Somewhat relevant: https://thebrainbin.org/m/linux@lemmy.ml/t/1858588

Has this occurred to y’all?

All. Of. The. Damn. Time.

The more private you try to be, the more you will hit those.

I see a couple diff behaviors. Sometimes, it succeeds and it lets me through. Sometimes, it “succeeds” but gets in an endless reload loop of the cloudflare page, and never forwards to the site. Sometimes, it convinces itself I am a robot and blocks me entirely.

No idea what drives that diff. Maybe there’s some kind of threshold sites can set, or sth like that.

I have much better luck getting past the non-cloudflare bot verifiers. There are some competitors, I forgot the names now.

All the time. There’s occasionally even websites that outright block me without challenge, run many iterations on my machine, or present a tiresome amount of CAPTCHAs (Waymo machine vision must be trained pretty well, from me labeling goddamn traffic lights, motorcycles and stairs throughout the day). Especially CAPTCHAs that load new pictures with an infuriatingly slow fade animation drive me up the wall; one of which possibly not even sufficient.

But I take it as a compliment, as it might mean my browser profile is minimal enough to trip these systems into thinking it’s a headless browser (typically used for bot traffic).

While Cloudflare, as well as Anubis and other “anti-bot solutions”, do behave like MitM, they only become a MitM in two situations:

- When the webmaster injects one of those third-party malware into their website.
- Very unlikely, when the network administrator (e.g. the wi-fi from a library or university) is deliberately acting as a MitM through a transparent proxy, and it’s somehow using Cloudflare.

As for me, personally, I don’t see these anymore. I built myself an userscript (FireMonkey), targeted at every domain, programmed to do a window.close() (close the tab) if the title is one of the strings “Just a moment…” (Cloudflare), “Making sure you’re not a bot!” (Anubis), “Cookie monster!” (also Anubis), “Checking you are not a bot” (some Anubis fork) or “One more step” (Google recaptcha). If the title matches, the tab is closed before any non-consented cryptographic challenge (i.e. those “solutions” don’t even dare to ask for user consent before “checking the browser”, therefore it’s a non-consented relationship and a behavior indistinguishable that of a malware) starts to overwhelm my decade-old laptop CPU.

Yes, this means I’m not having access to whatever content is behind the wannabe-cryptojacking tool, but if the webmaster does not respect my personal device and my right to consent (i must emphasize: all those “solutions” start straining the CPU with cryptographic challenges as soon as the user accesses the page, without asking for user consent beforehand, therefore it’s a non-consented relationship and a malware-like behavior), I can’t help but speed-run my search for the exit door. I’m not submitting myself and my personal device to malware (the webmaster pushing CF/Anubis/etc to non-consentedly run on my laptop ain’t gonna buy another laptop for me if mine died so I’m better as far as possible from their website).

!privacy@lemmy.ml