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Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

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41–50 of 164 posts

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#41
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to run it but stopped (I want to say) around 2016 or 2017. Another poster here linked[0] to how dang confirmed it is to protect against a DDOS attack. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38939668

The cert is Cloudflare today.

I meant to imply that Dang only re-added CF recently due to the attacks. They haven't used CF in many years to my knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#43
post #31

So HN uses Cloudflare? That surprises me because typically I notice sites using Cloudflare because my mobile running GNU Linux cannot pass their dreaded Turnstyle. Luckily that does not happen for HN.

The aggressiveness of the "dreaded Turnstyle" is 100% configurable.

It's very easy to disable it completely via Cloudflare settings. Using cloudflare doesn't require you to use all of its features, and almost every feature can be turned off.

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#44
post #6

Cloudflare has access to everyone's cleartext? I was unaware of this. NSA must love that

Same for Akamai, Cloudfront, Fastly, etc. Pretty much every business that wants to offload DDOS protection, caching,and some level of frontline security uses a proxying CDN. An alternative is to keep all of your CDN assets on a CDN bucket on its own hostname, with your main secret-containing business apps on your own servers, but it costs a lot to manage this level of separation and the payoff is only protection agai…

They kept the other spying secret for a long time and it was only due to pretty heroic actions by one person that it got exposed. So I duno.

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#45
post #6

Cloudflare has access to everyone's cleartext? I was unaware of this. NSA must love that

Yes that's how Cloudfare works. The TLS certificate for basically any website using Cloudflare "ends" at Cloudflare's servers. It's then either forwarded on to the actual servers in cleartext or re-encrypted with an internal company certificate (maybe signed internally as well) to pass the connection on to the actual servers. It was the easy way many companies who didn't have the expertise to do their own certificate management moved from the http world to the https world. They just handed it off to cloudflare and kept their servers running http.

F5 Networks, my former employer, sells something similar, but it's a box (or virtual appliance) you put in your own data centers somewhere that dead-ends the connection instead.

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for Akamai, Cloudfront, Fastly, etc. Pretty much every business that wants to offload DDOS protection, caching,and some level of frontline security uses a proxying CDN. An alternative is to keep all of your CDN assets on a CDN bucket on its own hostname, with your main secret-containing business apps on your own servers, but it costs a lot to manage this level of separation and the payoff is only protection agai…

That makes using https instead of http a lot less relevant.

https is important for preventing spying by anyone else in between you and the server. ISPs, coffee shop owners, schools, etc used to spy on http traffic to see what people were doing/searching for, and ISPs like xFinity injected code into non-https pages to show "important messages" to users, e.g. going over your bandwidth limit[0].

The only weak link now is Cloudflare, which is still "less secure than a direct connection" (with respect to government spying, bugs[0], hackers, etc) but the threat level is drastically reduced.

0: https://blog.ryankearney.com/2013/01/comcast-caught-intercep...

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13766339

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#48
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for Akamai, Cloudfront, Fastly, etc. Pretty much every business that wants to offload DDOS protection, caching,and some level of frontline security uses a proxying CDN. An alternative is to keep all of your CDN assets on a CDN bucket on its own hostname, with your main secret-containing business apps on your own servers, but it costs a lot to manage this level of separation and the payoff is only protection agai…

That makes using https instead of http a lot less relevant.

Hardly! Nobody is forcing you to consent to MITM, you freely choose it every time you voluntarily use a website that utilizes one.

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK most of these filters are disabled by default when setting up your website on Cloudflare, so most websites using the Cloudflare network likely have this turned off.

This is correct, it’s part of their WAF offering where there is rule-based blocking of content.

And requires the $20/month plan to enable.

Re: Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?

#50
post #31

So HN uses Cloudflare? That surprises me because typically I notice sites using Cloudflare because my mobile running GNU Linux cannot pass their dreaded Turnstyle. Luckily that does not happen for HN.

bummer. i used to like the legend that it was all on one commodity linux pc implemented in some nice concise lisp running on sbcl.

edit: my memory is crap. it was a single machine, but the codebase was written in a custom experimental language that i think was a lisp derivative. (which would make sense!). the source was online at some time, can't find it now.

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