Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 366 posts

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#271

Post by est31 »

dsl wrote: post #123
est31 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing They do the opposite. They enable small website owners to survive on the internet without having to use vertically integrated services like cloud offerings.

I'm not sure you fully understand the problem. If I hit the big red button and just shut Cloudflare off, millions of websites drop off the Internet. It is a massive single point of failure, and as you point out, a vertically integrated service (DNS, DDoS protection, WAF, proxying, etc).

I have said that it's not a vertically integrated service. Others are. Like S3. Or GCP. Cloudflare makes it possible to avoid the big clouds and do your own hosting or to use a smaller hosting company.

As for the millions of websites going offline. Surely, Cloudflare has tons of customers. It's an internet scale company. If they act sloppy and have tons of downtime a competitor might take over. If it's hard to architect a DDoS protection service in a robust way then that's just the world we live in. But I think you should appreciate that Cloudflare sells DDoS protection (their core product atm) without selling you a big package like http serving or root servers.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#272

Post by veronikakolejak »

quartus wrote: post #258
rvz wrote: post #83

> Today, our network spans 193 cities in over 90 countries and interconnects with over 8,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, public cloud providers, SaaS services, and enterprises. We estimate that we operate within 100 milliseconds of 98% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world, and 93% of the Internet-connected population globally (for context, the blink of an eye is 300-400 millisecond…

>Throughout this year it is just loss-making companies floating everywhere on the markets here and have boarded the hype-train into the red. Cloudflare is a loss-making company too, and their losses are growing. From the S-1: "we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively"

Most of the additional 2018 loss is attributable to the major increases in General & administrative and stock-based compensation expenses. The interesting thing is that net loss in the first half of 2019 is 13% higher than in the first half of 2018 but revenue increased by 48%, judging from the filing's data https://wallmine.com/doc/edgar/0001477333/000119312519222176...

Disclaimer: working on wallmine's filings product

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#273

Post by _7bxa »

Are any people in agreement with me that Cloudflare's emphasis on neutrality is actually a bad thing?

I see several comments admiring how Cloudflare is willing to serve alt-right/nationalist/racist content in the name of avoiding censorship.

I never understood why this is a good thing. The argument seems to be that not-censoring things is valuable because who knows when Cloudflare censors something that is actually valuable/not racist or nationalist.

Considering tech companies tend to censor right-wing extremist content, I consider the probability of that happening to be very low.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#274

Post by manquer »

Ayesh wrote: post #199
the_duke wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is quite possible to setup a global CDN overnight. Spin nginx reverse proxies in all AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode POSs, and you'd have a good enough network. Throw Inna control panel and you got yourself a contender in the budget CDN sector. Cloudflare was rather innovative, with their authorative and recursive DNS, peering agreements with many ISPs including the ones that others didn't bother about, free SSL (W…

That is a fast way to burn a lot of money . Cloud Service Providers like the ones you mention heavily marked up sell metered bandwidth with no guaranteed allocation and are considerably more expensive than say a tier-2 player like hetzner/OVH or spinning your own servers in a Colo.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#275

Post by ksec »

_7bxa wrote: post #273

Are any people in agreement with me that Cloudflare's emphasis on neutrality is actually a bad thing? I see several comments admiring how Cloudflare is willing to serve alt-right/nationalist/racist content in the name of avoiding censorship. I never understood why this is a good thing. The argument seems to be that not-censoring things is valuable because who knows when Cloudflare censors something that is actually v…

I quite like the way how Cloudflare has managed things so far. It is like Apple being the GateKeeper, they have the power, but they wont use it unless they absolutely have too.

If they started to actively banning and censoring content then at some point they are highly likely to corupt themselves and misuse that power.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#276

Post by kd3 »

henryfjordan wrote: post #248
_bxg1 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think whether "hate speech" falls into that category is a more complicated question, mostly because the term can be applied so broadly, but a handful of specific things have been illegal enough to get pulled from the public internet by law enforcement from the beginning, and I think it's naive to suggest that we don't need a category like that at all . Also, it doesn't require man-in-the-middle attacks or weakening…

That's fair, it would be very easy and appropriate for someone to monitor HN for example. I don't think the worry is that Cloudflare is helping police public websites, it's that they have the ability to police private ones that use their services. Their stance of proactively helping to police sites (instead of merely responding to warrants) makes the slope they are on very slippery. Would they be willing to decrypt t…

Not only that but it looks more like they intend to actively monitor traffic in real time to check for things that are problematic according to them and their friends. And people need to realize this is not just for https traffic but also Ipfs and Wireguard. I'm sure it won't stop there either. Defeats the whole point of those technologies to have Cloudflare spying in the middle. This is China 2.0.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#277

Post by ttul »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #244
rvz wrote: post #83

> Today, our network spans 193 cities in over 90 countries and interconnects with over 8,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, public cloud providers, SaaS services, and enterprises. We estimate that we operate within 100 milliseconds of 98% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world, and 93% of the Internet-connected population globally (for context, the blink of an eye is 300-400 millisecond…

I agree with all of that, but the other important thing (at least to me as an investor) is their 51% growth over two years (with 77% gross margin). You can have the best product, but if you're not actually growing and profitable then as much as I like the company or the product I'll put my investment dollars elsewhere.

77% GM is incredible for a cloud infrastructure service!

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#278

Post by alexnewman »

dylz wrote: post #184
alexnewman wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hcaptcha.com also supports privacy pass, and we contribute to the standard

Is this your product? If so, how can I cash this out into tangible currency rather than an ERC token, and is it possible to select the amount of labeling (ex: users I identify as bad have to go through 10+ pages, users I identify as OK go through 1)?

It is. We support paying in paypal. We get users asking us to mainnet our token so they can be paid that way everyday, so expect news there.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#280

Post by JorgeGT »

SXX wrote: post #259
apexalpha wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I didn't know you could do that. Do you move the Rpi around a lot? What do you use the dynamic dns for?

Many ISPs around the world give you public IPs without NAT, but they're dynamic and change every once in a while.

Exactly my case! So I have a cronjob that compares the current IP with the previous one and, if different, sends an API request to update the DNS record.
Post reply on HN