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Anyone else noticing a lot more "Access Denied" pages while using hardened Firefox lately? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 9 months ago by Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I use Firefox whenever I can.

On first install of the browser I usually end up following a hardening guide which includes stuff like blocking cross site cookies, setting a few things in about:config to disable Pocket/etc, and installing uBlock Origin. I've taken what I consider a relatively balanced approach, I don't use anything like noScript, uMatrix, etc that ultimately just cost a lot of time fiddling to get the 10th website of the week working.

I've been more or less fine browsing the web this way for years, but around the start of 2024 I've started seeing way more "Access Denied" pages than I used to. I think part of it is Cloudflare or similar, but I don't know exactly what's changed or what's triggering it to occur.

It usually goes away and I can re access the site in 10-30 minutes as usual, but I've had it occur in really weird instances, such as trying to change my Minecraft skin and getting blocked by the website. The server block often goes away immediately if I switch my user agent, so I know that it has something to do with how I've got everything set up.

Not sure what anyone else's experience with this has been. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts and tips

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[–] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I'm using LibreWolf, Firefox and Tor browser since years (I love LW and TB, sometimes FF is needed for less restrictions for some sites). With LibreWolf I don't see any more access denied messages lately. On Tor browser this happens from time to time, but I don't see an increase. When using VPN I see these sometimes in LW and FF but didn't notice an increase. I guess it depends a lot which web sites one visits. I usually stick to mainstream news, tech sites (like Stackexchange) and not much more. With LW and FF I often use the cool LibRedirect Firefox add-on to avoid some tracking and ads, maybe that helps. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/

Regarding Cloudflare : I think this really also depends on how the website user has configured their Cloudflare settings. For example with Anna's Archives where I once in a while check for an e-book Cloudflare has not been offensive at all for the download links. Cloudflare is there checking, but no nagging (captcha), no blocking even with Tor browser. It is even possible that the default Cloudflare settings are pretty hostile towards Tor and VPN users, but that the website admins have no idea that it is so, and just followed some popular howtos how to configure Cloudflare for their site.

[–] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 9 months ago

I have found that it happens more frequently with sites I've either not been to before, or not visited for a long time... Again it does seem to go away after 20 minutes or so for any given website, I just find it weird that it seems to be happening more.

I might have been exaggerating the degree to which this happens... It's been only around 5-10 occurrences since the start of the year, but it happened so rarely before that point in time I barely noticed. Could also be a coincidence, it's just barely enough though that I've been starting to get suspicious and wonder if anyone else was having issues

But yeah no VPN or anything and it's occurred across 3 of my devices, only thing in common was Firefox and that I've taken steps to harden it on all of them