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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”

#371
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to move pretty fast when things are broken for non blind people. Are you saying it's ok to discriminate? I know there are varying degrees at play here, all I'm trying to do is point out your priorities are fucked. CloudFlare is working on something right now, why not this?

When things are already completely broken then it's acceptable to move fast because things are already completely broken. When things are only slightly broken you need to be careful you don't expand the breakage. Are you sure CloudFlare isn't working on this right now? Captchas are very hard (if not impossible) to do right, and audio captchas are no exception. Check out http://uncaptcha.cs.umd.edu/ As far as I know C…

[deleted]

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

#372

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…

For me, the biggest disappointment was when they were defending hosting terrorist site for "free speech" reasons: https://www.fastcompany.com/90312063/how-cloudflare-straddle... https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/ > the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine…

From the article:

“ This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Seeking problems is another way to write it.

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contr…

That’s just general market analysis. It doesn’t say anything about what their hedge is. Or was it simply that the existing actors were that inefficient/price gauging.

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

#375
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

We can expect developers to think about accessibility during development. You would never see a building constructed today without a ramp or with insufficient handicapped parking. I realize that you can't change culture overnight either, but the fact is that technology like this, designed for use in large applications used by a huge portion of the population of the world, shouldn't need to be retrofitted to be accessible. It should have been baked in.

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the biggest disappointment was when they were defending hosting terrorist site for "free speech" reasons: https://www.fastcompany.com/90312063/how-cloudflare-straddle... https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/ > the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine…

From the article: “ This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”

Are DDOS-for-hire sites "speech"?

Their only use is to suppress speech.

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already laws regarding accessibility.

Are Captcha companies violating those laws? If so, then yes, enforce them. If not, then either change the laws or leave the Captcha companies be.

> Are Captcha companies violating those laws?

I would argue that this is the case, yes.

> If so, then yes, enforce them

If only I could.

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

#379
Starting yesterday, I have been getting Cloudflare's hCaptcha image identification quizzes on every site that uses them. Googling the issue indicates that the IP address range may have been blacklisted, if say my laptop (a Mac that doesn't visit any shady sites) or my router has been compromised and is now running a botnet or something.

It seems unlikely because my phone can access sites on wifi fine, and again my Mac doesn't appear to have any malware.

Could it be that the outage is somehow relate to Cloudflare putting these captchas up as a precautionary measure?

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

#380

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.

I'm not american, otherwise I would definitely do so.

This issue is mostly unnoticeable, as long as you're not considered malicious to Cloudflare, everything works perfectly and passes accessibility audits. When something weird happens and Cloudflare flags you, you cannot access the system at all.

For those doing accessibility audits out there, this kind of issues might be worth looking into, as they're very non obvious and very critical.

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