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

Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

goauthentik.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#51

Post by deanCommie »

phpisthebest wrote: post #47
deanCommie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should instead advise your business partners not to host content that threatens the lives of specific individuals based solely on their identity group? Including coordinate doxxing, harassment, swatting, and threats of violence? It's nice that you have the option to take such a professional attitude that can advise companies in the abstract based on free speech absolutionism, but the details really matter.…

Many Americans would disagree that they "ended the "slippery slope" there" or have anything close to free expression. Look at the Trucker protests during Covid, arresting people for harmless jokes on Twitter, or because a dog raised it paw..... Come On now. Neither Canada, nor Europe have free speech, while they may not be to 1984 authoritarianism yet, they are well well down that path.

> Trucker protests during Covid,

Watch a video of the protest in Ottawa and come back to me and tell what you would have done if this was happening inside your city.

> arresting people for harmless jokes on Twitter

I'll give you that one - https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/7/22912054/uk-grossly-offens...

The law is a mess. But ironically it's not because of a degradation of free speech, but rather because of legacy laws that haven't been caught up with the times.

> because a dog raised it paw

While I personally wouldn't have made a stink out of that one either, let's not pretend that's all it was.

The man trained his dog to raise a paw in response to the command "Do you want to gas the Jews?" and then put it online.

I realize it may be difficult for Americans to understand why the rest of the world takes such a zero-tolerance policy with fascism considering they are only 6 years removed from having elected a fascist president, but there are good reasons why the rest of the world takes a zero tolerance policy with Nazi speech.

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#52

Post by byyll »

jefftk wrote: post #23

> Monopolistic Control of the CDN Market: Another issue is the monopolistic control that Cloudflare has over the CDN market. As one of the largest CDN providers... This is a silly piece, but the claim that Cloudflare is so big that they can push sites around doesn't make sense. Not everyone has released 2022 revenue yet, but in 2021 Akamai took in $3.5B to Cloudflare's $0.66B, Fastly's $0.35B, and Edgecast's $0.29B.…

Size is not measured by revenue alone. Cloudflare has a 75.6% market share among reverse proxies and 17.6% of all websites use it. [0]

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#53

Post by byyll »

Rimintil wrote: post #36
phpisthebest wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it... I think you may want to research those events more

This type of response has no value and should not be posted, here. If you wanted to _provide_ links to said information and be helpful or provide a factual counter-argument, that would be wonderful. It not only benefits the person you're replying to, but also the rest of the HN community. Otherwise, this type of response simply raises red flags of evasion and lack of knowledge.

I did, in another thread about Cloudflare and my comment got flagged so take that as you will.

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#54

Post by Incipient »

NHQ wrote: post #18

This was never the open internet. You can't send a direct packet to another person without intermediaries and cloud systems. You can barely host a website from your personal computer, most cannot. This internet is as they say sold out.

I mean the internet decided to scale out. I don't think relying on intermediaries counts as "selling out".

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#55

Post by phpisthebest »

deanCommie wrote: post #51
phpisthebest wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Americans would disagree that they "ended the "slippery slope" there" or have anything close to free expression. Look at the Trucker protests during Covid, arresting people for harmless jokes on Twitter, or because a dog raised it paw..... Come On now. Neither Canada, nor Europe have free speech, while they may not be to 1984 authoritarianism yet, they are well well down that path.

> Trucker protests during Covid, Watch a video of the protest in Ottawa and come back to me and tell what you would have done if this was happening inside your city. > arresting people for harmless jokes on Twitter I'll give you that one - https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/7/22912054/uk-grossly-offens... The law is a mess. But ironically it's not because of a degradation of free speech, but rather because of legacy law…

[flagged]

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#56

Post by Incipient »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #15
ilyt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hilarious as some time ago they vomited this blogpost https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest... > "Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness" Yeah no shit Cloudflare, YOU'RE THE REASON FOR IT. And the solution is "use hardware keys and track everyone"

> Yeah no shit Cloudflare, YOU'RE THE REASON FOR IT. Cloudflare is not the reason for it - ridiculous amounts of bot traffic is. Bot traffic that is either malicious, resource consuming, or actively trying to bring your website down. CAPTCHAs are just the best tool we have to block them, and I don't believe it is completely fair to have website operators just put up with it for the sake of the users - it's a team eff…

That's a similar argument to "we don't need police, everyone should just behave". It's always a worthwhile cause to teach our kids to be better humans, kind and forgiving...but the reality is people are...not great. We're always going to need cops. Someone will always ddos, we're going to need Cloudflare/anti-ddos.

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#57

Post by Incipient »

nabla9 wrote: post #6

Cloudflare has pushed against public sentiment and mildly against the government to restrict censorship. They would want nothing more than be just "delivery infrastructure" part of the internet. All the points about transparency, monopolies, and privacy concerns and implicit trust in general level are true, of course. They should be addressed. If you want to resist attacks and deliver content efficiently you need CDN…

Take it to the extreme. If cf has a site hosting child exploitation content, that absolutely has to go - at the very least cf could potentially be liable for it. Taking it as a given that this is acceptable to block, then a line must be drawn somewhere at what does and does not get thrown off their network. So far cases of cf taking action have been very few and far between (in the grand scheme of things).

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#58

Post by jefftk »

byyll wrote: post #52
jefftk wrote: post #23

> Monopolistic Control of the CDN Market: Another issue is the monopolistic control that Cloudflare has over the CDN market. As one of the largest CDN providers... This is a silly piece, but the claim that Cloudflare is so big that they can push sites around doesn't make sense. Not everyone has released 2022 revenue yet, but in 2021 Akamai took in $3.5B to Cloudflare's $0.66B, Fastly's $0.35B, and Edgecast's $0.29B.…

Size is not measured by revenue alone. Cloudflare has a 75.6% market share among reverse proxies and 17.6% of all websites use it. [0] [0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy

This is weighted by site, and counts cnn.com and jefftk.com equally. My understanding is Cloudflare is dramatically disproportionately popular among small sites, I think because of how generous their free plan is? If they were 76% of traffic I'd be worried, but I think a majority of the sites using CF probably are signed up because "why not?", which doesn't actually give CF that much power.

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#59

Post by byyll »

jefftk wrote: post #58
byyll wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size is not measured by revenue alone. Cloudflare has a 75.6% market share among reverse proxies and 17.6% of all websites use it. [0] [0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy

This is weighted by site, and counts cnn.com and jefftk.com equally. My understanding is Cloudflare is dramatically disproportionately popular among small sites, I think because of how generous their free plan is? If they were 76% of traffic I'd be worried, but I think a majority of the sites using CF probably are signed up because "why not?", which doesn't actually give CF that much power.

It does count them equally and I agree it's popularity is mostly because of the free tier. From the same website, there is a graph and Cloudflare is lower for high-traffic websites than Cloudfront, Akamai and Fastly. [0] But regardless, that gives Cloudflare power over a lot of sites.

[0] https://w3techs.com/diagram/market_technology/cn-cloudflare

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#60

Post by maldev »

laughinghan wrote: post #40
maldev wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't trust any of my businesses to run on it after this, and have been advising business partners and people I advise to steer clear of it. I know it's not much, but it's been mid to high 6 figures in revenue i've had shifted elsewhere. Having a business possibly be crippled won't pass any sort of risk management, and clearly shows they don't rank highly on any sort of organizational maturity scale.

If learning that Cloudflare took action against literal, self-identified Nazis—who praise Hitler, deny the Holocaust, and drove a car into a crowd and killed a woman—made you worried that Cloudflare might take action against you, you're really telling on yourself.

I don't condone that stuff at all. The big risk comes from 5 or 6 digit member enterprises where you can't properly vet your partners, employees, or contractors. What if a situation like Yandex happens and you find out your code has obscene comments on the backend? What if you have a sponsor that wasn't properly vetted. What if you wind up in a catastrophic PR situation, say BP oil spill. Or, what if someone goes onto a public comment form and posts that obscene stuff and you don't realize it?

Enterprises are massive machines that move EXTREMELY slow. And the risk of not being able to catch something in time is there, and since Cloudflare has now done it once, that means they could be pressured into it in the future. And would the media or Twitter be defending a poor Oil and Gas company if their source code had obscene things in it from a malicious developer, or would they push for Cloudflare to remove them?

Even if the odds of this are so low. I would be doing a disservice to my clients and enterprises if I didn't advise them of this possible risk that could cripple a company. Anything that can be easily stopped by using another vendor, so essentially free, when compared to a risk of something that could result in a company losing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars is an easy choice to make.

Corporations are risk averse, and this plays into both sides. Activists abuse this to pull advertisers of people they don't like. But they also have to understand that services which can cause risk are avoided like the plague.

Post reply on HN