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Comment by mynameisvlad | Hacker News Reader

Why jump to attacking them? Occam's razor applies, and there's no proof Cloudflare explicitly is targeting Firefox specifically, unless you somehow have internal access to their source and know there's checks explicitly looking for FF there.

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It's pretty simple to check. Go to https://www.g2.com/ in various browsers. That's what I did when I read the article. Here are my results:

Firefox: Javascript challenge

Chromium: No javascript challenge

Edge: No javascript challenge

How could you call this anything but an attack against firefox?

edit: Seems cloudflare has responded[1] and they claim it is a setting set up by the site author. So this attack is done by g2, using cloudflare, then.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31460441

Went to g2 from Germany. Got challenge, but was fast. Maybe 0.5secs. No challenge after closing and going there again. Maybe a geolocation thing, because of botnets, ddos, war, whatever?

edit: with FF OFC.

I think you mean Hanlon's razor, but that adage is a farce. Every scoundrel in the world knows the trick of pretending it was all a mistake. Skepticism is warranted.

I can't see why Occam's razor wouldn't apply: don't postulate more entities than are necessary to explain the facts. Specifically, there is no reason to postulate some kind of anti-Firefox elements within Cloudflare when it's simply explainable as a mistake.

(There's a reason Hanlon's razor was given that name, I'm pretty sure, and that's because it's not too dissimilar from – essentially it's a much-more-situation-specific subset or variant of – Occam's razor. But I don't think "attribute to stupidity" was what the parent comment was suggesting.)

^ This. The simplest explanation is generally the most correct.

I think that definition is right, but only where 'simplest' factors in the probability of each premiss, not just the aggregate number of premisses. And yeah, on that reading it's trivially true, but something's being trivially true doesn't mean humans as psychological beings don't need reminding of it.

It doesn't matter which razor you want to apply. These guidelines work well for natural/random phenomena but if you are talking about a potentially malicious group of sentient actors you have to assume that they will abuse your willingness to brush off ambigious acts as benign. For an organization that controls as large as a percentage of web traffic as Cloudflare I don't think we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Even if this is a customer rule, Cloudflare are still the ones making it easy and cheap to implement such rules.

I would take a more measured stance. I don’t think Cloudflare is explicitly targeting Firefox. I don’t even think they are aware of what this does in Firefox. (You can definitely design systems that don’t hardcode something but still clearly only affect it.) The likely explanation to me is that Firefox blocks cookies or something and Cloudflare marked this as suspicious. It shouldn’t, but it does.

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