CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#81

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:02 PM UTC

voidlogic wrote: post #76

lost_my_pwd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. This is the first I have heard of this and CloudFlare's reputation has just gone up my eyes because of it. Is ISIS dangerous and deplorable? Sure. Are there ideas so dangerous that they do not deserve to be exposed to public discourse and judged on their merits? I don't think so.

I don't follow; CloudFlare is not the government, therefore freedom of expression isn't really the issue here. Who they choose to give a voice to says a lot about them. I would oppose the government censoring ISIS; however, I would be proud of any company that refused to to business with them.

> Who they choose to give a voice to says a lot about them.

I don't think they're choosing to give anyone specific a voice. I think they're choosing not to make judgement calls.

Once you start blocking anyone, you've weakened your ability to refuse to block others. You'd see greater demands for blocking Wikileaks, censoring articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime, enforcing Europe's right-to-be-forgotten, etc. on the basis of "well you were willing to block ISIS".

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#82

Post by voidlogic » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:23 PM UTC

gozo wrote: post #80

voidlogic wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow; CloudFlare is not the government, therefore freedom of expression isn't really the issue here. Who they choose to give a voice to says a lot about them. I would oppose the government censoring ISIS; however, I would be proud of any company that refused to to business with them.

Shouldn't you also be upset over all the other service providers including your own ISP that also doesn't block those sites? Unless it's specifically against protecting people against criminal activity, in which case we are really going down a slippery slope.

>Shouldn't you also be upset over all the other service providers including your own ISP that also doesn't block those sites?

I would argue that the moral dilemma is different if you choose to allow ISIS traffic to pass through you, vs have them as a client.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#83

Post by Kalium » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:27 PM UTC

billyhoffman wrote: post #74

Kalium wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience in web-dev is that browser support for color profiles is dodgy at best. Much like alpha in PNGs. It's usually wiser to not rely on occasionally-supported features. PNG alpha in particular was a nightmare for me. After that I knew to look out for the pain caused by occasionally-supported features in images.

This "much like alpha in PNGs" makes it sound like you think this is a recent problem we still have to deal with. It's not: http://caniuse.com/#feat=png-alpha PNG alpha transparency was a problem with the decade old IE6. And even then IE6 worked fine with PNG8 images that had alpha transparency. IE7 and IE8 required a 1 line style attribute to work 100% with PNG + alpha, and IE9 did away with that need altogether.

The problem of haphazard feature support is not new, no.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#84

Post by rwhitman » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:28 PM UTC

chrissnell wrote: post #55

verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back. CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service,…

Cloudflare may be under court order by the DoD to keep ISIS on their network and protecting classified information with the free speech rationalization. Anti terrorist operations are much easier to conduct when the terrorists are using American communications infrastructure.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#85

Post by jsprogrammer » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:31 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #41

hueving wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can cache it, they can read it.

Then I shall restate with greater precision. The operating mode described by the comment to which I was responding, that of CloudFlare performing all steps of SSL termination, is one operating mode available. CloudFlare offers at least one other operating mode in which they are not responsible for all aspects of SSL termination. In particular, they offer an operating mode in which they do not hold private keys. This…

"Keyless SSL" is a bit of a misnomer. CloudFlare still holds the keys to encrypt and decrypt the content it is distributing and therefore sees everything (they can inject into your traffic as well). Even if they don't hold the private key, they can act in every way as if they did hold the private key.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#86

Post by duaneb » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:43 PM UTC

chrissnell wrote: post #55

verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back. CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service,…

I think it's perfectly valid ISIS have a platform. Gagging angry people is not going to calm them down or prevent them from communicating.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#87

Post by duaneb » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:45 PM UTC

voidlogic wrote: post #82

gozo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't you also be upset over all the other service providers including your own ISP that also doesn't block those sites? Unless it's specifically against protecting people against criminal activity, in which case we are really going down a slippery slope.

>Shouldn't you also be upset over all the other service providers including your own ISP that also doesn't block those sites? I would argue that the moral dilemma is different if you choose to allow ISIS traffic to pass through you, vs have them as a client.

I would argue it's better for them to have their own site rather than fostering a samizdat culture.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#88

Post by manigandham » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:50 PM UTC

To offset some of the feedback here, we run close to a billion requests a month through CloudFlare with no issues at all. We use their Strict SSL setting and everything is fast and secure and we save a ton on bandwidth.

As far as CDN service goes, free SSL and bandwidth and peering + all of their datacenter locations + DNS integration gives us better latency than pretty much everyone else we've tried.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#89

Post by chrissnell » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

duaneb wrote: post #86

chrissnell wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back. CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service,…

I think it's perfectly valid ISIS have a platform. Gagging angry people is not going to calm them down or prevent them from communicating.

That's not entirely true. ISIS fuels its ground combat force with angry young people recruited via predominately through social media. The social media often consists of video sharing and much of the video is served up from sites like isdarat.tv (now apparently gone) that are/were fronted by CloudFlare. YouTube and Facebook are efficient with their censoring; ISIS needs stable hosting for these videos for maximum efficacy and CF provided them with that.

Gagging these people certainly won't calm them down or stop their communication but it has a real effect on their recruitment, which is directly driving their combat operations in the Middle East and as a second-order effect, the flood of refugees to Europe.

Re: CloudFlare and Google Cloud Platform

#90

Post by mhuffman » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

chrissnell wrote: post #55

verelo wrote: post #18

I want to love CloudFlare, I really do. We currently use them, but sadly the number of times that CloudFlare has been the cause of a service interruption is somewhere around 50% mark. They are no longer in use on any critical/important end points, I just don't need PagerDuty waking us up over an issue I have no control over. This is not a problem I expect to improve. As they start to cover all of the web, i imagine t…

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back. CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service,…

I actually get this. If they don't take a hardline on censorship, they would be inundated with "offended" people wanted every site on the Internet removed from their edge caches because someone in the world found them offensive. Much better to just say, "We don't censor, take it up with the website owner!"