Technology

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hotbar 3.0)

Agreed. I use cloudflare for domain hosting because they're cheap, but I have never liked their protections.

If you use cloudflare to "protect" your site you are discriminating against browser choice and are as bad as Microsoft in 1998.

😕

Agree for static content like news and blogs. Disagree for dynamic content like games and social media. And the latter is mostly for scale (having server-side templating is expensive for rapidly changing content).

Then again, there's a case for snapshotting SM pages every so often for things like crawlers and cli browsers.

Maybe is against the ToS but I've used github as CDN for free in the past... Might work for you.

I never felt it was wrong, it was around the time of the Microsoft acquisition.

I get why you're frustrated and you have every right to be. I'm going to preface what I'm going to say next by saying I work in this industry. I'm not at Cloudflare but I am at a company that provides bot protection. I analyze and block bots for a living. Again, your frustrations are warranted.

• Even if a site doesn't have sensitive information, it likely serves a captcha because of the amount of bots that do make requests that are scraping related. The volume of these requests can effectively DDoS them. If they're selling something, it can disrupt sales. So they lose money on sales and eat the load costs.

• With more and more username and password leaks, credential stuffing is getting to be a bigger issue than anyone actually realizes. There aren't really good ways of pinpointing you vs someone that has somehow stolen your credentials. Bots are increasingly more and more sophisticated. Meaning, we see bots using aged sessions which is more in line with human behavior. Most of the companies implementing captcha on login segments do so to try and protect your data and financials.

• The rise in unique, privacy based browsers is great and it's also hard to keep up with. It's been more than six months, but I've fingerprinted Pale Moon and, if I recall correctly, it has just enough red flags to be hard to discern between a human and a poorly configured bot.

Ok, enough apologetics. This is a cat and mouse game that the rest of us are being drug into. Sometimes I feel like this is a made up problem. Ultimately, I think this type of thing should be legislated. And before the bot bros jump in and say it's their right to scrape and take data it's not. Terms of use are plainly stated by these sites. They consider it stealing.

Thank you for coming to my Tedx Talk on bots.

Edit: I just want to say that allowing any user agent with "Pale Moon" or "Goanna" isn't the answer. It's trivially easy to spoof a user agent which is why I worked on fingerprinting it. Changing Pale Moon's user agent to Firefox is likely to cause you problems too. The fork they are using has different fingerprints than an up to date Firefox browser.

Ever been down the gemini rabbit hole? It's not perfect, but quite interesting.

You can always build a PC and not have to deal with that UEFI signing stuff as you're expected to provide your own OS still, that option hasn't been eliminated yet.

Also, AMD cards are more friendly to Linux users than Nvidia cards are, even with the existence of NVK for the latter; NVK only supports Turing and newer cards and Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta are too old for it, and since Nouveau is broken on Maxwell and newer by firmware signing, once those cards lose support in the proprietary drivers, unless NVK gets backported to them somehow, you'll be SOL in the near future for 900-series, 10-series, and the Titan V, while Kepler and older is still supported by Nouveau, meanwhile over at AMD, Mesa actively supports Radeon cards going back to GCN1.

Basically, if you still have an R9 Fury or an RX 580 sitting around, for example, those cards will still be actively supported by Mesa open drivers for the foreseeable future, meanwhile your GTX 980Ti or 1080Ti, at least currently, are fully at the mercy of Nvidia's closed drivers.