CloudHole: make CloudFlare’s I’m not a robot captchas appear less often

One of the disadvantages of connecting to a VPN or Tor is the dreaded "I'm not a robot" message that you get on every site you visit that uses CloudFlare.

An intermediary page is displayed to you that notifies you that there is "one more step" to complete before you can access the site you want to load in your browser of choice.

You need to check the I'm not a robot" box, and complete one or multiple captchas first before you are allowed to access the site you want to visit.

Cloudflare uses different types of captchas, for instance multiple choice ones where you need to select all matching items on an image map.

CloudHole

The main issue here is that you need to repeat the process on every site using CloudFlare, and sometimes even on the same site if you reload it.

I always wondered by CloudFlare would not make the system more comfortable by whitelisting an IP address for a certain amount of time after a user successfully confirmed to the service that an actual user was trying to access the site protected by the service.

The brand new Firefox add-on CloudHole attempts to do just that by storing user agent and clearance cookie when solving captcha codes so that they can be reused on other sites.

This add-on stores the user agent and clearance cookie when you solve a captcha, and re-uses it on other websites as long as it's still valid, easing the pain during your browsing session.

So, instead of having to go through captchas on every site while using a VPN or Tor, you only have to fill out some.

CloudHole cannot get rid of them completely but it can make the whole process more comfortable by reducing the number of captcha codes you need to solve.

The extension for Firefox ships with an API that allows users to share valid cookies which gets cookies from other users for use on your system.

You can click on the add-on icon to manage CloudHole API access and check out user agents, clearance cookie data and the API key.

Closing Words

The idea behind CloudHole makes sense. If you visit lots of sites throughout the day and get cookies for each that is using CloudFlare, you know how time consuming and annoying this can be.

CloudHole on the other hand does not resolve the issue completely but you will get less I'm not a robot prompts while using it.

If you don't feel comfortable using the API provided, disable the feature so that only locally saved cookies and information are used to improve the process.