Let’s say somebody has a blog that I’d like to read. Subscribe to even. Let’s say they have an RSS link on their page. This should be easy.

Now let’s say the blog in question is hosted/proxied/whatever by Cloudflare. Uh oh.

Just reading the blog in my browser is now somewhat hampered because Cloudflare thinks I’m some sort of cyberterrorist and requires my browser to run a javascript anti-turing test. But eventually the blog loads, I read it, click the RSS link to subscribe, see that it is in fact XML rendered in my browser, and copy the link.

I paste the link into my RSS reader, optimistically hoping to see new links arrive. But they never do. Check the logs. Seems I’m getting 503 server errors, which is Cloudflare’s way of saying, “It’s not us; it’s you. And fuck off.”

Apparently my feed fetcher is also a cyberterrorist. It’s also written in python and can’t solve browser detecting riddles because it doesn’t include a javascript engine because OMG why would fetching an RSS feed require javascript?

Now I’m somewhat less inclined to read said blog, but hey, at least the internet is being kept fast and secure from miscreants like me.