I don't want to defend them, because they gate away a good chunk of the internet with their "bot protection", but unless you do PoW (which is also ecologically a nightmare), probably fingerprinting is the way to go - completely destroying the privacy of everyone involved.
Cromite, a privacy conscious fork of Chromium for Android, has constantly issues with CloudFlare Turnstile [2] because they (Cloudflare) try to fingerprint it in multiple ways in order to pass the challenge. The only way to get it to work would be to join the CloudFlare Browser Developer program - which requires signing an NDA. Rightfully so, the project maintainer didn't want to do it.
If you want to see the extent of what CloudFlare does to fingerprint the browsers, just have a look in the issue [2] and see which flags need to be disabled in order to allow CloudFlare to pass the challenge.
I understand both sides, but at least CloudFlare could be flexible enough to fall back to PoW instead of just blocking people from sending forms or accessing websites...
They also gate away a good many people with their "bot protection". I am extremely worried about how so many seem to have outsourced the control over who can access their websites to a company, with no second thoughts whatsoever.
[0]: https://konform-browser.codeberg.page/
[1]: Most? All? Without any telemetry, relying on user reports and our own testing here.
I'll make sure to fail all cloudflare turnshit in the future.
>Turns out it's because Cloudflare wants to have a fingerprint of your device via WebGL, the only reason for doing this would be tracking.
> So Cloudflare just banned all WebKitGTK browsers as I guess they put an exception for Safari.
This is false. I ran firefox with:
* hardware acceleration disabled (so software renderer, nothing to fingerprint)
* resistfingerprinting enabled, including letterboxing with default window size
* webgl disabled
* VPN enabled
* In a Windows VM
By all accounts this should be the most suspicious fingerprint ever, but turnstile happily lets me through. If they want to track people, they're doing a pretty bad job. My guess is that OP's browser is getting banned because his WebKitGTK has a weird fingerprint, not because of webgl or whatever.
> Such things are blocked in WebKit, and have been for years. Meaning it's tracking so awful that even Apple would block it, and as far as I can tell it's not the kind of privacy protection you can easily disable in it.
This is also false. Webgl fingerprinting works just fine on Safari. They might try to mitigate it by adding some noise, but that's not so different than what firefox does, and is certainly not "blocked".
Normally websites feature test and just skip using obscure disabled APIs, or more likely, websites don't use those APIs at all or only tracking scripts use it, which are already optional usually.
Problem with CF is that if you want increased security they'll prevent you from gaining it everywhere, even on sites they don't protect, or prevent you from accessing services even the ones you paid for. Browsers don't allow disabling APIs per domain, so you're either at risk everywhere or you're blocked from accessing a lot of things for no particular reason.
CF can't be bothered to feature test.
Also by default addons.mozilla.org is a privileged site so of course they include google tracking in it and they get the proper fingerprint no matter what you have configured.
That pref is there for the Tor Browser.
For good reason. I've run that setting for ages but I kept having to disable it and add workarounds because websites would break in weird ways. Timezones in scheduling websites being messed up nearly made me miss a couple of appointments. There's no way to tell the user Firefox isn't broken without displaying a permanent banner like "if websites are broken in any way or you see weird glitches or your computer's time is wrong or fonts look weird or videos don't always work right, click here to disable fingerprinting protection".
Interestingly, Turnstile breaks with resistfingerprinting but works with fingerprintingProtection, I guess the latter takes this crap into account.
Yeah, this needs to be burned to the ground.
Obviously this is terrible, but I think there's a possibility it's the least terrible option? Another option is IP reputation, which I think is worse. Or scanning a code with a non-rooted phone, which I think is even worse than that!
I'm not good at creating petitions but can happily sign it. Also with stop killing games and anti-chat control.
I can imagine this can get a traction, if it's explained in youtube video to "normal" people.
Can you expand? I don't see a problem with some napkin math. 5W load for 2 seconds is 0.002Wh (we have to let smartphones pass and not by doing PoW for 10s of seconds). 8 billion checks a day for a year = 8GWh.
Bot protection with fingerprinting is just an illusion. Any signals like this which is on client side can be spoofed by an above average person. Fingerprinting is just way to consolidate the market for advertising business. Assigning Reputation to residential IP addresses and commercial blocks is is another approach to achieve the desired result. Providers would be a lot more careful to allow their IP addresses for misuses, however turns out that it would bring down the DDOS business on both sides, attackers and protectors.
Ironically, more than often its the same companies that invest in building their own bots and finding ways to stop bots from other companies.
I think the Web is on its last legs, anyway. Generative AI and LLM-instead-of-search has destroyed what little value remained.
Official Firefox can be leaky unless you build it yourself with some build-time changes or use a fork with such[0]. Am I guessing right that you still have Webcompat, RemoteSettings, and Nimbus enabled still? How do you know a compatibility intervention isn't causing your browser to open the kimono just enough to "unbreak the page"?
> My guess is that OP's browser is getting banned because his WebKitGTK has a weird fingerprint, not because of webgl or whatever.
My guess is a different flavor of the same: Not matching an expected fingerprint (simplified: whitelist vs blacklist approach) combined with other factors.
[0]: I'm currently aware of Tor Browser, Konform Browser (am dev), Mullvad Browser, and to a certain extent Waterfox, LibreWolf, and r3df0x doing that.
I doubt politicians care much about fingerprinting, though. They're more afraid of actual businesses getting attacked by bots than they are about Linux users with weird setups not being able to access some websites.
b. Accept Only Necessary Fingerprinting
More to the point, these systems actually help scraping because proof of work unlocks essentially unlimited scraping, in my experience.
That said - from my experience on the other side, sure you can’t stop people like me or you, but you can stop 99% of the others. That’s more than worth it operationally.
At the upper bound, fraud can always be committed by paying real people with real accounts to perform the desired action in a way that is 100% truly indistinguishable from organic. There's fundamentally actual prevention technique at the limit.
So the entire game is only "increasing the costs until it's not viable ROI", not "holistically prevent", which is why fingerprinting is a relevant technique here.
fingerprintingProtection works fine on the other hand, but then again that's intentionally less intrusive.
Aside from general dev, could use a hand in bringing it to more platforms (mobile and flatpak are frequently asked) and taking a closer look at fingerprinting protections and what's currently tripping up the turnstile.
I somewhat expect breaking sites with strict settings, I don’t expect an still wide open tracking path.
That’s deceiving.
Also enabled by default for Konform Browser and Mullvad Browser, which borrow many of the privacy- and security-related patches from Tor Browser.
You can forget about it. It is not possible. Simple as that.
In any case, according to some napkin math done by Kimi 2.6 (which by itself is probably already consuming more than all of my PoW challenges for the upcoming 5 years) - the situation looks incredibly in favor of PoW: https://www.kimi.com/share/19e7ef40-a432-8912-8000-0000b4a71...
Which makes me wonder why CloudFlare isn't switching to this already
Firefox with a non-default profile can be created like that:
./firefox -CreateProfile "profile-name /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/profile-dir/"
# For, say, cloudflare that would be:
./firefox -CreateProfile "cloudflare /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/cloudflare/"
And you can launch it like that: ./firefox -profile "/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/profile-dir/"
# For cloudflare that would be:
./firefox -profile "/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/cloudflare/"
So, given that /usr/bin/firefox is just a shell script, you can - create a copy of it, say, /usr/bin/firefox-cloudflare
- adjust the relevant line, adding the -profile argument
If you use an icon to run firefox (say, /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop), you'll need to do copy/adjust line for the icon.Of course, "./firefox" from examples above should be replaced with the actual path to executable. For default installation of Firefox the path would be in /usr/bin/firefox script.
So, you can have a separate profiles for something sensitive/invasive (linkedin, cloudflare, shops, banks, etc.) and then you can have a separate profile for everything else.
And each profile can have its own set of extensions.
(That said, I still keep separate machines. One for doing "official" things, the other for everything else)
So why is Cloudflare saying the author got blocked because of WebGL?
> > Such things are blocked in WebKit, and have been for years. Meaning it's tracking so awful that even Apple would block it, and as far as I can tell it's not the kind of privacy protection you can easily disable in it.
> This is also false. Webgl fingerprinting works just fine on Safari. They might try to mitigate it by adding some noise, but that's not so different than what firefox does, and is certainly not "blocked".
While I don't have an iDevice to try, the assumption that they are special cased is fair... because they are: https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...
(Yes, this is basically WEI in a shinier package.)
There isn't one, and pretending otherwise is nonsense because humans will always provide their credentials to something to act on their behalf.
In the limit you end up with Chinese phone farms.
Cloudflare, Google Captcha, HCaptcha etc. are all shitty technical solutions because, as we are all discovering, it comes at the cost of our privacy (i.e. our personal data may monetise these services) and / or our computing resource and time. If current copyright laws aren't sufficient to prevent this, we have to acknowledge the system is broken. The answer could be enhancing it with some kind of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -like laws, but in favour of the creators against BigTech or rogue actors.
- Web-scraping and copyright law - https://www.neudata.co/blog/web-scraping-and-copyright-law
- Why DMCA Claims Against Web Scrapers Face Long Odds - https://capstonedc.com/insights/why-dmca-claims-against-web-...
Which sounds extremely difficult to differentiate
does it? same binary, same machine, same display, same 781 other heuristics.
No idea. I can't even reproduce the error OP got with webgl disabled.
I think this was as recent as 25 years ago?
Recently they added some new UI. There was and still is (I think) classic Profile Manager UI, which you can launch with
./firefox -ProfileManager
or access UI in about:profiles.But you don't have to use any of those anyway - see my comment above (a response to parent).
But in principle I agree that there's no good answer to this, scraping _is_ useful and I bet most of us here had scraped something, it is AI company and their use of human's material for training without consent and return that led us to this (I know botting exists in forum since forum is a thing but it is easily solved by human moderators and keyword filter)
As for issues like bots overloading websites or using too many resources scaling laws will take care of it quickly, it’s not like you can’t serve thousands of RPS from a Raspberry Pi these days.
See my other comment, tor browser works fine too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48346659
> we have to acknowledge the system is broken
The system is broken. It probably takes, what, 10 seconds or less to use a residential or foreign proxy, 6+ months to internationally track and prosecute a single offender? So like a million times more effort going the regulatory route.
Then when it's "processing", do them in bulk and prioritize slower users. There's huge opportunity do bot checks after checkout without affecting user experience.
Also on product launches you could add unique field which requires user to input, for example that way bots can't prepare for launches.
Even simply changing the user agent was sabotaged at Firefox, and choosing one user agent per domain is wishful thinking.
I don't use Anubis though. I just make my site not take five seconds to render a page so bots can overload it easily? It's not actually that hard?
So it’s not quite as horrible as it sounds.
I have setting up Anubis for my own sites on my todo list. And I wish more people did it too. I don’t really mind waiting a little bit extra every now and then before the page loads. What I do mind is ReCaptcha asking me to click all the pictures with buses in them etc. And especially when I have to do it several times over before it’s happy. I’d rather wait a minute for a page to load than to ever solve a ReCaptcha again, if given the choice.
And there are just not enough sites using Anubis for the people and companies running the bots to care to do that.
If you do care bypassing Anubis is trivial.
Anubis is active when a user agent looks like a web browser (e.g. contains the "Mozilla" substring every major browser uses). The reverse proxy serves an interstitial page that does a proof-of-work check, validated server side, setting a cookie if it passes.
This means a legitimate user won't constantly get the proof of work check, because they already passed it. But AI bots rotating through tons of residential IPs to scrape your forum or git forge or whatever will be slowed down.
Overall, I like the idea. It's unobtrusive, privacy preserving, and seems to be working out well for a lot of sites.
Some sort of decentralized trust web seems like another option, though less viable.
And then legislation required those consent boxes back, so everyone built their own, instead of demanding that the default should be changed back.
They don't now, but enough "high value to the bots" pages turning on JS or complicated redirects will simply result in the bot authors adding JS execution or redirect following so they can continue "botting" the sites they want to scrape.
It's a hole with no bottom. Each one-up on the anti-bot side will eventually be handled on the bot side.
Nevertheless even for these high value cases, you can still argue that it disincentivizes the business model, it becomes less efficient.
Cloudflare's demo page still treats that as a pass, but complains about it. As is often the case with Cloudflare, I expect that they'll then take no responsibility for sites that use more aggressive settings.
Since about a week, Cloudflare Turnstile (their "Verify you're human" device verification) has been looping indefinitely in my webkit-gtk based browser. Preventing access to quite few websites (previously, but it even went worse lately).
Turns out it's because Cloudflare wants to have a fingerprint of your device via WebGL, the only reason for doing this would be tracking.

Screenshot of Turnstile test page, "WebGL renderer info is spoofed"
Their pro-tracking non-justification copied here just in case:
Turnstile uses browser fingerprinting to verify you're human. Privacy tools that block or randomize fingerprinting make your browser look like a bot trying to hide its identity. Temporarily allowing fingerprinting for this site will fix the issue.
Such things are blocked in WebKit, and have been for years. Meaning it's tracking so awful that even Apple would block it, and as far as I can tell it's not the kind of privacy protection you can easily disable in it.
So Cloudflare just banned all WebKitGTK browsers as I guess they put an exception for Safari.
As an aside, if you're wondering, Mozilla Firefox screwed up their WebGL fingerprinting protection: Bugzilla#1916271: Gecko reveals sanitized GPU Characteristics; webkit and blink return hardcoded strings for all users

Screenshot of Turnstile test page on Firefox 145.0 passing with no issues.
Plus privacy.resistfingerprinting isn't enabled even when selecting "Strict" "Enhanced Privacy Protection" in the settings, great job there Mozilla.
But I guess with it enabled, privacy-conscious Firefox users might not be able to pass Cloudflare's device verification in the future.

Screenshot of Turnstile test page on Firefox 145.0 passing with just "Canvas Randomization Detected"; after enabling privacy.resistfingerprinting manually.