CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by inferiorhuman » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 12:52 AM UTC

graemep wrote: post #67

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 was huge before AI bots became a problem.

Neither Cloudflare nor their competitors were aywhere near as prevalent before the AI bots. Farnell and Renesas outright blocked me, DigiKey makes me sit through their bullshit at nearly every request, issue trackers have the slowdown widgets etc. etc. etc. As late as early this year I never had these problems.

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

#82

Post by ArtTimeInvestor » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 5:50 AM UTC

Hizonner wrote: post #80

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Additionally, I have read up a bit more on the Lightning Network now, and it seems not possible to send invalid payments in the first place.

The sender does not have a direct communication channel with the receiver. They send the payment to a hop they are connected to (they have a channel with) and it gets routed to the receiver. The first hop would already drop an invalid payment. If they spam them with more invalid payments, all that would happen is that their connection to the Lightning Network would get lost as their channel partners would disconnect from them. The receiver would not receive a single network packet in the whole process.

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

#83

Post by onetokeoverthe » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 11:45 AM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #74

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…

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…

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