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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”

#291

Post by lopmotr »

dependenttypes wrote: post #273
strombofulous wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use audio captchas. Google will usually only let you do 2 or 3 before banning you and making you do image-based ones. I'm pretty sure the button is just there to make it seem accessible.

I had exactly the same issue. I am surprised how neither cloudflare nor google have been sued for making most of the web inaccessible to people with disabilities.

Shouldn't that liability be with the operators of websites that use those captchas if they're required to be blind-accessible? If they get sued, it'll apply pressure up the supply chain.

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

#293

Post by lmm »

thephyber wrote: post #279
jariel wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nazis also shop at Macy's and drink at Starbucks. Cloudflare was purely acting out of market based fear, there wasn't a hint of moral impetus. Literally he said: "I don't want people saying they won't work with us" - which is giving into the mob. Where is the ACLU on this? We were all screaming for Net Neutrality just a couple years ago. It's up to communities and governments to make decisions on content, it would ac…

> Cloudflare was purely acting out of market based fear, there wasn't a hint of moral impetus. IIRC, the reason DailyStormer pissed off CloudFlare is because the users claimed (lied) about CloudFlare was somehow participating / sponsoring the site/activities. Sports teams have non-disparagement clauses; I don't see this as much different. The only thing I'm not clear about is if it was just a rando user on DS that sa…

> Common Carrier status is perhaps a closer comparison, but I think AT&T is allowed to drop a customer if they violate the AT&T ToS / contract.

That would make net neutrality meaningless, surely. Just put something in the ToS that says you agree not to actually use your internet service.

> Also, the CEO of CloudFlare went out of his way to publicize that this was a problem for the health of the internet and to start a conversation. Society didn't walk away from CloudFlare (eg. "vote with your feet/wallet") and Congress didn't choose to create any laws.

Which is exactly the problem. America has given up on free speech, and CloudFlare was a prime mover in that shift.

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

#294

Post by ksec »

renewiltord wrote: post #155
morrbo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

II love cloudflare. It has really helped out with several sites/projects that I have worked on and the service is top notch. I am also an investor. I tend to invest in stuff which I use a lot or trust/respect the employees. Weirdly what made me really invest is the level of geekiness on the company. I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome". I just wanted…

It's a bit of a sad story, but maybe you'll like this read about one of the guys who laid the foundation for their tech and his sad decline: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline... I really liked the stories of his skill when he was in his prime. Very inspiring.

I dont know how I missed the Cloudflare IPO and this Story. So thanks for posting it. Extremely good writing, though the story was very sad.

I wonder if there are any relationship between FTD and how clever a person or how much brain a person uses.

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

#295

Post by jariel »

thephyber wrote: post #283
jariel wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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,…

> There is no end to the insanity otherwise; we need basic, smart and clear regulation. I would argue that people should agree on what the right solution is before we enshrine it in law. Also, when you think of the US Congress, do you think of "basic, smart and clear" regulations?

I don't have a lot of faith that we will resolve this, but the 'Net Neutrality' vs. 'Ban Someone I Don't Like' hypocrisy is dizzying.

The positions are ideological and naive - they are obviously contradictory - it's only that when they are framed in certain ways, often 'straw-man-ish', do people think they have clarity on them.

For example, it's easy to understand why we don't want Verizon charging customers different prices based on the nature of the content. It's easy for us to want to 'ban Nazis' from Reddit. But both of those are unrealistic ideals (i.e. straw men) because neither contemplate the broader application. It's a very slippery slope.

It's not a big deal that Nazis get banned from somewhere, and maybe it's not a big deal that Verizon wants to design services such that your profitable business costs 2x on their network - but those bounds expand very rapidly.

On the front pages of CNN and Fox right now we have a completely ridiculous war over 'Goya' canned foods because of some arbitrary comments the founder made about Trump.

This issue is only going to get much worse and more complicated over time.

We have basically no choice but to define what kinds of businesses can use what thresholds, and try to infer what those thresholds are.

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

#296

Post by timbit42 »

louwrentius wrote: post #129
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #114

> Turns out half the internet has a Single-Point-of-Failure called “Cloudflare” The other one is called AWS.

So in the end, who cares about single point of failures?

Militaries. The internet was created so the US President could command the US military even in the case of nuclear war knocking out many of the internet's nodes.

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

#297

Post by ksec »

zenincognito wrote: post #246
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…

I wonder why. May be CF should work with Google and allow those crawlers?

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

#298

Post by zorpner »

BTinfinity wrote: post #275
waheoo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an out of touch dev response. The problem is hcaptcha, the solution is stop using hcaptcha. Not placate and evade with work arounds you wouldn't even suggest to non blind people. Also this ask a friend solution is like telling someone in a wheelchair to ask a friend to help them up those steps instead of just installing a ramp. You don't get to take over half the internet and just ignore social responsib…

Solutions can’t be implemented instantly; a work around is needed until that ramp is installed. As much as the lack of audio solution sucks, you can’t expect half the internet to just give up on a piece of technology overnight

No. The ramp needs to be built when the thing is built. Accessibility is not an afterthought.

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

#299

Post by userbinator »

jiggawatts wrote: post #270
miki123211 wrote: post #250

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…

The "human detector" of the modern internet doesn't accept disabled people as sufficiently human. That's... the most dystopian thing I've heard in a while!

In the other direction, Google thinks I'm a bot if I use complex search queries (exclusions, site:, quotes, etc.) in an attempt to find what I'm looking for. Apparently it thinks I'm too intelligent to be a human.

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

#300

Post by monadic2 »

dane-pgp wrote: post #157
transpostmeta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

Are the postal system and roads owned by cloudflare? I don’t get the analogy at all.
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