this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
139 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37730 readers
745 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The author was blocked from accessing a work website due to issues with Cloudflare's browser integrity checks. Despite having credentials to prove his identity, an attempt to bypass the checks by disabling fingerprinting in Firefox resulted in Cloudflare blocking all access. He could still access the site on Chrome, showing the block was based on his browser configuration. This left the author unable to complete important work tasks and questioning how much control individuals really have over authentication in an increasingly centralized web ecosystem dependent on remote attestation. It highlights the need for transparency and user agency in how identity verification is implemented online.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't speak for the author but I've experienced this issue a few times, with increasing frequency of late, on Firefox and even other apps (not Chrome). Especially if I'm browsing under private mode (which I often am, just because I don't like any cookies/cache to be saved for random sites). Now, it's not like it's some random site who's Javascript broke or something, perfectly functioning sites would stop working and display that CloudFlare access denied message, when they previously worked just fine.

The other app I'd experience issues with is Tachiyomi, a manga reader and scraper. Whilst it works fine for the most part, every once in a while I'd get blocked by CloudFlare, which prevents Tachiyomi from searching/accessing various manga sites. But if I access the said site via Chrome, it'd work just fine.

It's not just CloudFlare. Sometimes, when again browsing via Firefox's private mode and say I needed to run a Google search, Google sometimes throws a captcha at me because it finds my activities "suspicious".

Just so you know, there's nothing unusual about my internet setup - I'm just a standard home user, with a static-ish IP from a well known ISP. My public IP has been the same for over an year now, and I don't run any web/mail servers or anything that my ISP or a website would dislike.

What it is, is just plain discrimination. Just because I have my privacy filters up and blocking all tracking and crap, it's seeing me as suspicious. If this sort of stuff is going to be the norm, I can only imagine how much more bleak our future would be if Google's WEI went into effect.

[–] peter@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Google sometimes throws a captcha at me because it finds my activities “suspicious”.

To be fair, google does that to me too and I use chrome