CloudFlare discussion thread

[Octopuss]

Moonchild, any news? I presume not.

I remembered this thread today when this cancer service went down and half the websites I regularly use stopped loading.
Fuck cloud stuff.

[Moonchild]

Moonchild, any news? I presume not.

Nothing other than my contact asking about status update for Pale Moon and their allowances for it, apparently missing before that we're passing the turnstile test page normally now (where those would not be implemented). So I expressed surprise and asked if there was anything I had misunderstood or that there was anything specific we would still be missing if the turnstile test page passed anyway, and haven't received an answer to that.
They were also asking to enable performance observers by default. I explained I'd rather not and that using a web dev API on production sites (especially those fronting thousands of other) is a bad idea because fingerprinting and privacy issues. No response to that either so I don't know what they will be doing about that. They were claiming they needed it to improve performance of thr captcha but depite the shared name, Performance Observers don't actually improve performance or do anything for it -- they allow accurate timed measurements of web requests or callbacks based on navigation requests (which I'd still want to keep disabled regardless) but don't do anything to improve performance on either client or server side.
I don't have much otherwise to mention. A few open questions without answer and otherwise CF seems to work as it should if their infra isn't borking.

[Night Wing]

There is an article today (11-18-2025) stating Cloudlfare had a problem and took down a large part of the internet with lots of business companies affected. It has since recovered.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/live/a-cl ... e-internet

There is an old adage, "Never put all of your eggs in one basket".

[Michaell]

I had a couple of sites blocked earlier this morning (Cloudflare in Atlanta was down but site host was up). Neither of these sites should even need special protection - just genealogy info). Tried again just now and one went through. The other one demanded I unblock challenges.cloudlflare.com. After watching it loop a few times, I did unblock scripts for that subdomain in ematrix. It crashed Windows, no chance to save anything. I won't be unblocking challenges anymore in PM.

[Gemmaugr]

I had a couple of sites blocked earlier this morning (Cloudflare in Atlanta was down but site host was up). Neither of these sites should even need special protection - just genealogy info). Tried again just now and one went through. The other one demanded I unblock challenges.cloudlflare.com. After watching it loop a few times, I did unblock scripts for that subdomain in ematrix. It crashed Windows, no chance to save anything. I won't be unblocking challenges anymore in PM.

I unblock challenges in eMatrix all the time in PM, and have never had this happen. It's more likely some hardware fault on your setup that's the cause. What does the OS crash log say?

[Moonchild]

The "unblock challenges.Cloudflare.Com" was a red herring. I got it too but it's a default pass in my adblocker so it wasn't the issue. Instead, it was caused by cloudflare's challenges server throwing an error 500 (server error). So just mor cf infra being down

[browserman]

Cloudflare blocks & loops are annoying, the more we complain about it to website owners, the better, but here's a paradox:

I would be much more worried if there were no blocks (or other problems), then as has been seen elsewhere, one can suspect palemoon is compromised.
With this I mean, developers got bribed/bought by M$ or some other big us tech company so they get to control it. Some time ago I got suspicious when palemoon needed a recent cpu (SSE something) for example.

If we can spread palemoon to be too big to be ignored, then it will be safer of course

[andyprough]

A lot of the sites I used to visit without any js are now gated off by Clouflare. Maybe even most of them. The internet is a lot less friendly than it was even one year ago.

[Moonchild]

We've required SSE2 pretty much from day 1 in 2009.

[Mæstro]

A lot of the sites I used to visit without any js are now gated off by Clouflare. Maybe even most of them. The internet is a lot less friendly than it was even one year ago.

The pain sears deeply. Generally, I have fought it by using the Archive’s mirrors instead of visiting the pages themselves. For a few days, it threatened to deprive me of my favourite online reference site. Farlex is working again (if accessed in the right way) without imposing Cloudflare, but I find myself using Collins’ own site more often now, as well as a CD edition of Encyclopædia Britannica instead of the site. Friends who share my attitudes towards LLM have mused with me about whether we might someday find ourselves driven offline altogether, with limited exceptions like the Archive or our (non-Web) email and IM, as the Web grows ever more hostile. Friends who do not thought at first that I was joking when I described how the technology actively makes my daily life worse in this way.

[frostknight]

We've required SSE2 pretty much from day 1 in 2009.

Off-topic:
I used to be glad about that back when I used really old 64 bit hardware lol.

Because that meant, if I needed to, I could use palemoon instead of iceweasel-uxp.

But since the 2020s, I am very glad, that I have newer hardware especially since you made it call from AVX.

And on that note, it is faster.

[andyprough]

A lot of the sites I used to visit without any js are now gated off by Clouflare. Maybe even most of them. The internet is a lot less friendly than it was even one year ago.

The pain sears deeply. Generally, I have fought it by using the Archive’s mirrors instead of visiting the pages themselves. For a few days, it threatened to deprive me of my favourite online reference site. Farlex is working again (if accessed in the right way) without imposing Cloudflare, but I find myself using Collins’ own site more often now, as well as a CD edition of Encyclopædia Britannica instead of the site. Friends who share my attitudes towards LLM have mused with me about whether we might someday find ourselves driven offline altogether, with limited exceptions like the Archive or our (non-Web) email and IM, as the Web grows ever more hostile. Friends who do not thought at first that I was joking when I described how the technology actively makes my daily life worse in this way.

I'm enjoying browsing gemini space with the Lagrange gemini browser. Wikipedia is largely reproduced as "Gemipedia" at gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/welcome, giving me at least one site to browse with Lagrange daily. And quite a few people have been posting personal blogs and journals filled with fairly decent prose and poetry. Gemini is lacking much content, but the experience is so pure and simple compared to the web that I find it very enjoyable to spend time exploring it.

[moonbat]

Gemini is lacking much content, but the experience is so pure and simple compared to the web that I find it very enjoyable to spend time exploring it.

Sounds like Gopher. You can run it in PM with the Overbite extension.

[andyprough]

Gemini is lacking much content, but the experience is so pure and simple compared to the web that I find it very enjoyable to spend time exploring it.

Sounds like Gopher. You can run it in PM with the Overbite extension.

I haven't been on gopher in quite a few years but trying it now with Overbite. Not sure what to think, it will take me awhile to explore and see what's available.

[moonbat]

Floodgap has a large directory of current Gopher servers, so that's a good starting point: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/new