Cloudflare proxy of deathvalleydriver.com fucked in central Europe

[Robert S]

It seems that Cloudflare (or at least the server used for proxying this page) is fucked since last Friday for users located in central Europe (at least Austria and Germany seem to be effected). There are several threads open in the Cloudflare community but so far Cloudflare has not reacted on any of them. The effected servers are 188.114.96.12 and 188.114.97.12. The only workaround listed in the community (besides using a VPN which I am currently doing; I played around using some free proxies yesterday but did not really get anywhere due to SSL errors left and right) is trying to clear your DNS cache until you get lucky and the site is not resolved using one of those two servers.

EDIT: using a different DNS server (I am using the Google DNS server now) seems to work. Still, it would be good if one of the admins here could try to create a support request at Cloudflare (because I would think that it is simple luck which Cloudflare proxy the DNS server suggests to try to resolve the domain, i.e. what works today might not work tomorrow).

Edited August 28, 2022 by Robert s

[Robert S]

Okay, some site offering illegal stuff apparently was using Cloudflare for proxying too and the site got banned in Austria (and I guess in Germany, as there seem to be issues too) by court order. And those fuckers not just banned the domain but the IP address as well, i.e. blocking those Cloudflare servers. Blocking IP addresses in addition to the domain seems pretty silly to me (at least if you don't check what these IP addresses are as definitely was the case here). I guess Cloudflare can say goodbye to those IP addresses (as appealing to this decision is very likely much more expensive).

[Technico Support]

Find out which DNS entry is the good one and then put it in your hosts file!

[Robert S]

The restriction got reverted, I can access the page with my default DNS server again. The whole thing got a bit of media coverage (I mean they blocked a whole bunch of IP addresses of one of biggest reverse proxy providers of the world). Apparently, some lawyers sent a request to block a couple of domains AND the IP addresses related to them. This was the first such case since 2019 or so and in 2020 there has been an Austrian supreme court decision that basically says that in case an ISP does not fulfill a block request and it turns out that the site was doing something illegal, the ISP opens itself to litigation. Anyway, once the thing became public today, the ISPs quickly reacted and removed the Cloudflare IPs from the block list.

Long story short: judges know nothing about the internet (besides how to read their e-mails) and this thread can be closed.

Edited August 29, 2022 by Robert s

[Ryan]

I don't believe for a second they know how to read their e-mails properly.