Cloudflare announced four major new features that could disrupt industries

Post by opinion-is-bad » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:12 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #68

rudian wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that concerned me is that CF kicked a few "bad actors" off their network One could argue that they have the right and/or duty to do that, but being closer and closer to a "internet backbone" provider, this can become scary. Would you like water to be cut off to "bad actors"?

Those situations aren't analogous: if the water utility cuts me off, my options are things like drilling a well, trucking in water, or moving. If Cloudflare declines not to do business with me, there are many competitors around the world who I can switch to at varying levels of service depending on how much control I want.

Post by wpietri » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:46 AM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #100

wpietri wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This definitely isn't a disruption in the academic sense of the term: https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation But even in the casual sense I don't think it's disruptive. They've introduced a competing service at a modestly lower cost. This won't put AWS out of business. Customers won't switch away en masse. It even won't make a noticeable dent in AWS's quarterly revenues. So this isn't disruption. it's…

I think you are underestimating what it could do when they have a complete cloud offering. And since there are no egress fees, there is no barrier to use a competing product that does something better. It's like they are launching without vendor lock-in. So I do think it's disruptive, not based on costs alone.

Post by anaganisk » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 6:15 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #43

aaomidi wrote: post #21

It's kinda astonishing to me that were fine with a third party company terminating end to end encryption between the service provider and the user. It just feels...so off to me that we've normalized this. Hopefully there will be new standards in the future. But for now this is slightly terrifying to me.

CDNs have existed since the 90s so everyone's had time to get used to it. The part which I think you're over-weighting is that this is not a third-party stranger but a third-party with whom you have a legal relationship — the use-cases for a CDN require external termination, otherwise you don't rent one, and the contracts commit to keeping it secure. For a business, there are tons of trust relationships you handle th…

Post by acdha » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:10 AM UTC

anaganisk wrote: post #105

acdha wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDNs have existed since the 90s so everyone's had time to get used to it. The part which I think you're over-weighting is that this is not a third-party stranger but a third-party with whom you have a legal relationship — the use-cases for a CDN require external termination, otherwise you don't rent one, and the contracts commit to keeping it secure. For a business, there are tons of trust relationships you handle th…

On a fun note, microsoft does ship a trojan in windows. Its called Cortana and Telemetry.

Post by LinuxBender » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 12:43 PM UTC

verisimi wrote: post #22

I see Cloudflare as part of the system of control of the internet. They can prevent sites from being seen or users from accessing the internet. I also suspect that their business model is the mafia protection racket - that they may run some of the bots that commit DDOS attacks - it would be in their business interests.