CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#21

Post by cortesoft » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:00 AM UTC

As someone who works for a CDN (not CloudFlare), this was certainly interesting to read. It is always good to remember that we owe something to our customers' end users in addition to our direct customers, the website owners.

We have to remember that those are real people and not just percentages of traffic that are affected when we make decisions like putting a captcha up against every visitor from certain countries. I like to think we were already doing that, but it is good to be reminded.

However, I am not quite sure I am getting what the author is suggesting when they say that sites should forgo a CDN. Maybe I am biased, but if you thought latency was bad when a datacenter near you went down for maintenance, try having to go all the way to the sites origin in New Jersey for every request. I am not aware of any way besides a CDN (or a CDN like setup) that would get you good performance for people in all countries.

So I get the frustration with the captchas, and I get the frustration with the lack of multiple datacenters near you, but I wonder if you will make things worse for yourself by advocating to not have a CDN.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#22

Post by unityByFreedom » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:01 AM UTC

cnst wrote: post #14

unityByFreedom wrote: post #8

OP lives in Southeast Asia and suggests website owners choose a different CDN and fails to propose an alternative. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There are two complaints, (1) cloudflare requires a captcha for visitors from some regions (like SouthEast Asia) (2) cloudflare does not have enough nodes in SouthEast Asia, and OP feels being rerouted to another node defeats the purpose of a CDN. Yet, Cloudflare does (1) because they often see…

> Getting rid of the CDN is not a solution. Why not? The whole everyone-needs-Cloudflare is a made up problem, which depends on many false narratives. And why do we as website visitors have never heard of Akamai, yet it's hard to find anyone who's never seen these captchas from Cloudflare and Incapsula? > Is there a better free CDN for that region? You can only find free mice in mousetraps.

> Why not? The whole everyone-needs-Cloudflare is a made up problem, which depends on many false narratives.

I've never seen anyone say "everyone needs cloudflare" except maybe CF itself.

> why do we as website visitors have never heard of Akamai

Akamai is not free, they have a trial period that is free. It's not in the same space.

> You can only find free mice in mousetraps.

I don't understand your point. You feel CF is a trap?

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#23

Post by judge2020 » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:02 AM UTC

chairmanwow wrote: post #12

These especially suck in China. It’s especially painful when you are finally free and clear of the great firewall only to be stopped by a mistuned fraud filter.

Assuming the website itself isn't blocked by the GFW, many site owners regularly either set a Cloudflare rule to block or challenge (recaptcha) all china traffic (or even all non-US traffic for US-only businesses) due to the amount of spam and malicious requests that come from IPs originating in those countries. My own sites has shown some attacks from within the US but not nearly as much as from China before I set up a firewall rule to block China.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#24

Post by blunte » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC

There is some presumption that Cloudflare's behavior related to "second class" regions is based on statistics - percentage of traffic that is of ill-intent. Maybe that's not the case, but I suspect so.

CF customers probably know that any delays cost viewers/visitors, but losing a few good visitors is worth preventing a ton of bad visitors. And CF generally seems very thoughtful about their actions. If they make something unpleasant, they're likely to have a good reason for doing so.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#25

Post by sdan » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:06 AM UTC

superasn wrote: post #16

Not to mention that it's not just a matter of filling some random words anymore but more like a "neverending" cycle of identifying buses and traffic lights which can last 5+ minutes. I must have identified more buses for Google than I've actually seen irl :(

Especially when you hop on a VPN; I kid you not I have to spent literally 20 straight minutes following this bs. It’s infuriating for someone who self-respects their privacy.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#26

Post by _bxg1 » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:07 AM UTC

cnst wrote: post #6

sl1ck731 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you routinely use a VPN or a shared connection like University housing?

How do you define a VPN? Noone other than myself has ever used my IP addresses in X years.

Honestly I wonder if even an unusual setup like a static IP would register on one of their heuristics. It could flag as a web server, which would theoretically be more likely to ping a site rapidly than a personal computer.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#27

Post by unityByFreedom » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:07 AM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #19

ridgewell wrote: post #9

Is the situation improved by using the Privacy Pass add-on [1] from Cloudflare? Supposedly: >Privacy Pass is a Chrome/Firefox browser extension to make browsing Cloudflare-protected websites a better experience for users. In particular, if a user IP address is designated to have a poor reputation then the user may have to solve a Cloudflare CAPTCHA page before they can gain access to such websites. Privacy Pass uses…

So wait, "we shipped a bug, so we made a browser extension that lets you circumvent the bug". That's cloudflare's answer? I'm not impressed. EDIT: people seem to be confused as to what bug cloudflare shipped. The bug is not having people solve captchas because their IP has a bad reputation. It's having them solve it over and over again . You can put it however you want it, but if my app's UX is fine without cloudflar…

If captchas are a bug, try running your own popular web service, and good luck keeping away the spam.

An extension is easy to install and is a reasonable way for the CDN to verify that you're not a spammer without requiring you to repeatedly prove it whenever your IP changes.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#28

Post by lugg » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:08 AM UTC

unityByFreedom wrote: post #17

tfha wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we be building the internet such that a single website can make it effectively unusable for any user at their arbitrary whim?

> a single website can make it effectively unusable for any user at their arbitrary whim CF is a free service. Websites can choose to use it or not, and it certainly does not dictate the nature of the internet.

Nor the world or the internet is this black and white. And heartbleed begs to differ.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#29

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:09 AM UTC

tfha wrote: post #13

ridgewell wrote: post #9

Is the situation improved by using the Privacy Pass add-on [1] from Cloudflare? Supposedly: >Privacy Pass is a Chrome/Firefox browser extension to make browsing Cloudflare-protected websites a better experience for users. In particular, if a user IP address is designated to have a poor reputation then the user may have to solve a Cloudflare CAPTCHA page before they can gain access to such websites. Privacy Pass uses…

Should we be building the internet such that a single website can make it effectively unusable for any user at their arbitrary whim?

[deleted]

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#30

Post by throwaway_bad » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 5:11 AM UTC

lstodd wrote: post #10

This. I route all my traffic via mmy own vpn server at Hetzner for privacy and security reasons and this Cloudflare bullshit is infuriating at times. Besides I guess 95% sites that use their free tier either don't actually need it or would be better off without it.

From a technical standpoint, what else can they do?

Your IP is coming from the cloud just like all the actual bot traffic.