Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare • Hacker News Board

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#261

Post by strictnein » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

milkshakes wrote: post #254

strictnein wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it’s no big secret that the NSA is listening in on the node/isp level" The NSA is doing deep packet inspection at every "node/isp" in the world? That's a pretty amazing claim. How are they managing that?

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore for the sota from 20 years ago

Yes, I'm well aware of XKeyscore.

If it required ~700 servers in ~150 locations (mostly US military bases and embassies) to surveil a small slice of internet and other traffic back then, how many would it require now? How many locations would those servers need to be situated? And how would NSA positions situated in embassies capture all of that Internet traffic in a foreign country without getting noticed?

Just think through the logistics of all of this and try to think of a way that any agency could accomplish it in 2026. And now think of all the people in the industry who would have to have at least some knowledge of it, or be able to discover a part of it.

Those are just some of the things one would need to explain and rationalize to even suggest that the NSA is doing what some of the people here are claiming.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#262

Post by junofan » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #246

icantevenhold wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck the NSA backdoored our head of states phones - if “NSA wants my data” is your threat model you are pretty much cooked everywhere. Even if you host on your own server and operate everything yourself it’s no big secret that the NSA is listening in on the node/isp level

> "it’s no big secret that the NSA is listening in on the node/isp level" The NSA is doing deep packet inspection at every "node/isp" in the world? That's a pretty amazing claim. How are they managing that?

Isn’t their whole thing supposed to be spying on foreigners? They seem to be quite successful. There aren’t that many exchanges [1]. Could probably manage with cash, guns, and some know-how.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_poin...

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#263

Post by celsoazevedo » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #240

pocksuppet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers. Cloudflare is the LG TV of websites, but it's worse because we've known it has an always-on microphone and speech-to-text for over a decade and we still keep using it for some reason.

The NSA couldn't care less about you and your customers, nor do they have any interest whatsoever in the megaton of worthless internet traffic that goes through Cloudflare. This article, from over a decade ago now, explains how they actually operate. Gobbling up all the traffic is a 20+ year old idea that never bore any fruit and is amazingly pointless. Instead, they might drop an implant in the SSD firmware of devic…

There's a lot of important data that runs through Cloudflare, so I think it's a bit naive to think that there's nothing interesting for the NSA there.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#264

Post by wat10000 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #226

petcat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did they not ask Ukraine to give the already occupied land and then some? Ukraine is never going to retake the territory they've lost without European soldiers on the ground. Macron famously said that he would have to send troops to Odesa and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine. Meanwhile Putin has captured even more land and is now actively bombarding Kyiv. It is painfully obvious that Eu…

Not being able to take the territory, having a ceasefire over the territory, and actually conceding the territory are three different things. The world is full of unceded occupied areas. Korea. Taiwan. Northern Cyprus. Palestine. Nagorno-Karabakh. Transnistria. Ukraine rightly has no interest in ceding land to achieve a temporary ceasefire to allow Russia to re-arm and then attack again. Meanwhile it is also importan…

I'm not excited to have France and Russia in direct conflict, but having two nuclear states at war would not be anything new. There's been China/USSR, India/Pakistan, India/China, and if you want to consider wars that mostly exist on paper at this point, North Korea/USA.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#265

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

Vaslo wrote: post #213

shevy-java wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not living in Europe, right? Because while I agree that China is a problem, the USA is a much, much bigger problem for Europeans than China is right now. It's mostly the USA that wants to depict China as the main problem when in reality the USA behaves in a hugely aggressive colonial manner. Trump just makes this more obvious, but that has been the case way before Trump already.

This is all in your head. We just expect people in Europe to begin picking up more of the tab for things like NATO, and don't want our enemies (your enemies if in western/central Europe too, BTW) to get control of future energy/minerals. You call it "aggressive colonial control", Americans call it "time for Europe to accept more financial and personal responsibility.

[deleted]

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#266

Post by broken-kebab » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

kakacik wrote: post #210

broken-kebab wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China isn't a big bully for European nations cause it's counterbalanced by USA, not of inherent niceness. Also in two years there will be a different president in White house, but in Beijing things aren't that fluid.

US is also nice to others only because it benefits it long term ie in building and maintaining its hegemony, fighting for petrodollars and so on. Now that it shat on those decades of hard-won fights and alignment thats irrelevant thing of the past. Ask/look around in places that dared to stood apart or directly up to whatever US wanted, the story is everything but nice and bloodless. Ask those that fought for them, a…

USA fluctuates expanding, and diminishing its power mainly because it's typical for electoral democracies to change its course with higher frequency.

It's friendly to Europe most of the time, and hostile at times. It's culturally closer, and functionally democratic. You quite obviously don't like the latter statement, but it is, and it is verifiable claim.

1) Can an American sue the country's gov't and win?

2) Is said gov't changeable by the way of elections?

3) How easy it is to participate in political debates for electoral outcomes?

On all 3 USA gets pretty high score. In high contrast against the backdrop of China. Like, if you prefer a world hegemon who is actively imperialist, and contra democracy, cause you're so outraged by the orange man - that's your choice, of course. But let's not pretend the choice is well-thought. Were HN a Chinese place, and you dared to criticize Chinese imperialism your account would not remain unpunished for long, for instance.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#267

Post by iteria » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #201

mrits wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current Europe strategy seems to be to pay software engineers less money and hope for a superior product. I'm not sure how you'd catch up when some of your engineers literally make less than our fast food workers.

I rather have 30 day vacations, a proper life with 40h work week, healthcare, union membership, than SV salaries, which are nontheless an exception, most of the developers, that aren't even properly accredited Software Engineers, get the same salary as most office workers. In which country do fast food workers get higher salaries than office workers, unless we are talking about tourism industry outside Europe, with s…

I'm American and I take 30 days of PTO a year. I get paid the national median for pay, but that still puts me in the top 10% of _household_ incomes for my state. I have good healthcare and benefits. Hell, I got sick last year and took 2 months off from work paid because my company has the policies to cover that and then I came back and it was fine.

Like, I find SV culture and living to be a cancer, but I'm just saying as someone who doesn't live in a top 10 city in the US with a MCOL, I struggle to think of how working as a software engineer in the EU would be better.

It's been over 10 years since that 2 weeks PTO nonsense applied to tech. I don't even have a fancy job. I work for a bank.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#268

Post by breakingcups » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

bakugo wrote: post #133

Havoc wrote: post #2

Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there

Something to consider if you're looking at Bunny.net: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710845

I wonder of the CEO ever got back with an update. It seems awfully quiet in that thread.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#269

Post by xboxnolifes » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #16

cbg0 wrote: post #9

> The front door is not the whole stack Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN? On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to…

> now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website ... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires…

Nobody needs DDoS protection... until they do. It only takes 1 disgruntled person with a few dollars to take down a cheap server for days.

Re: Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

#270

Post by wat10000 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #49

microtonal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I theoretically agree, the issue is that Trump will connect economical issues to blowing up NATO Article 5, leaving NATO completely, or retracting intelligence or Starlink for Ukraine. So for the most part, the EU has to work slowly and under the radar. That said, my worry is that we'll be back to business as usual if the midterms look favorable. Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was g…

> Even the urgency present during January's Greenland threats was gone after a few months. There are troops deployed on Greenland right now ready to defend the island. The threat is not gone from the minds of the people there or in the rest of Europe just because you stopped reading about it on CNN or whatever. Edit: I got curious if this part is even possible: > leaving NATO completely Apparently not. Congress enact…

Is a law going to stop it from happening? The destruction of USAID was against the law but it still happened. Let's say that the president announces we're leaving NATO, all troops stationed in Europe are leaving immediately, and we will no longer be bound to collective defense. What would actually prevent that from happening? Maybe we'd still be "in NATO" in some technical legal sense, but would it make any difference?