<story><title>Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet</title><text>Across many different pages including science journals, ChatGPT, and many others, CloudFlare verification goes into an infinite loop of:&lt;p&gt;1. &amp;quot;Verify you are a human&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;2. Check the box or perform some other type of rain dance&lt;p&gt;3. &amp;quot;Please stand by, while we are checking your browser...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;4. Repeat step 1&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m on Fedora Linux 37 using Firefox 110.&lt;p&gt;The workaround is to use Chrome.&lt;p&gt;After experiencing this dozens of times and getting annoyed of needing to use Chrome, I finally went and deleted all my cookies and cache which I had been dreading to do.&lt;p&gt;It did not help.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t have a CloudFlare account so I wrote up a detailed post on their community forums. I offered a HAR file and was willing to do diagnostics. It received no responses and it was auto-closed.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s unacceptable that CloudFlare is breaking the internet while offering no community support.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I&amp;#x27;m in Texas. I&amp;#x27;m not using a VPN or Tor, just AT&amp;amp;T Fiber. I don&amp;#x27;t have ad-blockers. No weird extensions. Nothing special (besides being on Linux).&lt;p&gt;Edit2: Since this got traction, I opened a new community post: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&amp;#x2F;t&amp;#x2F;infinite-verify-you-are-a-human-loop&amp;#x2F;503065&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I&amp;#x27;m not against CloudFlare doing DDoS protection, etc., but it can&amp;#x27;t be breaking the internet &lt;i&gt;while ignoring community posts on it&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Edit3: The CloudFlare team has engaged. Thank you HN!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m not using a VPN or Tor, just AT&amp;amp;T Fiber. I don&amp;#x27;t have ad-blockers. No weird extensions. Nothing special (besides being on Linux).&lt;p&gt;Even if you were doing any, or all of these things, you are no less a legitimate internet user than anyone else. This whole &amp;quot;rain dance&amp;quot; supplication to show you are worthy of browsing a web site has got to go. Stop visiting sites who treat their users this badly!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kevincox</author><text>This reminds me of the origin of &amp;quot;jaywalking&amp;quot;. People used to walk wherever they wanted but when cars became a thing they found that people where in their way. So they started to blame people for &amp;quot;jaywalking&amp;quot; to turn it into a bad thing that the pedestrians are doing rather than framing it as cars wanting to take some of the road away from pedestrians.&lt;p&gt;We are trying to frame people who are trying to protect their privacy as &amp;quot;suspicious&amp;quot; rather than saying that we want to track them better.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet</title><text>Across many different pages including science journals, ChatGPT, and many others, CloudFlare verification goes into an infinite loop of:&lt;p&gt;1. &amp;quot;Verify you are a human&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;2. Check the box or perform some other type of rain dance&lt;p&gt;3. &amp;quot;Please stand by, while we are checking your browser...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;4. Repeat step 1&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m on Fedora Linux 37 using Firefox 110.&lt;p&gt;The workaround is to use Chrome.&lt;p&gt;After experiencing this dozens of times and getting annoyed of needing to use Chrome, I finally went and deleted all my cookies and cache which I had been dreading to do.&lt;p&gt;It did not help.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t have a CloudFlare account so I wrote up a detailed post on their community forums. I offered a HAR file and was willing to do diagnostics. It received no responses and it was auto-closed.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s unacceptable that CloudFlare is breaking the internet while offering no community support.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I&amp;#x27;m in Texas. I&amp;#x27;m not using a VPN or Tor, just AT&amp;amp;T Fiber. I don&amp;#x27;t have ad-blockers. No weird extensions. Nothing special (besides being on Linux).&lt;p&gt;Edit2: Since this got traction, I opened a new community post: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&amp;#x2F;t&amp;#x2F;infinite-verify-you-are-a-human-loop&amp;#x2F;503065&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I&amp;#x27;m not against CloudFlare doing DDoS protection, etc., but it can&amp;#x27;t be breaking the internet &lt;i&gt;while ignoring community posts on it&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Edit3: The CloudFlare team has engaged. Thank you HN!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m not using a VPN or Tor, just AT&amp;amp;T Fiber. I don&amp;#x27;t have ad-blockers. No weird extensions. Nothing special (besides being on Linux).&lt;p&gt;Even if you were doing any, or all of these things, you are no less a legitimate internet user than anyone else. This whole &amp;quot;rain dance&amp;quot; supplication to show you are worthy of browsing a web site has got to go. Stop visiting sites who treat their users this badly!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justizin</author><text>&amp;gt; Stop visiting sites who treat their users this badly!&lt;p&gt;The problem is the individual sites aren’t making these highly technical decisions, people are using what seems to them an innocuous security product.&lt;p&gt;Not visiting a random website places no pressure on CloudFlare to change, since there’s no way to correlate your choice with the decision to use CloudFlare.</text></comment>