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Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

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Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#251

Post by wolco »

danShumway wrote: post #234
wolco wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how ads work. More visitors more pageviews/clicks. People who serve ads don't want to pay for bots which is why they are a problem. Doesn't medium do this?

> That's how ads work. More visitors more pageviews/clicks. That's not asking people to pay for bandwidth/compute power, it's selling something adjacent to your content that you hope makes up for the loss. > People who serve ads don't want to pay for bots which is why they are a problem. That's kind of my point. When you ignore the arbitrage potential of serving requests for free, it forces you to care about making s…

If you had to pay for each request you would make fewer and limit the requests to serious requests (school, work, medical).

Having said that, you could provide a central service where people would buy credit to be used on many sites. So the micropay isn't the problem.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#252

Post by computerfriend »

ficklepickle wrote: post #240
jlarocco wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's easy to shit on everything. Let's hear some real solutions. My solution more and more is to just not bother with it. If a site is unreadable because I'm using uBlock and uMatrix, and I have to spend more than a minute or two tweaking things, then I just leave. That said, I don't have any problem with Cloudflare. I'm much more annoyed by the overuse of *.googleapis.com. I'd love if somebody would setup a servic…

I've been thinking about a local proxy that caches CDN assets. The first request to a cdn URL goes through, subsequent requests come from cache. I think it would work fine with versioned libraries, fonts, etc. I'm thinking of setting up a container and squid config to achieve this. Any obvious problems or alternative solutions? Obviously enumerating the worlds CDN URLs would be a task. But I think even covering the m…

Something like https://decentraleyes.org/?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#253

Post by leokennis »

tomc1985 wrote: post #230
RyanK24 wrote: post #83

It appears that you may have made some modifications to your user agent string. If you revert your user agent to the one provided by default by your browser vendor everything will be fine.

Why is it that something as malleable as a user-agent string trips these kinds of sensors? If I were to write a bot, copying current browsers' user-agents is literally the first thing I'd do

It really hits home the point of how shitty the web has become. Ad companies and malware distributors come up with bad and worse ways to interfere with my browsing, and the “good guys” need to match with increasingly invasive and fragile anti measures.

Sort of like having to take of your shoes when you board a plane. If that’s what it takes, isn’t it just better to stay home?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#254

Post by oefrha »

wolco wrote: post #251
danShumway wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's how ads work. More visitors more pageviews/clicks. That's not asking people to pay for bandwidth/compute power, it's selling something adjacent to your content that you hope makes up for the loss. > People who serve ads don't want to pay for bots which is why they are a problem. That's kind of my point. When you ignore the arbitrage potential of serving requests for free, it forces you to care about making s…

If you had to pay for each request you would make fewer and limit the requests to serious requests (school, work, medical). Having said that, you could provide a central service where people would buy credit to be used on many sites. So the micropay isn't the problem.

> you could provide a central service where people would buy credit to be used on many sites.

That central service is going to lock out many countries and regions as well as lots of people (minor, unbanked, poor, etc.) in non-locked out countries and regions. Payment is frigging hard especially on the international scale. This is every bit against freedom of information and strictly worse than Cloudflare.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#255

Post by Dylan16807 »

lopmotr wrote: post #239
jakelazaroff wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not analogous. You have a moral (and possibly a legal) obligation to grade a student fairly. Unless you are a school administrator, you can not unilaterally expel a student. A business has no such constraints. If I go to a bar and start telling people that the owner is actually a racist, I’m going to get kicked out even if I want to buy more drinks. That’s not “might is right”; it’s the owner not wanting to…

I'm talking about morals, not the law. The issue is that there was an imbalance of power which means one party can push the other one around but not the reverse. If The Daily Stormer had made that claim about some unrelated business, it wouldn't suffer any such consequences because that other business wouldn't have any power over it. If only powerful players can punish weak players and people call that "fair", then t…

> imbalance of power

> If The Daily Stormer had made that claim about some unrelated business, it wouldn't suffer any such consequences because that other business wouldn't have any power over it.

Even if cloudflare was equally sized, they probably would have shut down services over that. Don't misrepresent your business partners if you want them to stay business partners.

> If it's the only bar in town and people really need that service

It's not the only DDoS protection, and most sites don't need significant DDoS protection.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#256

Post by Dylan16807 »

erichocean wrote: post #152
Rebelgecko wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a ridiculous claim, I honestly can't imagine how anyone could make that in good faith. The website is named after a Nazi tabloid that was so virulent its publisher was executed at Nuremberg. The website's style guide for guest writers talks about the importance of "gassing kikes". If a website that glorifies Adolf Hitler, fascism, and genocide isn't enough to be considered neo-Nazi, then what is?

Neo-Nazi sites, for better or worse (obviously: worse) should still be on the Internet. If only for the rest of us to point at as an example of what not to do. Censorship is a bit like antibiotics: short-term positive impact but long-term negative impact. Neo-Nazis are not a threat to anyone, anywhere, in any way. We can survive their stupid web page, and have no need to censor it. The cure is MUCH worse than the dis…

> UPDATE: I love how I get downvotes and literally NO ONE has engaged with my core argument, that censorship is a bit like antibiotics: short-term positive impact but long-term negative impact.

Because it's absolutely insane to suggest that zero people/websites should use antibiotics.

The problem with antibiotics is when they're given out in huge amounts with barely any reason. And the only reason that's bad is because it makes antibiotics ineffective. There's no possible way to turn that into an argument that we should never use antibiotics.

Your own analogy argues strongly against your point. Cloudflare's shutdown count is very small.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#257

Post by tomc1985 »

leokennis wrote: post #253
tomc1985 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that something as malleable as a user-agent string trips these kinds of sensors? If I were to write a bot, copying current browsers' user-agents is literally the first thing I'd do

It really hits home the point of how shitty the web has become. Ad companies and malware distributors come up with bad and worse ways to interfere with my browsing, and the “good guys” need to match with increasingly invasive and fragile anti measures. Sort of like having to take of your shoes when you board a plane. If that’s what it takes, isn’t it just better to stay home?

Welcome to this brave new world where technology is accessible to all.

I hate it.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#258

Post by Dylan16807 »

erichocean wrote: post #190
Rebelgecko wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not aware of anyone, anywhere, debating that The comment that I was replying to...

You replied to a comment that said "I do not trust the SPLC to determine what is a "Neo-Nazi" website"—something I agree with as well. The SPLC is a garbage organization, even if they happen to be correct about The Daily Stormer in this specific case (not hard, given that The Daily Stormer is completely open about what they believe—no one has to "guess"). Anyway, the OP was perhaps unclear—you could construe distrust…

In context, that comment was definitely saying both.

Their view is even clearer in another comment on this post, where they described the daily stormer as "smeared as 'Neo-Nazi'".

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#259

Post by jrockway »

lopmotr wrote: post #239
jakelazaroff wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not analogous. You have a moral (and possibly a legal) obligation to grade a student fairly. Unless you are a school administrator, you can not unilaterally expel a student. A business has no such constraints. If I go to a bar and start telling people that the owner is actually a racist, I’m going to get kicked out even if I want to buy more drinks. That’s not “might is right”; it’s the owner not wanting to…

I'm talking about morals, not the law. The issue is that there was an imbalance of power which means one party can push the other one around but not the reverse. If The Daily Stormer had made that claim about some unrelated business, it wouldn't suffer any such consequences because that other business wouldn't have any power over it. If only powerful players can punish weak players and people call that "fair", then t…

I don't think there is any moral conflict in believing that the government shouldn't regulate speech while also not helping people whose speech you disagree with. "Let me help you hand out copies of your newsletter" does not follow from "I don't think you should go to prison for writing that newsletter".

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#260

Post by oarsinsync »

leokennis wrote: post #253
tomc1985 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that something as malleable as a user-agent string trips these kinds of sensors? If I were to write a bot, copying current browsers' user-agents is literally the first thing I'd do

It really hits home the point of how shitty the web has become. Ad companies and malware distributors come up with bad and worse ways to interfere with my browsing, and the “good guys” need to match with increasingly invasive and fragile anti measures. Sort of like having to take of your shoes when you board a plane. If that’s what it takes, isn’t it just better to stay home?

> Sort of like having to take of your shoes when you board a plane. If that’s what it takes, isn’t it just better to stay home?

Removal of shoes, 'naked' full body scanners, these are all terrible, and I tell myself every time it isn't worth the hassle.

The reality is that as much as I hate it, I'm still flying every other week.

I'm also on the Internet daily. I don't see that changing.

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