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Comment by whilenot-dev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> just good privacy settings in my case.

You are blocking the trackers and damaging the revenue model.

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