Live data from Hacker News

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

slashgeek.net

71–80 of 83 posts

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

#71

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 Ligh…

Processing a micropayment takes more resources than serving a simple Web page, even if the payment fails. You would have to put in similar filters, or you would get DoSed using the micropayment service.

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

#72
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.

"Your face ran into my fist!"

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

#73

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 Ligh…

Processing a micropayment takes more resources than serving a simple Web page, even if the payment fails . You would have to put in similar filters, or you would get DoSed using the micropayment service.

The incentive to send http requests is that data comes back. That's why the storm of scrapers hurts website owners. They gather the data and give nothing back.

What would be the incentive to send failing payment requests?

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

#74
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…

I run a little wiki and, holy shit, the bots have gotten advanced. Like, it used to be no big deal, then like a year and a half ago, it exploded. It's basically quadrupled the costs for me to run the site. It's not even worth it to ban IPs anymore, because they are routing their traffic through different IPs -- in different countries -- just to scan my site, repeatedly, every damn day. It's an obscure golf course wiki, but no... better check every other day to see if anything has changed!

At the same time, the bots are dumb as hell. I have honey pots that basically are as simple as "if you visit this obscure, hidden URL you're banned" or "if the same obscure page for a course is visited for four different courses in a row, then ban all the IPs that were part of that." But they keep coming... like, an infinite number of IPs. I genuinely don't want to use Cloudflare, but I understand why people do. It's absolutely crazy out there.

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

#75
post #74
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…

I run a little wiki and, holy shit , the bots have gotten advanced. Like, it used to be no big deal, then like a year and a half ago, it exploded. It's basically quadrupled the costs for me to run the site. It's not even worth it to ban IPs anymore, because they are routing their traffic through different IPs -- in different countries -- just to scan my site, repeatedly, every damn day. It's an obscure golf course wi…

I have heard great things about Anubis, although I have not needed to use it myself:

https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

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

#76
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cloudflare offers more options to paid customers than to free customers, but with basic Cloudflare Rules you can usually configure your firewall and presents to your liking.

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

#77
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a little wiki and, holy shit , the bots have gotten advanced. Like, it used to be no big deal, then like a year and a half ago, it exploded. It's basically quadrupled the costs for me to run the site. It's not even worth it to ban IPs anymore, because they are routing their traffic through different IPs -- in different countries -- just to scan my site, repeatedly, every damn day. It's an obscure golf course wi…

I have heard great things about Anubis, although I have not needed to use it myself: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

Thank you for this. I will definitely look into it. Anything that will help stem the fire hose of bullshit is a good thing.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processing a micropayment takes more resources than serving a simple Web page, even if the payment fails . You would have to put in similar filters, or you would get DoSed using the micropayment service.

The incentive to send http requests is that data comes back. That's why the storm of scrapers hurts website owners. They gather the data and give nothing back. What would be the incentive to send failing payment requests?

To break the site. But you're right that a lot fewer people will probably want to break it than to scrape it, and that stuff like CAPTCHAs is usually more about the "scraping" case. So basically a mistake on my part.
Post reply on HN