Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I've become less enamored of Startpage since it was acquired by a commercial outfit in 2019, and started seeing targeted ads. The last straw occurred today when instead of searching for me it, put up a blocking screen stating:

"We apologize for the inconvenience: to prevent possible abuse of the Startpage.com service, your Internet connection has been prevented from accessing it at this time. This happens when a large number of search requests are received from one's Internet connection in a short amount of time -- for example, if you are using "screen-scraping" software, or if you are sharing a connection with many people, perhaps through a proxy service."

Uh, no, I don't use screen scraping, proxy service, Tor, etc. Just vanilla Seamonkey, and about 20-30 searches max a day. No way to do a search, now since it's the default engine. Well, time to change that.

Google, nope. DuckDuckGo -- I want to like it, but it just misses so many search results that Goog and Startp provided, that it just isn't good enough. Is anyone here using something else that provides good results with minimal tracking?

The blocking seems to be tied only to the Seamonkey browser. I'm able to run FireFox and access Startpage without a problem.

To check it on Seamonkey, I cleared Startpage's cookies, deleted cache, and private data, and rebooted, but I still get the blocking screen. I just tried to access StartPage on Seamonkey in both Tahr32 and Bionic64, and I get the same blocking screen on both.

But on both I CAN access Startpage in Firefox. So it looks like it is blocking the Seamonkey browser for some reason.

I can also boot this laptop into Windows. So I did, and tried Seamonkey on Win7. It put up the same block message.

So here's the tally:

All instances of Seamonkey in this household are blocked from accessing StarPage. That covers 3 computers and 3 operating systems tested (Win7, and Bionic64 and Tahr32).

All instances of Firefox in the same household on the same computers, with all 3 operating systems can access Startpage with no problem. Therefore the IP is not blocked, just the Seamonkey browsers.

Because the problem has persisted even after I have wiped Seamonkey's cookies, cache and offline website data, I'm guessing Startpage may be blocking erroneously based simply on the Seamonkey user-agent.

Just tried seamonkey in 4 different puppies or EasyOS, Seamonkey versions tried were 2.53.2, 2.53.4, 2.53.7.1 and 2.53.8. All versions checked are able to access startpage and returned search results.

The last one tried was EasyOS Dunfell 2.8.4, which has Seamonkey 2.53.8. This is the user agent from that install:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0

Thanks TerryH. I just tried it here as well and now it works. No idea why any of this went on. I did write to Startpage to tell them what was happening to me, and also wrote it up on Mozillazine. I don't know if the restoration is coincidental. But we'll see if it continues.

I don't use Startpage, but on a whim, I tried it. I got the same error. This is of no consequence to me.

Hi,

Slightly off topic but as of yesterday Startpage is blocking Palemoon browser in exactly the same way.
Have used Startpage and Palemoon for many years but Startpage now useless.

Will try

Quant.com

and

Swisscows.com

Have you seen this info on their support page?
https://support.startpage.com/index.php ... 2/browsers

funny they have something about a lot of different browsers.
Seamonkey all they tell you is how to make them the default search.

Have you tried to set Seamonkey to spoof being Firefox?

Startpage is working fine in my Seamonkey(s) since the issue was brought up (here, on Mozillazine, and directly with them). I did not mention a failure with Palemoon -- as I didn't know about it

Bigpup, in answer to your question, no I didn't try to spoof a Firefox user agent string in Seamonkey. In fact I did come across a page on Startpage's support where they indicated that spoofing user agents was one of the things their automatic anti-bot software apparently looks for in blocking searches. So that would have been counter-productive see last paragraph of the below support note:

https://support.startpage.com/index.php ... -addresses

My guess at this point is that they implemented a faulty filter for that, and ended up blocking some alternative browsers like Seamonkey and Palemoon. Maybe notifying them about Seamonkey solved it for that browser (or mine anyway). Don't know if they are aware about Palemoon.