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Comment by kcrwfrd_ | Hacker News Reader

Were you on a VPN?

Some vendors are just weird... I'm always getting blocked by Etsy with Firefox after the first navigation on their site. It shows me a puzzle to solve and then, after solving the puzzle correctly (read "Success"), redirects me to "You have been blocked". It works with Chrome-based browsers though, but that doesn't make me want to use the website at all.

No VPN, just good privacy settings in my case.

Do you have the "resist fingerprinting" setting enabled in Firefox? (You can check in about:config)

"privacy.resistFingerprinting" is "true", yes, and it'll stay that way. Why let me solve a puzzle just to block me afterwards anyway?

To let you know who wears the pants in the relationship :)

I use multiple profiles with Firefox to sandbox cookies etc. My profiles are based on activity. HN, Facebook, and infrequently used sites…sometimes I use Linkedin but I dont want it following me around the web.

I would prefer the web was different, but it is not.

Maybe the performance of the puzzle also has some undeclared side channels.

Businesses that scrape websites for a living hire people in third-world countries to solve captchas 24/7 to keep the scraping bots running.

So when I successfully solve a captcha, that doesn't make me 100% trusted not-a-scraping-bot. Instead it's an input into a statistical model, along with all the other identifying information they can hoover up, and that statistical model may still say no.

While looking at a flight price on sas.dk I had to disable Firefox's built-in enhanced tracking protection.

It seems excessive to not allow at least a single query in this situation.

I had the same with a newspaper which I subscribe to. They shouldn't be tracking me, and don't show adverts to subscribers. In this case I wrote to their support person, who told me not to block the tracking.

> just good privacy settings in my case.

You are blocking the trackers and damaging the revenue model.

Nope, no VPN, making it all the stranger.

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