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Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

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Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#241

Post by chacham15 »

jgrahamc wrote: post #49
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #43

Honest question: I've never really understood the back of the napkin math of how Cloudflare functions economically, which I feel would go a long way towards my understanding of why/how they were able to become such an integral and generally positive part of the Internet. Did they have some crazy in to get cheap bandwidth? Did they bet big on bandwidth prices falling? Did they figure something else out that nobody saw…

Read our S-1, it's all in there. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

The relevant excerpt seems to be here:

Market Opportunity

We believe our platform disrupts several large and well-established IT markets. The key markets that are addressed by our platform include VPN, internal and external firewalls, web security (including web application firewalls and content filtering), distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention, intrusion detection and prevention, application delivery controls, content delivery networks, domain name systems, advanced threat prevention (ATP), and wide area network (WAN) technology. From our analysis based on IDC data, $31.6 billion was spent on those products in 2018, which is expected to grow to $47.1 billion in 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%. We also are actively developing new products to address adjacent markets including compute, storage, 5G, and Internet of Things (IoT) that are not included in the estimate of our addressable market.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#242

Post by ygjb »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #182
jonny_eh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always a line, and therefore, I'm ok with drawing the line at Nazis.

> There's always a line This is where you've gone wrong. There isn't always a line, some businesses are in the business of selling products and services and not in the business of policing content. And if some of their customers are pedophiles or the like then have the police arrest the pedophiles and leave the fry cooks and gas station attendants out of it, even if the pedophiles eat food and drive cars.

No. The reason why freedom of speech (or freedom of expression, if you're Canadian like me) is important in a government context is because the government (in theory) has a monopoly on violence. Businesses and private individuals should not be expected to uphold and enforce freedom of speech because requiring them to do so puts them at odds with themselves.

An employer expected to uphold freedom of speech must then require their employees to work with or for people who believe they are lesser people, not even people, or should be the victims of abuse, violence, and genocide. That is an untenable position from a human rights perspective. I as a private individual do not want to do business or associate with people who use freedom of speech as a platform to preach hate or ignorance, and that is my choice.

I am happy to see companies kick bad actors to the curb, whether they are fashionable nazis being deplatformed, gamergaters harassing women and minorities, and I am frustrated when I see legitimate journalists being censored by those same platforms. It's not cognitive dissonance to support stopping bad actors while rallying to support good actors, it's a recognition of the fact that our rights are open to abuse and that the current system isn't great at coping with abuse.

I certainly don't think that requiring businesses and platforms to provide guarantees around freedom of speech is a good idea, and most platforms that have attempted to or succeeded in doing so have turned into the cesspools of the internet.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#243

Post by syshum »

aneutron wrote: post #9

Okay here's the thing. I'm okay with people bashing other (competing) companies when they do wrong. However, I believe it is somewhat childish and uncalled for to bash another company, because of a mistake. First of all "I use easyDNS so I didn't notice it at all tbh" is not only a childish assertion, it's borderline a falsehood. You DO NOT offer the same services, nor the same scale. (No, VOD would not work if your…

Well if you are going to rant, you might want to rant and quote what they ACTUALLY said, not what you conceived in you mind what they were saying

You indicate they said " "I use easyDNS so I didn't notice it at all tbh" but NO WHERE IN THAT ARTICLE was that statement

The actual quote is

"We’re familiar with Cloudflare’s DDoS service for DNS providers, because we use it ourselves. Fortunately easyDNS was not impacted by the outage (I didn’t even notice it, tbh),"

This is a MUCH different statement than you attempt to cast out as call "childish". He is stating that the services they use of CloudFlare was not impacted by the outage

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#244

Post by foxfired »

phkahler wrote: post #192

If you keep much of a website simple - plain html and css - won't that reduce the need for a CDN in the first place?

Yes, but cloudflare reach is much deeper then that.

I am not a cloudflare customer but my all websites failed that day. The reason was digitalocean uses cloudflare, I use digitalocean. So apparently I depend on cloudflare.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#245

Post by jariel »

cellar_door wrote: post #213
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So no problem with Nazis using USPS but FedEx is to be condemned for not opening all your packages and refusing the ones with proscribed literature?

This is a bad analogy. Cloudflare is not inspecting individual packets for hate speech. They are refusing to do business with an organization that negatively affects their brand (The Daily Stormer). They should have the right to make that choice as a private entity. Funny you bring up Fedex: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/business/fedex-washington-red...

"They should have the right to make that choice as a private entity."

No they should not.

And the analogy works: if you're getting filtered on the basis of your content - at the packet level or not - then it's fundamentally against Net Neutrality.

Wait until the PR team at Verizon decides they don't want to publish your content because you're too vocal about BLM. Or, they will only support you if you do support BLM, or something rubbish. And now your VPN, your server host, caching technology provider, Telco, wireless provider, Visa/Amex, Video-conf provider - it's completely absurd.

FedEx won't ship 'PlanB' because it's a 'controversial' medicine? But they will in 3 states?

USPS will ship condoms everywhere but not in Utah where the local Union forbids it?

Alaska Big Oil gets their local VPN owners to ban Greentech related sites?

Trump's buddies on the Board of AT&T get them to threaten anyone hosting 'fake news' about Trump?

California Teachers Union Pension Fund presses Cloudflare to ban all hosting of anything related to law enforcement?

And FYI nobody is acting 'morally' - they're scared executives just trying to do whatever to hush people up and continue making money - a system which hands arbitrary power to arbitrary groups. This is not what anyone wants.

For services that are inherently 'content neutral' - the content should not be allowed to be a basis of discrimination.

For Social Media it's different, as there is an inherent association between the platform and it's users, but not for Cloudflare, or AWS or Verizon, Gmail for example.

There is no end to the insanity otherwise; we need basic, smart and clear regulation.

Edit: I should add 'and that's just the US'. Imagine when a very vocal, organised group wants to ban Arabs living in what is commonly referred to as 'Palestine' from using the term 'Palestine'. Or Serbian authorities from hosting content using the term 'Kosovo' in any way that reflects its supposed 'autonomy'. Or Greek companies ganging up on Macedonia's usage of the term 'Macedonia'. Or Greens in Germany from banning pro-Nuclear energy content. There are at least a handful of Tweeters who would want those things. It gets infinitely messy, very quickly.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#246

Post by zenincognito »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #43

Honest question: I've never really understood the back of the napkin math of how Cloudflare functions economically, which I feel would go a long way towards my understanding of why/how they were able to become such an integral and generally positive part of the Internet. Did they have some crazy in to get cheap bandwidth? Did they bet big on bandwidth prices falling? Did they figure something else out that nobody saw…

Worth noting that cloudflare does a poor job of identifying and allowing crawlers specially Google. I have a site with 1 mil URLs , nothing big and every time you turn on cloudflare it reduces the crawler to 1k visits or less per day. If you compare your logs for visits for Google and Bing with CF turned on/off there is a huge difference.

Suffice to say, that in over 5-6 projects I have added CF to, it's never worked out in my favour.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#247

Post by henriquez »

snowwrestler wrote: post #195
henriquez wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is a relatively cheap "lite CDN" for developers who want caching without putting in any work. This becomes a gateway drug for Cloudflare's more expensive plans once you outgrow the free plan. It quickly adds up; I worked for a company that wasn't even on an enterprise plan and was spending hundreds of dollars a month on Cloudflare just because they had a lot of domains. My reservation with Cloudflare is th…

Unless you're sending all your traffic back to physical machines that you own locked into a cage in a datacenter, you are probably letting someone MITM your SSL traffic. For example if you are hosting on AWS, Amazon has access to your keys. If you are hosting on a hardware server leased from Hetzner, Hetzner has access to your keys. When a 3rd party has access to your keys, their responsibilities to you are spelled o…

I send traffic for my sites and apps to physical machines that I own and operate in a secure location, but I doubt most people are doing this.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#249

Post by Reelin »

nix23 wrote: post #179
dane-pgp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be shocked to hear who use the postal system and roads, then.

Yes but you don't have to sell your service to Nazi's....roads are a official service provided by the government/people's taxes, CF is not.

This misses the point to an impressive degree. No one here is disputing the current legality and I think everyone here understands the difference between government and private services.

The argument is that we've come to depend on privately owned backbone infrastructure in much the same way we depend on publicly owned roads. Furthermore, the operators of that infrastructure have shown themselves to be vulnerable to public outrage. Therefore, it's reasonable to ask if additional regulations might be a good idea.

A good analogy here might be to privately operated toll roads. Surely such a system shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against you based on (for example) your bumper stickers?

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#250

Post by miki123211 »

Cloudflare is horrible for blind people.

Screen readers, the programs that use synthesized speech to tell us what's on the screen, cannot read images. Good captchas usually have audio equivalents (which come with their own set of problems), but this one doesn't. If you're blind and flagged by Cloudflare for some reason, you're cut off from accessing half the internet, potentially critical banking/governmental/medical/communications/educational services. We rely on the internet way more than our sighted peers, so this is very important. This has recently happened to me on a few sites, fortunately not critical ones, but it was not a pleasant experience nonetheless. CF engineers, please fix this ASAP. I'm surprised there still isn't a huge lawsuit over this, as this is clearly violating all sorts of laws.

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