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Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

blog.dijit.sh

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Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#161

Post by csydas »

dgreensp wrote: post #109
pwinnski wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since then, they've stopped working with a number of other sites due to content, like 8chan. I believe that number is 1, and that the only two sites they've shut off service to are Daily Stormer and 8chan.

I think if your business helps 20,000,000 groups of people talk to each other (sites), you get to once or twice be like, "Ok, you guys are clearly murderers plotting murders, can you go do it somewhere else?" Haha.

I think this goes out the window when you have a bad actor making claims as follows:

>The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

I am no fan of Cloudflare; as an expat, their service just makes my life increasingly frustrating as I have to go through hoops and perform circus tricks just to look at the bouquet selection selection of a local florist if I want to send flowers to my Mom on Mothers' Day, never mind having the audacity to look at local news sites.

That being said, I get their position if places like Daily Stormer were making invalid claims of support/association with the company. I'd cut them off too without a moments hesitation, since Cloudflare's model is anything but implicit support of the sites it hosts/protects.

I don't see a good-faith effort from Daily Stormer in that post, I see an attempt to use a good-faith effort from CloudFlate to legitimize a bad-faith effort from Daily Stormer; and this is not okay. This is not a free-speech issue from my perspective, and instead, it's a bad-actor continuing to act in bad-faith in response to the good-will offered by Cloudflare.

Again, I do feel Cloudflare nowadays is trash -- I am a US expat and I just close the tab when I hit the Cloudflare redirect or Google Captcha on absolutely senseless pages. (Neverminding my frustration with US corporations blocking me completely, as if the sweet sweet deals at Home Depot or Target are too good for my current country of residence...)

But, that is a separate issue of individuals accessing standard HTTP(s) pages in an expected way versus a rogue group claiming implicit support from Cloudflare to their cause. I totally get Cloudflare's response in the latter.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#162

Post by pferde »

dijit wrote: post #74
pferde wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had js turned off by default for many years now, and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything important. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

You're a stronger person than me. I keep trying to live without JS but so little of the internet works. * Gitlab/Github (obviously) * Google maps (obviously) * Linkedin... (uh... less obviously) * Outlook * Infoq.com * Rust docs * Google Cloud Docs etc; A lot of the internet is butchered without JS. I really want a way of just blocking third-party JS (IE; the site can deliver JS, but not anything it tries to import u…

Perhaps I did not express it clearly, but I do not browse WITHOUT ANY JAVASCRIPT EVER. I browse with js disabled by default, but enable it (using excellent uMatrix Firefox addon) for certain sites that I trust. Although even then I try to find the least possible amount of uMatrix permissions that enables the functionality I need from a site.

That said, I do not use many of the obvious mainstream sites - e.g. I ditched Github like dirty socks the moment Microsoft grabbed them.

But yes, modern web (not the Internet, mind you) is very damaged, and I fear it will take decades to fix the damage, once (I hope) smarter people take the reins after high-visibility security and privacy incidents become more and more frequent, and, well, more visible to general public.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#163

Post by dmix »

JohnFen wrote: post #134
hombre_fatal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you can't really talk about downsides of Recaptcha/Cloudflare without also acknowledging the extreme amount of malicious actors and abuse on the internet. We're in a "this is why we can't have nice things" predicament and you have malicious actors to thank for that, yet most people on HN only seem capable of attacking the few affordable solutions to that problem. I'm even down with the theory that Cloudflare is…

> most people on HN only seem capable of attacking the few affordable solutions to that problem. I doubt that many would attack those solutions if they actually worked well, but they don't. These "solutions" are a big part of the reason why the web gets smaller for me every day as more and more websites become unusable.

Cloudflare is like the TSA for the internet, I'm not convinced it needs to be as aggressive as it is. And yes I know websites have some control over how aggressive it will be but much like Reddit-moderation policy it's choosing the safety over everything approach, which hits enough false-positives on the edges to be a serious problem.

Cloudflare is very much anti-internet. And I'm a very security-obsessed person. Just like Reddit I believe we need to dial things a bit closer back towards chaos like a venn-diagram (safety)[x](chaos) there's a balance and I believe the internet is worse off when this balance is out of wack.

There might be some awful stuff on sites like 4chan but it also generated a ton of the memes that later filtered down into mainstream internet culture. Culture and innovation often happens in the chaos and fringes, which is an area I believe the world is becoming completely intolerant of in some attempt at idealism. But there are real sacrifices in between (ie, the mostly harmless stuff getting tagged as bad guys).

We need to be better at calming down and embracing the chaos, pushing back against FUD, and maintain a good balanced default. That chaos and flexibility is what originally made the internet great and endlessly promising.

Based on the various posts I've seen from Cloudflare founders on here I'm not convinced they are taking this problem as seriously as they need to be.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#164

Post by nemoniac »

mhasbini wrote: post #156
Liquix wrote: post #17

The problem presented by services like ReCaptcha and Cloudflare is a tough nut to crack. They're silently embedded in a huge portion of modern websites, and the average user will never even know about them. But it seems to be way too easy for them to blanket-ban or serve an absurd amount of captchas to powerusers, linux gurus, privacy geeks, or anyone with the wrong combination of browser+addons. And the failures (as…

> Launch a competing product that accomplishes the same thing. Disclaimer: I was part of hCaptcha team. https://hcaptcha.com/ is competing with ReCaptcha. It's a drop-in replacement for ReCaptcha. It's privacy focused (supports privacy pass), and is fair: webmasters get a cut for each captcha that is solved correctly (they can choose to directly donate it to a charity of their choice), hCaptcha get a cut for running…

An alternative? This service uses both Cloudfare and googleapis. What's that all about?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#165

Post by StavrosK »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #160
StavrosK wrote: post #123

I don't see anyone here mentioning this, so I will. CloudFlare supports PrivacyPass, a third-party, privacy-preserving way to do proof-of-work for websites. Basically, you do some small amount of CPU work and get 30 tickets your browser can transparently redeem for access to a site. That's a pretty clever way to both deter bad actors and ensure legitimate users get uninterrupted access to websites.

AFAIK the Privacy Pass protocol has nothing to do with proof-of-work. It's just a way to allow users to solve a CAPTCHA once and re-use that single solution across multiple sites without jeopardizing privacy. Reduces the number of CAPTCHAs you see, but doesn't eliminate them entirely. What you're talking about is more like what Hashcash does, where it essentially replaces CAPTCHAs with a cryptocurrency miner, such th…

Sorry, you're right, I misremembered. You solve the CAPTCHA to get tickets, you don't do work.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#166

Post by creato »

JohnFen wrote: post #134
hombre_fatal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you can't really talk about downsides of Recaptcha/Cloudflare without also acknowledging the extreme amount of malicious actors and abuse on the internet. We're in a "this is why we can't have nice things" predicament and you have malicious actors to thank for that, yet most people on HN only seem capable of attacking the few affordable solutions to that problem. I'm even down with the theory that Cloudflare is…

> most people on HN only seem capable of attacking the few affordable solutions to that problem. I doubt that many would attack those solutions if they actually worked well, but they don't. These "solutions" are a big part of the reason why the web gets smaller for me every day as more and more websites become unusable.

They do work well for the vast majority of people. Only on HN do I ever see people complaining about cloudflare/captchas/etc.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#167

Post by StavrosK »

JohnFen wrote: post #141
StavrosK wrote: post #123

I don't see anyone here mentioning this, so I will. CloudFlare supports PrivacyPass, a third-party, privacy-preserving way to do proof-of-work for websites. Basically, you do some small amount of CPU work and get 30 tickets your browser can transparently redeem for access to a site. That's a pretty clever way to both deter bad actors and ensure legitimate users get uninterrupted access to websites.

I probably don't understand PrivacyPass well enough, but I don't really see how it's a good solution to the problem.

It makes it so you solve thirty times fewer CAPTCHAs, which is not nothing.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#168

Post by [deleted] »

nemoniac wrote: post #164
mhasbini wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Launch a competing product that accomplishes the same thing. Disclaimer: I was part of hCaptcha team. https://hcaptcha.com/ is competing with ReCaptcha. It's a drop-in replacement for ReCaptcha. It's privacy focused (supports privacy pass), and is fair: webmasters get a cut for each captcha that is solved correctly (they can choose to directly donate it to a charity of their choice), hCaptcha get a cut for running…

An alternative? This service uses both Cloudfare and googleapis. What's that all about?

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#169

Post by kragen »

Liquix wrote: post #17

The problem presented by services like ReCaptcha and Cloudflare is a tough nut to crack. They're silently embedded in a huge portion of modern websites, and the average user will never even know about them. But it seems to be way too easy for them to blanket-ban or serve an absurd amount of captchas to powerusers, linux gurus, privacy geeks, or anyone with the wrong combination of browser+addons. And the failures (as…

4. Mirror the contents of this Dark Web 3.0 on a Light Web 3.0 accessed using privacy-protecting technologies like Tor to make sure it remains accessible. Obviously this won't help for logging into Twitter and your Fecebutt account but it should be fine for the nginx documentation.

The underlying incentive here is that centralized websites are slow and vulnerable to DDoS. Massively mirroring their content is the solution, and it's what Cloudflare does. Let's do it in a way that protects human rights rather than taking them away.

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