Comment on Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
RedPandaRaider@feddit.org 6 months ago
Cloudflare PR. Fuck them. Blocking VPNs from accessing websites is very open web of you.
For what it’s worth when you set up your site on cloudflare you get to choose how strict you want security to be and what URLs it applies to, or just disable it and use it only as a CDN.
It would be nice if they were more clear that enabling some features might block legitimate users though.
Cloudflare blocks VPNs at the request of whoever is running the server. There are tons of websites running on Cloudflare that work with VPNs.
Nope. Cloudflare use a complex set of fingerprinting tools that determine security scores. It’s literally social credit system for web user agents and the site admits have little control over that.
While true that there are security scores, the site admins set which score (if any) to block at. So, they do have control over that. Same goes for the bot fight mode as well. So, site admins do have control over whether or not to block based on the associated score.
The control is very limited unless you’re enterprise subscriber and even then CF is super sneaky and doesnt actually report the real world. I had a few clients where they were clearly suffering losses due to cf implementation (you could literally see sales dip when cf is enabled) but they didnt believe me because cf dashboard doesn’t report false positives or anything of that sort and they had no in house analytics to really understand the issue.
Exactly. My employer uses Akamai, which is larger than Cloudflare. Akamai provides the ability to block traffic from Tor, traffic from VPNs, traffic from any countries you desire, and so on. They also provide managed lists of countries listed in thing like ITAR so you can easily block them if you want.
There are also many Lemmy instances that are intentionally blocking VPNs because they have to to stay afloat.
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 6 months ago
I’m using a VPN with my cloudflare reverse proxies right now. That blocking is configured by the website owners, not Cloudflare.
RedPandaRaider@feddit.org 6 months ago
It is Cloudflare that creates this functionality and gives access to it to its customers though.
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 6 months ago
I didn’t say they didn’t. But if a site is blocking you, that’s the site admins configuring that, not Cloudflare.