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0 pointseverybodyknows2y ago0 comments

Website owner complains elsewhere in this topic of blocked users (country-specific):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37050774

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5 comments · 1 top-level

NicoJuicy2y ago· 4 in thread

That's not a lot of information for such a complex subject.

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?

mlyle2y ago

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.

NicoJuicy2y ago

Tbh. There's a lot of technical folks, worldwide, here. That's a lot of edge cases in comparison.

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.

1 more reply

bravura2y ago

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?

Yeah but what sort of transparency does Cloudflare offer website owners about what kind of traffic was blocked and *why*?

acdha2y ago

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.

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