Hi folks on the avast support forums. From me best wishes for the coming New Year 2022.
May you stay free of any mishap both offline as well as online.
This time my question was: ""Who is behind CloudFlare?".
Whenever you do an IP look-up at a CloudFlare protected website, like for instance shodan.io,
CloudFlare may block you as a visitor. This is whenever they cannot fully identify you.
You cannot go there anonymously. No tor-users are allowed on their platform either,
even when you aren't into any mischief.
You are banned until you can give proof of who you really are as a human being (real IP).
In such cases it can be interesting to know who is behind a certain CloudFlare reversed proxy address.
You can look it up at:
https://securitytrails.com/list/ip/104.18.12.238 (example for shodan.io) (random example by me, pol).
Mind to do your look-ups at securitytrails.com not from behind a proxy, else you also meet with their endless captcha,
even when you are not a bot and strictly a human anonymous. They also are CloudFlare driven.
It is a pity the extension to see whether one was safe from NSA spoofing on a particular website,
is now no longer available as a Google's or cromium extension.
Their new extension and api restricting settings will make blocking etc. much harder.
Coming to a browser near you in the forecoming months, I think May 2022.
A couple of extension developers have already thrown the towel into the developer's ring.
Well the going gets narrow, as some clamps seem to be coming down.
It is a pity really and actually a shame for the last bit of end-user-autonomy.
I use a London-based in-browser proxy by Digital Ocean in the browser
and have experienced above scenario various times.
polonus