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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

#321

Post by Dylan16807 »

erichocean wrote: post #317
Dylan16807 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 becau…

> Your own analogy argues strongly against your point. Cloudflare's shutdown count is very small. The Daily Stormer went on to be banned by Google Domains, and a number of other registrars (all of whom had previously not banned customers for political speech). So yes, the "anti-biotic" had to be repeatedly prescribed—just not by CloudFlare. In the end, it was all for not: The Daily Stormer is still up and running tod…

Are you saying the Daily Stormer ban is worse because it didn't knock them offline, but the Alex Jones ban is bad because it did knock his audience way down?

I can't figure out what your argument is.

And nobody expects antibiotics to eradicate a disease either.

Also Alex Jones was using that platform to strongly harm the lives of a big group of people by aiming constant harassment at them. Does that factor in anywhere? Are you demanding hosting platforms to be complicit in that?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#322

Post by perl4ever »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #246
perl4ever wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say "why, why not micropayments"? Micropayments require even smaller transaction fees. Really small transaction fees require centralized regulation and economies of scale, i.e. government control and monopoly. You can't have your freedom and your frictionless markets both. The more anarchy, the more expensive buying and selling is, and the more business models and options for wealth creation simply can'…

> Really small transaction fees require centralized regulation and economies of scale, i.e. government control and monopoly. No they don't. I could sign up for the ten most popular micropayment services and the fees would be about the same as if I signed up for just one.

Are there ten popular micropayment services? Does it cost anything in time and effort to use them? Who do you trust to tell you which micropayment services are good and trustworthy?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#323

Post by erichocean »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #321
erichocean wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your own analogy argues strongly against your point. Cloudflare's shutdown count is very small. The Daily Stormer went on to be banned by Google Domains, and a number of other registrars (all of whom had previously not banned customers for political speech). So yes, the "anti-biotic" had to be repeatedly prescribed—just not by CloudFlare. In the end, it was all for not: The Daily Stormer is still up and running tod…

Are you saying the Daily Stormer ban is worse because it didn't knock them offline, but the Alex Jones ban is bad because it did knock his audience way down? I can't figure out what your argument is. And nobody expects antibiotics to eradicate a disease either. Also Alex Jones was using that platform to strongly harm the lives of a big group of people by aiming constant harassment at them. Does that factor in anywher…

My dude, if you want to censor people, or get corporations to do it for you—knock yourself out. Some random HN commenter isn't going to change your mind, or stop you.

I think it's bad strategy, and antithetical to the stated goals of those doing the censoring. Let's leave it at that.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#324

Post by tomc1985 »

deogeo wrote: post #295
tomc1985 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for a data-scraping firm and very often we would accidentally knock many web sites offline when we pointed our crawlers at them. I'd love to agree with you, but the crawler problem is 100x worse today than it was a decade ago

This would be much better solved with IP-based rate limits. And if IP-based doesn't work, then you're dealing with a DDOS, and it doesn't sound like this case was DDOS protection.

IP-based rate limiting is easily foiled via proxies, VPN services, tor, or botnets

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#325

Post by Dylan16807 »

erichocean wrote: post #323
Dylan16807 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying the Daily Stormer ban is worse because it didn't knock them offline, but the Alex Jones ban is bad because it did knock his audience way down? I can't figure out what your argument is. And nobody expects antibiotics to eradicate a disease either. Also Alex Jones was using that platform to strongly harm the lives of a big group of people by aiming constant harassment at them. Does that factor in anywher…

My dude, if you want to censor people, or get corporations to do it for you—knock yourself out. Some random HN commenter isn't going to change your mind, or stop you. I think it's bad strategy, and antithetical to the stated goals of those doing the censoring. Let's leave it at that.

I'm mostly just trying to understand you because you keep using self-contradicting arguments. If you would rather keep making new arguments instead of explaining anything, then sure it's better to leave it at that.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#326

Post by Dylan16807 »

perl4ever wrote: post #322
Dylan16807 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really small transaction fees require centralized regulation and economies of scale, i.e. government control and monopoly. No they don't. I could sign up for the ten most popular micropayment services and the fees would be about the same as if I signed up for just one.

Are there ten popular micropayment services? Does it cost anything in time and effort to use them? Who do you trust to tell you which micropayment services are good and trustworthy?

> Are there ten popular micropayment services?

It exists just as much as your government monopoly. We're talking about a world where sites let people pay microtransactions, not the current state of the real world. I'm just pointing out that it is definitely not necessary to have government control to have really small transaction fees.

> Does it cost anything in time and effort to use them?

Whatever the government version you proposed would do, let's keep it simple and make them act exactly the same.

> Who do you trust to tell you which micropayment services are good and trustworthy?

I dunno, who tells you that visa or stripe or kofi is good and trustworthy? If creators flock to a site, they'll draw in users.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#327

Post by deogeo »

tomc1985 wrote: post #324
deogeo wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be much better solved with IP-based rate limits. And if IP-based doesn't work, then you're dealing with a DDOS, and it doesn't sound like this case was DDOS protection.

IP-based rate limiting is easily foiled via proxies, VPN services, tor, or botnets

And user agent string based protections are even more easily foiled, that's why I don't believe this can be plausibly counted under DDoS protection.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#328

Post by bradknowles »

thu2111 wrote: post #310
AstralStorm wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, an IP or IP block throttling is good enough. Except then there are those pesky CGNATs to handle including Chinese Great Wall. Anyway, high profile spammers will emulate enough of the browser to render any measure based on browser anomaly detection worthless. Including using a headless browser. The only way to defeat them would be too put some quite computationally intensive JS operation... (On par with…

high profile spammers will emulate enough of the browser to render any measure based on browser anomaly detection worthless Based on actual experience of fighting spammers, that isn't the case. Like a lot of people new to spam fighting you're making assumptions about the adversaries that aren't valid.

There are many different types of spammers and attackers.

Some will be stopped by the simplest protection mechanisms.

Some will be indistinguishable from real humans, and you won’t be able to stop them without crippling your services for your real users.

But those are the two extremes. The real problem is the ones between those extremes.

Every intentional stumbling block you put in the path to try and stop those in the middle might also have a negative impact on your real users. The real problem is that the most troublesome attackers will learn and adapt to whatever stumbling blocks you put in the path. So, how many of your own toes are you willing to sacrifice with your foot guns in the name of stopping the attackers?

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#329

Post by thu2111 »

bradknowles wrote: post #328
thu2111 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

high profile spammers will emulate enough of the browser to render any measure based on browser anomaly detection worthless Based on actual experience of fighting spammers, that isn't the case. Like a lot of people new to spam fighting you're making assumptions about the adversaries that aren't valid.

There are many different types of spammers and attackers. Some will be stopped by the simplest protection mechanisms. Some will be indistinguishable from real humans, and you won’t be able to stop them without crippling your services for your real users. But those are the two extremes. The real problem is the ones between those extremes. Every intentional stumbling block you put in the path to try and stop those in t…

Very few, but that's OK. Good spam fighters don't have to sacrifice many or really any toes to stop nearly all spam. You seem to be assuming a linear relationship between effort and false positives, but that would be a very ineffective spam fighting team relative to the ones I've worked on. In practice you can have nearly no false positives combined with nearly no false negatives.

This isn't easy and many firms fail at it, but you it can be done and we routinely did it.

Re: Cloudflare is turning off the internet for me

#330

Post by The-Compiler »

anthk wrote: post #319
The-Compiler wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried with Street View im vimb. I don't see any difference - it's slow to the point of being almost unusable, while it works fine in qutebrowser.

on ~/.config/vimb/config set hardware-aceleration-policy=always set webgl=true

That seems to help, but I still don't see a difference with/without a Chrome UA.
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