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

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61–70 of 83 posts

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Chrome users should feel a shiver going down their spine.

Why would they? They're obviously on the 'right side of history'. \hj

Chrome browsers don't send a specific handshake. But while browsing other sites they help gather enough evidence for this being a human operated piece of software.

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

#62
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…

Yup, the CloudFlare CAPTCHAs are a nuisance, but they're so much better than the Google reCAPTCHAs they replaced. Those things must be designed to make you give up.

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

#63
post #39

What is a better option for website owners? We don't want to keep people out, we want to keep attackers out.

Genuinely curious, is there a way of tuning how this protection is triggered? If there is, perhaps filter out those ISPs/countries from which most attack originate? Not a cloudflare user myself -- for me it's mostly been a nuisance.

At least to me, cloudflare has never shown any fine tuning options.

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

#64
I believe the problem is not really Cloudflare or another cloud provider.

The fact is internet was built around the idea that everything should be decentralized in order to be resilient.

Resilient to attacks, resilient to outages or any form of censorship.

So, each time amazon, cloudflare (...) fails, it reminds us that nobody like SPOFs.

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

#65
post #39

What is a better option for website owners? We don't want to keep people out, we want to keep attackers out.

Genuinely curious, is there a way of tuning how this protection is triggered? If there is, perhaps filter out those ISPs/countries from which most attack originate? Not a cloudflare user myself -- for me it's mostly been a nuisance.

I use cloudflare and I block whole countries because the bots and spam are so bad from places like Singapore.

Cloudflare makes region blocking very easy.

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

#66
post #60
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 in the interest of CFs customers to be as accessible as possible, after all. But since in reality there is friction, there is no magic mechanism to make those interest force CF to implement a better system as, for example, the customers might not have enough knowledge / tech expertise to understand they're losing 1% due to crude CF filters and ask for a fix

It is, but do they even know about the problems?

The data Cloudflare shows people in the number of requests it "protected" you from and the number of requests it thought legit. There is no indication of the number of false positives, and IIRC of the number of people asked to pass a captcha. The wording implies zero false positives and I think many people simply assume its negligible.

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

#67

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…

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 was huge before AI bots became a problem.

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

#68
post #66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is in the interest of CFs customers to be as accessible as possible, after all. But since in reality there is friction, there is no magic mechanism to make those interest force CF to implement a better system as, for example, the customers might not have enough knowledge / tech expertise to understand they're losing 1% due to crude CF filters and ask for a fix

It is, but do they even know about the problems? The data Cloudflare shows people in the number of requests it "protected" you from and the number of requests it thought legit. There is no indication of the number of false positives, and IIRC of the number of people asked to pass a captcha. The wording implies zero false positives and I think many people simply assume its negligible.

> It is, but do they even know about the problems?

No, that's what I said - they may lack knowledge.

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

#69
Blame the devs as well, lots of useless junk code and libraries for things that could've been couple lines of code that ends up bloating a site and make it slow - then they need a CDN like and caching solutions like cloudflare. 4/5 of the web wouldn't need any of it (if their sites were optimized from the start). DDOS attacks do happen, but considering the size of the web, the chance it will affect you is very low. AI bots are more of a stress test than a DDOS, figure out your bottlenecks and fix them.

E.g. for a frontend yourself a budget of 1MB for a static site and 2MB for dynamic one and go from there.

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

#70
post #34
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…

I've been on the Internet since 1992, directly connected at home (student dorms at the time) vial ethernet cable and university ATM backbone since 1994.

At that time I was an admin of said student network, and at the same time built TCP/IP based network and email infrastructure at a subsidiary of a large German company as a side job.

So I was an admin of routers, switches, various services (email, Usenet server, webservers, fax server).

Funny enough - we only added a firewall in front of the student network to protect against our own student's experiments rather than against outside intrusions, at least initially (for example, one person setting up their own Usenet server brought down DNS by flooding it with queries)!

We never had any problems with spam or attackers. "you just didn't notice the attacks!" - NO. When you go online today you get an eternal stream of automated intrusion attempts, visible in all your log files.

Today does not even remotely compare with the easy-going Internet of the 1990s.

Usenet, forums, email - they were all very much usable with minimal or zero spam, and very basic user management. Today, with such a basic setup like we used to have, you would be 100% and chock-full of spam shortly after putting such a server online.

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