Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 199 posts

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#131

Post by [deleted] »

Avamander wrote: post #104
ntoskrnl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunate, but the only way it's sustainable. Businesses throughout history have been sustainable without needing to ban people at random with AI. This AI hell is a new phenomenon in the past 10 years and it's purely driven by cost-cutting.

> Businesses throughout history have been sustainable without needing to ban people at random with AI. When the cost of abuse lowers, so must the cost of defense. So of course cost-cutting has to happen. Otherwise it's going to be a financial DoS. All that is though only if you want services to have free tiers. If you're willing to pay for everything then sure, it becomes easier. I'm actually quite certain one will e…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#132

Post by tyingq »

Avamander wrote: post #104
ntoskrnl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunate, but the only way it's sustainable. Businesses throughout history have been sustainable without needing to ban people at random with AI. This AI hell is a new phenomenon in the past 10 years and it's purely driven by cost-cutting.

> Businesses throughout history have been sustainable without needing to ban people at random with AI. When the cost of abuse lowers, so must the cost of defense. So of course cost-cutting has to happen. Otherwise it's going to be a financial DoS. All that is though only if you want services to have free tiers. If you're willing to pay for everything then sure, it becomes easier. I'm actually quite certain one will e…

Then they should automate a way for the domain owner to transfer the domain out when they decide they don't want your business. There's no reasonable excuse to hold a domain hostage. Their registrar is also not free.

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#133

Post by Anunayj »

srrr wrote: post #93
usr1106 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. But even if they (any of those corps running algorithms but no customer support worth the name) comply (which I won't take for granted), you will get some code or keyword that fraudulent activity was detected. Very unlikely that they have technical details of the root cause in their customer DB.

I don't think so. I have not worked on many fraud detection systems but in all cases there was a very detailed record in the logs of what happened and how the decision came to be. In addition, if there was a human review additional data is often generated. You can't just flip a bit in the customer record, or can you? (Edit: And if no information is in the logs I would argue that all information is in the input data a…

I've done this with Instagram in the past, and funnily.. after a few emails back and forth.. they just reinstated my account..? and told me to download my data the normal way.

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#134

Post by ntoskrnl »

Avamander wrote: post #104
ntoskrnl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunate, but the only way it's sustainable. Businesses throughout history have been sustainable without needing to ban people at random with AI. This AI hell is a new phenomenon in the past 10 years and it's purely driven by cost-cutting.

> Businesses throughout history have been sustainable without needing to ban people at random with AI. When the cost of abuse lowers, so must the cost of defense. So of course cost-cutting has to happen. Otherwise it's going to be a financial DoS. All that is though only if you want services to have free tiers. If you're willing to pay for everything then sure, it becomes easier. I'm actually quite certain one will e…

You do have a point about the free tiers. I try to pay for things where I can, for example I'm a happy Fastmail user (and you should be too!) But paying for things is still no guarantee, see also: the OP. Google and Discord are both infamous for this. They treat paying users and free users the same. eBay charges for their service too, and I had a ~15 year old account banned. Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you've been collecting my money for the past 15 years, can't you spare 5 minutes to sanity check your AI?

I guess besides free users, the other exception is payment processors. I don't envy Stripe or PayPal.

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#135

Post by devoutsalsa »

malikNF wrote: post #38

Update: Just received an email from CF. -------------- Hello, With regard to your inquiry, we have restored the domain names in your account to active status. Please allow for normal propagation. You will need to re-add mnf90.com to your account in order to manage it. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. Kind Regards, Cloudflare Trust & Safety ------------ Not much info lol, but guess its fixed n…

> The suspension is permanent and we will not be making changes on our end.

"J/K LOL"

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#136

Post by eins1234 »

slig wrote: post #114
eins1234 wrote: post #106

Wow, that's terrible. Thank you for the heads up. Just transferred my domains back to namecheap. While we're all here venting about Cloudflare, is anyone else frustrated about how they lure you in to their CDN product with "free" bandwidth, but then lock behind so many useful features arbitrarily behind what I can only imagine is a thousands of dollars per month enterprise plan? Just look at their cache-purging page…

Have you seen this thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581

Nope, thanks for bringing it to my attention. Though not sure who to trust at this point haha...

Anyone have other recommendations for where I should keep my domains?

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#137

Post by zwily »

andrewnyr wrote: post #128
johnklos wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Justin... Perhaps you can explain why this happened in the first place while also explaining why you ignore complaints about tons of spammers and scammers that are hosted(note) on your platform? (note) hosting is providing services on the Internet without which a site / domain won't work, so please don't try to pretend you don't host because you've decided to redefine "hosting".

proxy =/= hosting understand the tech, there is no redefinition going on

Cloudflare does lots of hosting too.

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#138

Post by throwawayforcf »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #83

FWIW I also had a recent experience with Cloudflare "Trust & Safety" and it was my first negative Cloudflare experience, unfortunately. A client-of-a-client had their site reported to CF for malware distribution via Netcraft. I reviewed the site and found nothing unsual-looking. I dug out a month's worth of access logs for the site, carefully filtered them, and then eyeballed all of the tens of thousands of remaining…

My only interaction with cloudflare's "Trust and Safety" team involved reporting a site using their services, and that site hosted a large archive of child pornography [1], for which I provided a sizable chunk of evidence, which would have let them easily verify my claim.

All I got back was a canned response that cloudflare is not actually hosting anything and cannot do anything and will forward my complaint to the ISP that really hosts the website.

Replying back to that email, asking whether they couldn't at least close the cloudflare account in question, I was greeted with exactly the same canned response again.

Responses form law enforcement I tried were also rather underwhelming, but that isn't cloudflare's fault.

This was a while ago, and it all was rather discouraging. And I can only hope they got their act together now...

But I guess not. I just checked, and the site is online again, under the same domain, and using cloudflare again. I'll report them again now, I think.

[1] Including a lot of the child porn this UK blackmailer had traded and sold: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-59614734 The site I reported was re-selling the stuff for crypto or gift cards, with a lot of free samples.

Now you may wonder why in hell I would even know about any of this. I used to be a small time moderator on a small time website where some of our users shared some of the content/links to the content.

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#139

Post by OJFord »

cfsucks wrote: post #85
TrueGeek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also want to see a Cloudflare post-mortem here. All of my domains are with them. The worse part of OP's story is that they even prevented him from moving the domains to another registar. So if this happens to any of us we're completely locked out of our email.

Which violates their registrar agreements: > Registered Name Holders must be able to transfer their domain name registrations between Registrars (Note that sections 3.7-3.9 do allow registrars to deny transfers, f.e. given "evidence of fraud", but given that they reinstated the domains I doubt they have evidence of fraud.) https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/transfer-policy-2016-0...

But they ('re automated system or through mistake or whatever) thought they did have evidence of fraud right, so that's consistent?

Re: Ask HN: Has Cloudflare blocked your domain without explaining what's going on?

#140

Post by slenk »

TrueGeek wrote: post #57
akersten wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep framing this as "how do I make sure I don't get into this situation again," but with the attention this is getting (#6 on HN) and just how bad the issue is (both functionally and PR-wise)... Cloudflare should really do a public post-mortem here. It sounds like it's their fault.

I also want to see a Cloudflare post-mortem here. All of my domains are with them. The worse part of OP's story is that they even prevented him from moving the domains to another registar. So if this happens to any of us we're completely locked out of our email.

You can't transfer domains more than once every 60 days...so if he transferred within the last 60 no place would let him transfer out
Post reply on HN