everyone's) internet architecture.
As a serviceprovider they could be better at informing their customers of these unintentional side-effects and how they impact otherwise innocent visitors, but whose mental disorders/impairments cause them to be flagged for and having to undergo additional verification steps disproportionately more than others, likely due to some atypical behavioural patterns they show and their often adjusted hardsoftware setups producing an unconventional signature.
Some modifications to the system could probably be made on the architectural level too. We can get people in wheelchairs to the top of the empire state building, surely we can also find a solution that allows us to enjoy the benefits of these protective measures without wrecking the web's inclusivity and accessibility this much every time the measures need to be stepped up.
Am I asking for too much, what do you think?
If there was just as effective a way to tell cheap bots from legitimate browsers without making users wait I'm pretty sure it would have been used.
Things aren't set in stone either. The most effective method to communicate over long distances used to be carrier pigeons, but only because they hadn't yet invented the telegraph.