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CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

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Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

#11

Post by lysace »

darkwater wrote: post #6
lysace wrote: post #5

(The author runs a small ISP in an unspecified country in SEA and complains about many CF captchas.) This may be one reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ddos-threat-report-2025-q3/ Top 10 largest sources of DDoS attacks: 2025 Q3 1. Indonesia 2. Thailand 3. Bangladesh Vietnam and Singapore also make it into the top 10. The latter is a bit of an outlier being rich and having a small population.

So, guilty by default, right? We developed human rights and laws through centuries of debates, pain, suffer, revolutions, fights etc just to get mega-corps doing whatever they feel right, externalizing the trade-offs on innocent peoples.

No, just pointing out that it's relatively likely that their ISP's IP ranges have been flagged as DDoS sources.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

#12

Post by legumesoflight »

binaryturtle wrote: post #2

I fully agree. It's not only the waste of time when you have to confirm you're a human (that adds up to multiple hours per month). It's also the entire blockage of older or less mainstream systems that no longer can access, sometimes critical, websites at all when the Cloudflare check blocks things entirely because the "browser is out of date" or not on their whitelist. Therefore causing excessive discrimination of p…

I wish there were more information and guides being spread of free and open source systems worldwide, there is tremendous potential in upgrading "end of life" systems to use a Linux-based operating system. That way we could avoid unfathomable amounts of e-waste being dumped for no other reason than them not being commercially viable anymore and poor people could keep using their computers

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

#13

Post by nomilk »

esperent wrote: post #4

This article is from 2016, and it should be noted that things have significantly increased since then. I no longer have to click traffic lights and motorcycles, I just have to wait a few seconds. I'm in Vietnam so my IP gets flagged for checks a lot, but they all pass automatically in a few seconds. The only time I still get asked to click motorcycles is not Cloudflare, it's Google. They absolutely hate when you try…

Today I looked up a word definition on tfd.com (usually a lightning-fast website), it took 3 cloudflare screens each 10 seconds to load. Why?. Because I'm in South East Asia? I aborted mission and pasted the word in a search engine and had a definition in The shorter the average interaction with the site, the worse the burden cloudflare becomes. E.g. looking up a definition is usually a 5-10 second job, Cloudflare can make it take almost an order of magnitude longer.

In defence of motorcylces and traffic lights, those captchas are annoying too, but they do help humanity in a tiny, tiny way. By contrast, watching a cloudflare loading spinner is stupefyingly useless.

(apologies for ranting. I find it disproportionately irritating even though it's only a few minutes per day, possibly due to the sheer repetition involved).

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

#14

Post by nevon »

I have almost the same experience. I'm not running my own ISP and I'm not in a country known for originating DDoS attacks (Sweden), yet just using Firefox on Linux seems to be enough to be forced to click on traffic lights many times an hour. If I'm using Mullvad VPN that accelerates to almost every minute. CloudFlare claims to support privacy pass, but their extension implementing it seems to do absolutely nothing.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

#15

Post by andyjohnson0 »

darkwater wrote: post #6
lysace wrote: post #5

(The author runs a small ISP in an unspecified country in SEA and complains about many CF captchas.) This may be one reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ddos-threat-report-2025-q3/ Top 10 largest sources of DDoS attacks: 2025 Q3 1. Indonesia 2. Thailand 3. Bangladesh Vietnam and Singapore also make it into the top 10. The latter is a bit of an outlier being rich and having a small population.

So, guilty by default, right? We developed human rights and laws through centuries of debates, pain, suffer, revolutions, fights etc just to get mega-corps doing whatever they feel right, externalizing the trade-offs on innocent peoples.

So what's to be done? Some people are being adversely (and probably unfairly, maybe even unjustly) affected by the actions of people that they share a geographic location with. I'm not convinced that many people desire that, but nobody much wants systematic disruption to a shared resource that has (perhaps regrettably) become economically and socially important, either. And, at its basic level, the net is geography: wires and data centres and peering points, as well as national laws, companies, agreements, etc.

What's the better solution? I certainly don't know.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

#17

Post by tpdly »

nomilk wrote: post #13
esperent wrote: post #4

This article is from 2016, and it should be noted that things have significantly increased since then. I no longer have to click traffic lights and motorcycles, I just have to wait a few seconds. I'm in Vietnam so my IP gets flagged for checks a lot, but they all pass automatically in a few seconds. The only time I still get asked to click motorcycles is not Cloudflare, it's Google. They absolutely hate when you try…

Today I looked up a word definition on tfd.com (usually a lightning-fast website), it took 3 cloudflare screens each 10 seconds to load. Why? . Because I'm in South East Asia? I aborted mission and pasted the word in a search engine and had a definition in The shorter the average interaction with the site, the worse the burden cloudflare becomes. E.g. looking up a definition is usually a 5-10 second job, Cloudflare c…

Woah, yeah just tried tfd.com and got 10 CF redirects, still not loading.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

#18

Post by bhattisatish »

ehhthing wrote: post #9

OP didn’t put this in the title but the article is from 2016. Turns out a lot has changed in the last decade and I think it’s likely that the article should be updated on what it’s like right now.

Oh this is still very true! I am from Banglaore, India. There are sites that outright block me. And in a day, I at least encounter 20-25 times where I need to click on "human checkbox" due to my region or IP. In mobile it's worse. All sites that have "strict" mode on, will either block or show the "human checkbox".

Even sites that I manage with Cloudflare, I see the same. Even if I use relaxed mode on, If I visit the site via mobile, it can trigger the Cloudflare human validation.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016)

#20

Post by azalemeth »

binaryturtle wrote: post #2

I fully agree. It's not only the waste of time when you have to confirm you're a human (that adds up to multiple hours per month). It's also the entire blockage of older or less mainstream systems that no longer can access, sometimes critical, websites at all when the Cloudflare check blocks things entirely because the "browser is out of date" or not on their whitelist. Therefore causing excessive discrimination of p…

What are the symptoms of being shadowbanned? I see an awful lot of "click here to prove you are human" boxes, click then, the page reloads, and I'm left with the captcha again. It's been very very frustrating.
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