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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”

#311

Post by anchpop »

jariel wrote: post #234
johnklos wrote: post #224

I think people are Cloudflare fans simply because so many other services suck more. I gave Cloudflare a fair shake. But after hearing their lies way too many times, I'm calling them out for being deceptive and unscrupulous. After being told that sites pretending to host Adobe Flash updaters and pretending to be Bank of America can't be taken down by Cloudflare because of their rights to free speech, I knew their atte…

I thought 'we' were for 'Net Neutrality'? Remember, carriers and service providers not allowed to decided what to do based on content?

Yeah, Cloudflare shouldn't be censoring anyone. I could understand if it were requested by law enforcement but why would we want them trying to police the web?

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

#312

Post by technofiend »

1f60c wrote: post #268
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…

Thank you for sharing your experience. Cloudflare switched to using hCaptcha a couple months ago, I think and I only just noticed that they do not offer an audio-based captcha. However, hCaptcha integrates with Privacy Pass[0], and you can top up your tokens by solving a captcha at [1] and [2]. What you could do (and I realize this is far from ideal), is getting a sighted friend to solve a couple of captchas so you h…

Perhaps it's only a matter of time before volunteers or well meaning organization [1] add captcha solving to bemyeyes-style solutions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightHouse_for_the_Blind_and_V...

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

#313

Post by riknos314 »

ehsankia wrote: post #31

Didn't people also say the same thing about AWS a while back when that had a downtime? I guess the internet has multiple "Single-Point-Of-Failure"s.

This is why AWS is puts effort into blast radius reduction.

The Physalia paper is a wonderful read that explains both the justification and high-level approach to implementing said isolation [1].

Another great example is shuffle sharding [2], notably used in Route53.

The end goal of this is that aws outages would be isolated to subsets of aws customers where possible. So instead of half the internet failing it's only 10% (obviously the exact numbers depend heavily on implementation).

[1] https://assets.amazon.science/c4/11/de2606884b63bf4d95190a3c... [2] https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/workload-isolation-u...

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

#314

Post by aww_dang »

Cloudflare is hell when you need to load scripts and css 403'd by them.

Here's my work around:

1) open developer tools 2) refresh page 3) move tab into a new window 4) find a blocked resource in the network tab of developer tools and open it in a new tab 5) verify humanity 6) repeat step 4 and sometimes 5 for each resource the page requires 7) move the problematic site out of the new window and close all of these tabs at once

It is a terrible experience. CF devs and publishers have no idea how inconvenient their service is. I wonder if they have ever lived in a region where every ISP is both incompetent and listed in the CBL?

I frequently skip sites that use CF. The captchas are obnoxious.

The entire concept of a webapp firewall seems a bit backwards to me. Developers should fix their insecure applications.

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

#315

Post by mynameisvlad »

zorpner wrote: post #298
BTinfinity wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, yes, in an ideal world that's true. Yet, here we are.

It's not possible for a dev to go back in time to before hcaptcha was created or when CF decided to switch to them to create said ramp, so until it's built, workarounds are the only real thing a community member can offer someone in the short term.

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

#316

Post by drivebycomment »

DrJosiah wrote: post #304
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…

Hi! I work at hCaptcha (we handle the CF captchas), and to respond specifically: audio is inaccessible for those with visual and auditory processing issues, as well as being broken by ML techniques. Not to project, but we suspect this is why Google turns it off if your browser looks at all suspicious. Another user mentioned the Privacy Pass solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23902870 While Privacy Pass is…

Audio captchas are considered broken completely (search for various papers over the past decade, including one from CMU), so it has limited usefulness only in a very narrow context in practice. I suspect this is a harbinger of things to come - as we close the gap on passing the Turing test, captchas are likely to get less effective, and we will need to transition to a very different solution for bot detection.

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

#317

Post by virtue3 »

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…

It might be worth filing an ADA compliance notice against cloudflare. This is seriously disturbing.

As someone that works in ed tech - anyone that supports higher education is required to support screen readers etc. If any of those sites are using cloudflare that would block them from being compliant pretty seriously.

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

#318

Post by manquer »

DrJosiah wrote: post #304
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…

Hi! I work at hCaptcha (we handle the CF captchas), and to respond specifically: audio is inaccessible for those with visual and auditory processing issues, as well as being broken by ML techniques. Not to project, but we suspect this is why Google turns it off if your browser looks at all suspicious. Another user mentioned the Privacy Pass solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23902870 While Privacy Pass is…

Yes there are subset of people with visual problems who also have auditory problems, that does not mean you should not support the ones with vision only problems.

Are there not "ML techniques" for visual captchas too ?

With more and more powerful models like GPT-3 coming along every few months, Even if the accuracy levels are less for visual over audio today how long do you think that is going to last ?

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

#320

Post by virtue3 »

DrJosiah wrote: post #239
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…

I work at hCaptcha, we run CF's captcha. If you're having problems in the future, popping open a debugger and capturing the results can help us figure out what's going on. But also: browser, OS, site, ...? Right now: there is an issue with Safari users on the most recent iOS and OS X, where 3rd party cookies have now been disabled by default. We're working on a solution. If that's your issue, you can fix on your side…

I cannot believe apple decided to roll that out in the middle of COVID. I got hit pretty hard with it and am finally rolling out a fix for my own stuff.

(posted in case others are hit by this) using `requestStorageAccess()` on a user click event seems to work and that's what we're rolling out :/ https://gist.github.com/iansltx/18caf551baaa60b79206

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