Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers

An alternative: <meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="script-src 'self' https://only-scripts-allowed-from-here.com">

This makes the client only load self-hosted scripts, or scripts only from the specified origins, among the other directives CSP allows (e.g. restricting styles, images, frames, etc.): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/CSP

Indeed, https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-rum-diaries-enabling-web-ana...

Yikes! I see this too:

<script type="module" src="https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/v4513226..." integrity="sha512-ZE9pZaUXND66v380QUtch/5sE9tPFh2zg45pR2PB0CVkCtOREv2AJKkSidISWkysEuQ0EH8faUU5du78bx87UQ==" data-cf-beacon='{"version":"2024.11.0","token":"c0859b51a7804ab5a9cc8e9e2b2c4cde","r":1}' crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

If you're only using Cloudfare for DNS, but HTTPS connections go directly to your server, how does it inject HTML?

You must be allowing Cloudfare to terminate your HTTPS connections; i.e. using them for actual proxying.

Are you using CF as a proxy or only for DNS? I ask because I just went to check my domains on the dashboard (some purchased a few years ago, one purchased just a couple days ago), and none of them have Web Analytics enabled.

I have all my domains set to DNS only, so no CF proxy. Wondering if that is why?

Yes, they add the js if "web analytics" is enabled. I believe I had to manually enable it on my old sites though. Maybe it's enabled by default when adding new domains?

Took me a minute to realise this isn't 1.1.1.1 (which Cloudflare also runs), but their original website DNS hosting service.

This reminds me of the old free hosts that would inject their own scripts/ads on pages hosted by them, but their implementation would do it only after detecting the closing HTML tag (either </body> or </html>, can't remember) and the various tricks to get around it, including omitting the tag (browsers don't care), rAnDoM case tags (some were hardcoding lower or upper and comparing case-sensitively), and messing with the content type and relying on the browser to detect correctly since it didn't inject into other types (not sure how the current browsers will handle that).

Isn't this well known when using CF as a proxy? Not sure how they would provide traffic / DDoS telemetry otherwise.

> injected a JS analytics snippet in my HTML-only JS-free site textlog.cc

Cloudflare injected hostile code into a site they are not even hosting? If it's HTTPS, how do they even do that?

Does it violate the "exceeds authorized access" provision in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

Is there an opt-out mechanism at least? CF is burning goodwill in months it built over the last decade.

I noticed the same thing with email-decode.min.js on my site. It turns out it's the "Email Address Obfuscation" feature, which I didn't expect to be on by default.

yep, last website I did was JS free 100% except that pesky cloudflare script

It's not necessary to use Cloudflare hosted DNS to use R2 with a custom subdomain.

Make a CNAME record the same way you would for a CDN subdomain.

(I am not yet running this in production, YMMV.)

Thank you for this. I indeed had it up on mine. Cloudflare has switched defaults a couple times now, which honestly is wild to me.

We use Cloudflare tunnels for connecting distributed workers to central infrastructure. Haven't seen this on tunnel traffic, but good to know it happens on nameserver-managed sites. Another reason to audit what your CDN injects — same applies to checking your security headers regularly.

A public service reminder to anyone setting up their domains that there are many alternatives to Cloudflare, like EG Bunny.net (I am not affiliated, just a happy customer) and that by using one of these other DNS providers, you

- play your small part in keeping the Internet open

- delay or avoid entirely the enshittification that is 100% foreseeable when buying the "free" services of a quasi-monopoly vendor.

If you're not an enterprise customer, alternate providers will also give you every single feature you could ever need and more, and fewer surprises like the OP's.

Surprise! The man in the middle man-in-the-middles! This is only the beginning, when you’ll get used to this they’ll do worse and worse, enshittification, remember?

To add to your experience: It was also very hard, for me, to find the setting that disables this JavaScript.

Spies. Spies everywhere

Noticed this the other day as well. Sketchy as fuck. I didn't have analytics enabled. I had to go and enable to get access to the option to turn this off

You left out the part about how you use them as a reverse proxy, which is decoupled from DNS. One is coincidental; the other required.

If they can inject script, they can also snoop on all your cleartext traffic without you knowing....

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