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CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

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

#31

Post by judge2020 »

cirno wrote: post #11

Not to mention, CloudFlare has become synonymous with hosting and protecting the worst websites on the internet, with currently only two exceptions made, seemingly at the CEO's whim. CloudFlare protects websites dedicated to doxing, stalking and harassing their victims. And when their victims complain, CloudFlare forwards all their personal information directly to said website owners while doing nothing about it. Web…

The CEO's blog posts make it clear that CF really wants to bee the city water company that sells access to "dumb pipes": pipes that can route, filter and transform the stuff that goes through them while not knowing about exactly what it is that is going through them (at least when some maliciousness filters haven't triggered); the city water doesn't want to start cutting people's water off because of what they use the water for. Their stance is that they don't have the power to remove that content, all they can do is make the website vulnerable to ddos attacks and whatnot by kicking them off the service.

While 8chan being kicked off CF did bring them offline (their new anti-DDOS provider was told to kick 8chan off by the upstream bandwidth provider, and the domain hasn't worked since to my knowledge) the daily stormer is still working. CF kicking TDS off their network didn't stop their website from working.

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

#32

Post by derefr »

cortesoft wrote: post #21

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…

In the author’s case, the CDN was worse than fetching from the origin; for some reason, Cloudflare just gave up on rerouting their traffic (not sure how this is even possible given their anycast DNS) and they never got the requested resources at all! Having even a 30s RTT would have actually been an improvement vs. this outcome.

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

#33

Post by unityByFreedom »

lugg wrote: post #28
unityByFreedom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not suggesting anything is black and white. No idea why you brought up heartbleed. You're free to choose to use free services, open source software, public resources etc. or not. That's not black and white, it's a bunch of choices you can make about resources without requiring money.

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

#34

Post by sjwright »

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…

Thwarting denial of service attacks isn’t a bug.

You seem to be confused about what your rights are around website availability. Hint: you have no rights. Absent specific coercion by government, the owner of the website had all the rights. If she wants to require you to solve a Where’s Waldo first, that’s her prerogative. Your choice is to accept the terms or go elsewhere.

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

#35

Post by cnst »

pjkundert wrote: post #18
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?

You mean, the internet that allows web property owners to elect to protect themselves from vandalism? That sounds like a powerful use of personal choice to me -- allowed by an internet that (still) allows individuals to make choices in their own best interests.

The problem is that it's often uninformed choice. Some people at LAX, for example, decided that my whole AS has no business accessing their website. (Yes, an international airport blocking international visitors — how cute.) And Cloudflare is the enabler.

Notice that you never see Akamai presenting these messages that you've been blocked.

Most of these pages where you get blocked are something that looks entirely static, should be cachable with the most basic nginx if dynamically generated, yet Cloudflare tells everyone that they need to protect such content from the users. (Some of their newer competitors that protect from more "bots" are even worse, BTW.)

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

#36

Post by judge2020 »

sdan wrote: post #25
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.

Maybe try a personal VPN on digital ocean? You'd be guaranteed a clean IP that only you have access to, as it's very likely CF only flags VPN IPs because some malicious traffic is coming from them. The only issues with this are sites that block the digital ocean ASN (like Crunchyroll).

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

#37

Post by therealmarv »

Experienced the same during my Asia travels with Cloudflare 2016/2017. Actually that was the biggest reason/negative ad not to consider Cloudflare when choosing a CDN. They simply don't respect Asia and other non first class countries with their standard settings. It's like good Internet only for the rich people in the world!

I'm aware on the Chrome extension (really, why should I install this sh&+t on the first place?) and that you can change Cloudflare settings. But the usual IT admin won't change this settings and f&+ck up Asia.

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

#38

Post by cnst »

cortesoft wrote: post #21

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…

If you have a proper website without a gazzilion of useless JavaScript frameworks and custom fonts, there's hardly going to be an unacceptable experience latency-wise even if you have to go all over the world to fetch those resources.

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

#39

Post by cirno »

judge2020 wrote: post #31
cirno wrote: post #11

Not to mention, CloudFlare has become synonymous with hosting and protecting the worst websites on the internet, with currently only two exceptions made, seemingly at the CEO's whim. CloudFlare protects websites dedicated to doxing, stalking and harassing their victims. And when their victims complain, CloudFlare forwards all their personal information directly to said website owners while doing nothing about it. Web…

The CEO's blog posts make it clear that CF really wants to bee the city water company that sells access to "dumb pipes": pipes that can route, filter and transform the stuff that goes through them while not knowing about exactly what it is that is going through them (at least when some maliciousness filters haven't triggered); the city water doesn't want to start cutting people's water off because of what they use th…

I understand that, and I don't think websites should be deplatformed just for saying unpopular things.

But when a site clearly crosses into blatant criminality, it's disappointing when everyone who has the power to rein them in (Google with PageRank, CloudFlare with protection, the US government with criminal proceedings) decides to pass the buck on to someone else. It's always someone else's problem, meanwhile people's lives are being ruined and lost.

These sites would not be as highly profitable without CloudFlare's network, so I think it's fair that if someone wants to use CloudFlare, they're aware of what they're supporting when they give CloudFlare their money.

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

#40

Post by cnst »

blunte wrote: post #24

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 somet…

Most properties protected by Cloudflare appear to be webpages that could easily be cached without any ill effects, for hours to days or weeks.

Why exactly do they need captcha protection?

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