Thomas . Your problem is not cloudfare . They dont hijack peoples connections . The site your trying to get to probably has a deal with cloudfare to filter the incomming connections . A VPN for security !!! = Joan of ark , gahandi , martin luther king , jesus , budha , mohamed have not been raised from the dead to open a holy VPN ..... and trust is for children and victims . You TRUST strangers !?! ...... with your valuables !!! ....... and you advertise it with a VPN ....... look at me i have something to hide !!! Thats what honey pots are for = gulible people that have things tpo hide and make statements against themselves .
Depending on how your vpn is configured it may enctipt the traffic but not the DNS request Practically someone (tipically google) knows the list of the websites you are visiting even if the content of the site comes encrypted via the vpn. If the dns are encrypted the list of your dns request are encrypted as well. A bit naive sentence It's not like someone is interfering with your internet activity, everyone is interfering to your internet activity. Potentially you can have 30 hops to reach a website and you have 30 routers that can do something with your connection. Your ISP can do some traffic shaping, and can do that per content type Your government may force your national DNS server to reuse or reroute your request, the website owner can decide that the activity is suspicious depending on location, even your antivirus, if you use one, blocks some website w/o asking you first So where's the news? Try to use TOR and you'll get captchas even on google.com, no matter if you use TOR because you're a criminal or just a citizen looking for privacy
You are of course correct, but... No one in his right mind has been using Tor for a few years now, and still believes he is "safe". I am aware that there are problems possible with VPNs too. But that captcha plague has only started a few years ago, because website owners are outsouring their security at the expense of their user's privacy! And they do so, WITHOUT informing their users! Trying to access a website and instead receiving a pop up that literally tells you that "We are now checking your browser" is a bit of an insult. Shoshana Zuboffs book is a few years old by now, so people can know what is going on.... and seemingly unstoppable. I find it a bit sad how unaware even a site MDL is, to use garbage like that, because it is convenient...
My point was not about safety but about the announce captcha thing, safety is a bigger matter that can't be exhausted in few forum messages. Well it's their website basically they have no obligations about how the service is provided,unless you are a contractor that discussed and signed the term before. Now first you are upset because they do things w/o informing you and now you are upset for the opposite motivation... Any website checks your browser, some limits the check to the user agent alone, some do some deeper inspection, usually to provide you the website version that fits your need, say PC v.s. Mobile or IE v.s. other browser and so on... Cloudflare probably tries to check that your browser is a real browser and not an automated script meant to trigger a DOS attack or alike Speaking of the captcha service itself, personally I'm more upset by the fact that most modern capchas are a work you do, for free, for some one else. Do you ever asked why you see traffic lights and cars on them? Well you are feeding an AI meant to improve the self driving cars, years ago when you got distorted letters you were helping the digitization of books and paper documents