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pierat

To be fair, I use subscribed ProtonVPN. Same exact issues.

Cloudflare gives me captchahell with infinite "click on fire hydrants or vans or bicycles or stoplights".

Amazon just pretends to "site error".

Numerous sites like Tiktok, JLwaters, my state's data portal, and others just give me a 403 forbidden.

Other sites just load a <html></html> blank document on my VPN.

And Proton is actually kind of hard to get port forwarding turned on. You can do it by adding a suffix to the OpenVPN name, or by generating a wireguard with port forwarding on.

But again, I don't think it's anything to do with port forwarding per se. The current web demands deanonymization. And naturally "abuse" is blamed, even when attached to legit accounts with legit historical purchases etc.

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Even without a VPN, the built-in tracking protection in Firefox trips Cloudflare’s bot detection every time. It’s a not-so-subtle FU for taking any steps to protect your privacy online.

The goal is privacy, but the side effect is that you appear exactly as any spam/scraping bot out there. So website owners block this scenario and are fine that it'll likely exclude a minority of visitors who try to browse the web with maximum privacy.

True, but it still is a flaw with services like cloudflare and I don't believe their users know how many people actually get blocked. There are quite a few people that are familiar with these issues and it isn't only the technically affine.

Users of cloudflare-ish services (site owners) may see a joyful dashboard counter that expresses "we blocked 9000 nefarious attempts this month" instead.

Of course without the big fat asterisk of "actually, we have no idea what our false positive ratio is. So they could be 9000 prospective customers that we blocked."

And then the customer will think "oh wow good service, all those baddies blocked, better stay in the warm embrace of this service or who knows what will happen to my site".

This is being improved by CF - if you have any "managed challenge" firewall rules on the CF dashboard, which is 'browser detection and Captcha if potential bot', it will show a Captcha Solve Rate, so hopefully site owners will adjust their firewall rule settings till the CSR is under 10% or so.

https://rr.judge.sh/Screenshot%202023-05-30%20at%2011.19.52%...

> The current web demands deanonymization. And naturally "abuse" is blamed

I used to work at a smallish mom-and-pop website host (do those even exist anymore?) that also offered email services. Our PF firewall just straight-up blocked huge swaths of IPv4 CIDRs because it was 99% email spam and exploit scanners. We had no ability whatsoever to fight it any other way. I don't recall even a single complaint from any of our customers.

> I don't recall even a single complaint from any of our customers

Well, there are two different reasons you might not have received any complaints...

What are the two different reasons?

Nobody had a complaint to lodge because none of the emails were legitimate, or they had no means of contacting them because the were completely blocked, presumably.

> And Proton is actually kind of hard to get port forwarding turned on. You can do it by adding a suffix to the OpenVPN name, or by generating a wireguard with port forwarding on.

Regrettably, I suspect this does nothing for abusers, who are motivated, and instead impacts only "legitimate" customers.

ProtonVPN supports port forwarding? Had no clue!

Sure does. And it's easier with Wireguard than OVPN.

I never successfully got an OpenVPN set up with proper port forwarding. It would appear to, and then just up and fail.

With Wireguard, I set the port automatically with UPnP (Soulseek and torrents). Have it set up there, and works like a champ.

You'll have to log in, go to Wireguard configs, set port forwarding and a P2P VPN, and download. Then do the usual with /etc/Wireguard and start it up. That's it.

Re: Captchas: Have you had any luck with PrivacyPass? https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy-pass

Ive had no luck, cause I wasn't aware of PrivacyPass.

Thank you! Looking into it now.

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