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Cloudflare S-1

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Re: Cloudflare S-1

#101

Post by the_duke »

nannal wrote: post #92
OrgNet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is getting too big so I'm all for anything that could possibly make it smaller

In defense of this user we have had a few system wide outages which have shut down major communications networks and news outlets. Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts. Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.

Site owners can turn off the captcha by reducing the security level. I understand why it exists, I just wish they didn't use a Google service for it...

The lack of competition probably shows the difficulty of the task. A global CDN is complicated and expensive (physical infrastructure, all the interconnect agreements) and a big technical challenge.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#102

Post by edm0nd »

patrickmcnamara wrote: post #87
666lumberjack wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like CFR and CLD are already taken, to be fair

There's still CLFL and CFLR and probably others.

an interesting article from the other day, Confused investors keep buying FORD, thinking it's Ford - https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/12/investing/ticker-symbol-confu...

Maybe they are trying to stop these types of scenarios by using NET.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#103

Post by skrowl »

superkuh wrote: post #30
leetrout wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an interesting opinion. What about being publicly traded makes you think they’ll me more incentivized to censor? Facebook’s performance suggests that playing fast and loose is preferable

So far the CEO has twice bowed to public pressure and unilaterally removed completely legal websites from the service because he perceived hosting them made Cloudflare's brand look bad. As a publicly traded company the company is now actually accountable (rather than just in his head) to a slice of public opinion and to keep the brand as profitable as possible. That means not providing services for anything controver…

As Daily Stormer and 8chan have shown, CloudFlare has very few competitors and seemingly none that don't censor.

8chan jumped ship to BitMitigate when CloudFlare dropped them, and then BitMitigate dumped them when they had their backbone link yanked out from under them.

Neither site broke any US laws, but they were both controversial.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#104

Post by OrgNet »

nannal wrote: post #92
OrgNet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is getting too big so I'm all for anything that could possibly make it smaller

In defense of this user we have had a few system wide outages which have shut down major communications networks and news outlets. Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts. Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.

thanks a lot for articulating my point better then I did, but I don't really care about the downvotes because I know that my opinion will be accepted within 5-10 years if the trend keeps going the way it is... ;)

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#105

Post by gmanley »

dsl wrote: post #65
groundlogic wrote: post #9

Finally an IPO I want to buy into. Technical fundamentals matter. Edit: I mean that in the software/service way, not the economical way, in case there was any confusion.

> Technical fundamentals matter. Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing for people who care about technical fundamentals.

If you are just using the basic service for a firewall/DDOS protection and CDN there doesn't seem to be much lock in. If other competitors come along, and they undoubtedly will if Cloudflare proves the value of the market, it should just be a matter of switching your DNS records to said competitor. Maybe I'm not imaginative enough, so please share if I'm not thinking of something, but it doesn't seem like their market share makes it harder for other competitors, they aren't monopolistic.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#106

Post by jrockway »

Am I reading this right when it looks likes they spend twice as much money on sales as engineering?

There was also a very strange spike in stock compensation in 2018, $27,000,000 compared to $2,755,000 in the previous year and $1,849,000 in the next. What happened there?

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#107

Post by jorvi »

nannal wrote: post #92
OrgNet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is getting too big so I'm all for anything that could possibly make it smaller

In defense of this user we have had a few system wide outages which have shut down major communications networks and news outlets. Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts. Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.

CloudFlare offers Privacy Pass where with 1 captcha completion you generate something like 20 tokens, meaning you can bypass 20 captchas after that. Sadly nearly every website just uses pure Google captcha which forces you to go through the ordeal every single time.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#108

Post by cosmie »

btown wrote: post #96
cosmie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I've mentioned the first aspect of that in the past here[1][2]. The interconnect benefit never occurred to me, though. That's a neat aspect! Which just continues to reinforce what I said at the end of [2], about their business model instilling confidence in leveraging them at a free-tier level. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411

Yea, it didn't occur to me either - as implementers we'd be like "why would we want the responsibility of so much scale that we need to support without corresponding revenue," but in their position they can say "we need all the tooling for that scale anyways, why don't we leverage that into better bulk discounts with the interconnections!" And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interc…

> And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader.

It's basically real world chaos monkeys that are stress testing their systems.

Combined with signal intelligence, those chaos monkeys are actively improving their systems.

Then, as a final bonus, absorbing the DDoS attacks aimed at those chaos monkeys (and their paid tier) provides a lot of globally diverse and distributed inbound traffic to them, favorably offsetting the outbound traffic they're serving from from their network. Improving their position during interconnect negotiations.

There are quite natural synergies that emerge as a product of their particular choices in structuring their business. Which is far more rare of a thing than you'd expect.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#109

Post by empath75 »

JohnAtCC wrote: post #37
the_duke wrote: post #14

The free tier of Cloudflare has been really amazing for small to medium websites. It gives you a basically unlimited CDN, SSL, HTTP/2, DDos protection and fast DNS servers with almost 0 effort... for free ... Thus increasing the stability and speed of many web properties that otherwise wouldn't pay for it. I'm afraid this could easily change once the company is public and is under the pressures that come along with i…

How so? If the service is WORTH paying for, then it SHOULD be paid for. The world of service, if proven magnetizable, should always be monetized. #FreeMarkets

It’s quite possible that cloudflare gains more value from the customers than they gain from cloudflare.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#110

Post by kd3 »

Here's what Cloudflare's CEO wrote on their blog:

"In the two years since the Daily Stormer what we have done to try and solve the Internet’s deeper problem is engage with law enforcement and civil society organizations to try and find solutions. Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained an indication of potential violence. We will continue to work within the legal process to share information when we can to hopefully prevent horrific acts of violence."

Monitoring?? Sounds a lot like surveillance and spying to me. This is why they want to MITM the entire Internet. All encryption becomes useless. Breaking privacy and security just like Facebook. They even co-opted Wireguard recently. If you understand and see where this is going, stay away from them.

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