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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

When did Cloudflare ever do this?

It's reasonably common if you take any kind of privacy preserving actions or really anything that makes you less identifiable.

I'd say cloudflare is less bad about it than some, but I worry my privacy preserving measures might simply be defeated at this point.

How does that relate to "Cloudflare will next decide to lock me out of half of the web for my crimes of using a free browser", though? Seems to be unrelated?

"using a free browser" = "take any kind of privacy preserving actions"

If you use an odd/fringe browser you are more likely to be caught by CF Turnstile and be locked out from websites.

Perhaps, but not as a punishment for using a free browser.

Whether it's on purpose or incidental doesn't matter.

Punishment is something done on purpose.

No, that's nowhere in the definition of punishment. A system can be constructed with strongly normative attributes that punish anyone trying to not conform with the norm, without any intentionality behind it.

You've just defined punishment with your definition of it.

Not always, see e.g. "punishing heat", i.e. sense 2 here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/punishing

I was using that sense, and being hyperbolic with "crime". Cloudflare can cause bad outcomes for browser heterogeneity without any malicious intent whatsoever.

If I get locked out or get served captcha after captcha on Firefox (with or without my ad blocker and extended tracking prevention disabled) but everything works flawlessly on Chrome there's really only one conclusion I can draw.

Well, no, there are multiple. Thinking it's punishment for using a free browser is unsupported by your description.

I only use Firefox with tracking protection on and the DDG extension on, and it always works for me.

Just using Firefox is enough these days. I can't even book a train ticket on Firefox anymore. "Your behavior is similar to a bot. Try to log in to your account or use a different browser." My >10y tenured account with dozens of prior undisputed orders apparently does not matter as much as my user agent.

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