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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)

#41

Post by wkat4242 »

stavros wrote: post #37
pmdr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not CloudFlare that is ruining the Internet, but the spammers and attackers. Spammers have been around since forever and it used to be the webmaster/sysadmin's responsibility to deal with spam in a way that would not hinder user experience. With Cloudflare all that responsibility is aggressively passed on to the user, cumulatively wasting _years_. As for attackers, I wonder if Cloudflare publishes data showin…

> Spammers have been around since forever Is the fallacy here not obvious? Yes, spammers have been around since forever, but it's not the same amount of spammers. Whether it's two spammers or two million spammers does make a difference.

I think we're long past peak spam. A lot of them seem to have given up due to the rise of SPF and DKIM, and also because people don't really use email so much anymore as a serious form of communication.

I remember some clients in the mid 2000s. They got several spam emails per minute on some accounts. Not kidding. I haven't seen anything like that in recent years.

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

#42

Post by fsflover »

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.

More recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953508

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

#43

Post by pmdr »

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.

> 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.

Yes, every one-pager running on Vercel/Netlify sits behind Cloudflare now because no one wants to risk an insane cloud bill in case of an attack. People have become hopelessly dependent on managed cloud services.

However, to be fair, there's less captcha solving nowadays, since they introduced their one-click challenge (but that's not always the case).

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

#44

Post by ArtTimeInvestor »

All of these problems would go away if we had micropayments. So that the user could pay for the resources they use.

The user would know that each pageview is $0.001.

The website owner would know each pageview pays for itself.

We probably could get there with some type of crypto approach. Probably one that is already invented, but not popular yet. I don't know too much about crypto payments, but maybe the Bitcoin Lightning network or a similar technology.

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

#45

Post by charcircuit »

pmdr wrote: post #34
nosianu wrote: post #28

It is not CloudFlare that is ruining the Internet, but the spammers and attackers. On the second level, that catching and punishing them is impractical or even impossible depending on their location. Businesses were perfectly fine to accept the low security of 1990s email, webserver, and all the other configurations and software. They did not suddenly out of nowhere ask for more restrictions (such as email sending re…

> It is not CloudFlare that is ruining the Internet, but the spammers and attackers. Spammers have been around since forever and it used to be the webmaster/sysadmin's responsibility to deal with spam in a way that would not hinder user experience. With Cloudflare all that responsibility is aggressively passed on to the user, cumulatively wasting _years_. As for attackers, I wonder if Cloudflare publishes data showin…

The responsibility is passed to Cloudflare, and that's the point. Not every site can make a capable solution by themselves.

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

#46

Post by inferiorhuman »

grim_io wrote: post #36
inferiorhuman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a market CloudFlare wouldn't be able to ruin the internet. You can thank all of the incessant AI bots for that. I can't even browse GitHub anymore without logging in.

Cloudflare doesn't need AI to survive as a business. There are more than enough DDoS attacks to protect from.

Yet it wasn't until AI grifters started aggressively scraping everything that sites started turning to CloudFlare (and the like) en masse.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

wkat4242 wrote: post #41
stavros wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spammers have been around since forever Is the fallacy here not obvious? Yes, spammers have been around since forever, but it's not the same amount of spammers. Whether it's two spammers or two million spammers does make a difference.

I think we're long past peak spam. A lot of them seem to have given up due to the rise of SPF and DKIM, and also because people don't really use email so much anymore as a serious form of communication. I remember some clients in the mid 2000s. They got several spam emails per minute on some accounts. Not kidding. I haven't seen anything like that in recent years.

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by pmdr »

charcircuit wrote: post #45
pmdr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not CloudFlare that is ruining the Internet, but the spammers and attackers. Spammers have been around since forever and it used to be the webmaster/sysadmin's responsibility to deal with spam in a way that would not hinder user experience. With Cloudflare all that responsibility is aggressively passed on to the user, cumulatively wasting _years_. As for attackers, I wonder if Cloudflare publishes data showin…

The responsibility is passed to Cloudflare, and that's the point. Not every site can make a capable solution by themselves.

The responsibility now lies on the user, who has to click through confirmations to prove they are human, thus making their experience a lot worse. It has been my experience the last ten years.

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

#50

Post by hombre_fatal »

Egor3f wrote: post #27
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…

Moreover, the most hilarious thing here is that Turnstile is easily bypassed by "patchright" (patched playwright runtime) + xvfb + good residential IP pool. So it's hurting real users and not protecting against bots.

That is still more of an ask than what most IoT volumetric attacks can do. It’s like saying Turnstile is bypassed by paying a human to do the captcha.
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