Anubis screws with me a lot, and often doesn't work.
There’s literally no way for you to bypass the block if you’re affected.
Its incredibly scary, I once had a bad useragent (without knowing it) and half the internet went offline, I couldn’t even access documentation or my email providers site, and there was no contact information or debugging information to help me resolve it: just a big middle finger for half the internet.
I haven’t had issues with any sites using Anubis (yet), but I suspect there are ways to verify that you’re a human if your browser fails the automatic check at least.
Anubis looks much better than this.
Isn't any hosting provider also this?
FaaS: Yes.
IaaS: Only if you do TLS termination at their gateway, otherwise not really, they'd need to get into your operating system to get the keys which might not always be easy. They could theoretically MITM the KVM terminal when you put in your disk decryption keys but that seems unlikely.
The Soccer rightsholders - LaLiga - claim more than 50% of pirate IPs illegally distributing its content are protected by Cloudflare. Many were using an application called DuckVision to facilitate this streaming.
Telefónica, the ISP, upon realizing they couldn’t directly block DuckVision’s IP or identify its users, decided on a drastic solution: blocking entire IP ranges belonging to Cloudflare, which continues to affect a huge number of services that had nothing to do with soccer piracy.
https://pabloyglesias.medium.com/telef%C3%B3nicas-cloudflare...
https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-...
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/spain-providers-blocks-cl...
we are all complicit
Seriously though I do think we are going to see increasing interest in alternative nets, especially as governments tighten their control over the internet or even break away into isolated nation nets.
Think private trackers. The opposite of 4chan, which is an "alternative" that got too influential in setting the tone of the rest of the internet.
Basically we're already past the point where the web is made for actual humans, now it's made for bots.
It has, scrapers are out of control. Anubis and its ilk are a desperate measure, and some fallout is expected. And you don't get to dictate how a non-commercial site tries to avoid throttling and/or bandwidth overage bills.
That seems to be a pretty effective way for now to keep scrapers, spammers and other abusive behavior away. Normal users don't do certain site actions at the speed that scraper bots do, there's no other practically relevant search engine than Google, I've never ever seen an abusive bot hide as wget (they all try to emulate looking like a human operated web browser), and no AI agent yet is smart enough to figure out how to interpret the message "Your ISP's network appears to have been used by bot activity. Please write an email to xxx@yyy.zzz with <ABC> as the subject line (or click on this pre-filled link) and you will automatically get unblocked".
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Unless you're paying Cloudflare a LOT of money, you won't get to talk with anyone who can or will do anything about issues. They know about their issues and simply don't care.
If you don't mind taking a few minutes, perhaps put some details about your setup in a bug report?
(Not to mention all the sites which started putting country restrictions in on their generally useful instruction articles etc — argh)
You might have to show a passport when you enter France, and have your baggage and person (intrusively) scanned if you fly there, for much the same reason.
People, some of them in positions of government in some nation states want to cause harm to the services of other states. Cloudflare was probably the easiest tradeoff for balancing security of the service with accessibility and cost to the French/Parisian taxpayer.
Not that I'm happy about any of this, but I can understand it.
It is easy to pass the challange, but it isn't any better than Anubis.
If you fall in the other 1% (e.g. due to using unusual browsers or specific IP ranges), cloudflare tends to be much worse
We should repeat this until every network is cloudflared and everyone hates cloudflare and cloudflare loses all its customers and goes bankrupt. The internet would be better for it.
