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Comment by kneebonian | Hacker News Reader

So I hate cloudflare with a burning passion, at some point cloudflare decided me home IP was bad and has started flagging it all over the place, which leads to vast swathes of the internet now being inaccessible to me.

There is danger in centralized systems.

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Have you tried using Privacy Pass? It is a browser extension which helps prove that your traffic is legitimate which should reduce the incidence of challenges from Cloudflare, even if your IP has bad rep. It uses advanced cryptography to do this without creating any new tracking vectors.

(Disclosure/disclaimer: I work for Cloudflare but in a different department; I'm not an expert on Privacy Pass.)

> It uses advanced cryptography to do this without creating any new tracking vectors.

Sounds like something which is designed to create hard to detect tracking vectors.

Note that Privacy Pass is not a Cloudflare product, it's an open protocol which Cloudflare supports.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-privacypass/

Blog: https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-the-math/

(older) Design: https://privacypass.github.io/protocol/

PATs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...

So this is even more insiduos, and an interesting way for Apple, Google, and MS to pay Cloudflare to use its dominating market position to help safeguard them from other incumbents: you either work to get your devices approved in this scheme, or your users get more Cloudflare CAPTCHAs preventing them from having a nice web experience.

All in the name of "privacy" and "security". Though of course, the only security that is served here is the ad network's revenue stream, who are the only ones who really care if a real device or a bot is accessing their services. For most other cases, a DDoS is a DDoS regardless of it being initiated by actual users (e.g. an HN hug of death) or by a bot network.

When I started using Firefox with the Temporary Containers extension I would get absolutely bombarded by Cloudflare's captchas. To the point where if I clicked on a search result that sent me to a captcha, I would just close the tab and click the next result (which often resulted in another captcha, rinse repeat). That's when I realized just how big Cloudflare had gotten.

I still use Temporary Containers and lately, I've noticed a sharp decline in these Cloudflare captchas. I don't know if its because people are moving away from them, or Cloudflare just found a better way to finger print me.

The issue I have here is why does Cloudflare take the blame? There are 2 parties (well could be more) - your ISP and Cloudflare. Who says it's not your ISP that is the problematic 1?

People like to blame the easiest target.

You may be able to force your ISP to give you a new IP by resetting your modem or leaving it off long enough, that may help.

But once cloud flare hates you, you have to bow to them.

Try browsing the normal web over Tor sometime and see how bad it can get.

Change your IP? Most ISP change every modem reboot. Others you can call and request a change

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