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by ByQuyzzy 804 days ago
I just use Tor Browser. It's kind of a pain with Cloudflare always trying to de-anonymize me but I figure, it's better than using the clearweb.
1 comments

What do you mean Cloudflare is always trying to de-anonymise?

Still amazes me that Tor exists simply to hide American (and no doubt other Five-Eyes) spies among the ‘privacy advocates’ and others.

I admit, I used to believe in the ‘Tor mission’ for years and years.

Cloudflare attempts to guard sites using it against malicious traffic. To figure out if traffic is malicious, it has to sort out the "smell" of it: is it probably legit, or is it probably a known scraper / a penetration test attack / a DOS attack?

Some of that is done by inspecting the shape of packets but to figure out if, for example, a sudden spike in QPS is a legit novel interest in the data stored at the resource or a DDOS attack, Cloudflare's automated system will try to figure out if multiple incoming requests are actually from the same source and will throttle them all if they're determined to be hostile. Because, well, that's how you guard against DDOS in an automated fashion.

And in the middle, when Cloudflare can't determine the shape of the incoming traffic, it'll hit it with more scrutiny to check if it's automated. So if you're browsing with Tor, Cloudflare doesn't have a history on your requests to decide if they have a good past-behavior pedigree, so it ups the scrutiny: it'll try to cookie you and it'll throw up more CAPTCHAs to make you prove you're a legit human user of Tor and not someone trying to use Tor to hide a DDOS.

I mean what I say. There is no reason for Cloudflare's browser checks outside of their desire to de-anonymize Tor users.
The checks are to make sure you're using an actual browser and not some sort of automated program like curl to make 100k requests.
Nah they’re to individually identify your unique computer.
I don't play the sauce game with reputation managers. And they haven't ended captcha.
Tor is notoriously slow and bandwidth limited. That's not the reason.
5Tbps of botnet bandwidth isn't the only way to do a DDoS attack. L7 attacks can be pulled off with far less bandwidth.