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

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

#271

Post by [deleted] »

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

#272

Post by strictnein »

junofan wrote: post #262
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?

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...

If you just look at the largest 4 of those, you'd have 100Tbps of traffic to monitor, with an average throughput of roughly half of that.

That's ~540PB ((50 Tbps / 8 bits) * 86400 seconds/day) of traffic a day with just those four. Add in the rest and you're likely talking ~Exabytes of data each day. And that has to all be processed on site.

If someone wants to argue that the NSA is in these facilities I'd be 100% onboard. But inspecting it all would be nearly impossible, let alone capturing it all and sending it back to some datacenter somewhere, which is a physical impossibility.

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

#273

Post by jonathanstrange »

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…

If I was the director of an agency of the size of the NSA and was evaluating the options purely from that perspective, I'd aim at creating a file on every living citizen on earth, including their social network topology and their activities. Basically a Google search engine that includes information not publicly accessible. I'd create much larger files for persons of interest and authorize targeted surveillance of them, of course, but with today's means to collect data a complete world database on every living and many dead persons is well within the technical capabilities. It also makes sense and is rational, if you put aside moral considerations.

That's how I evaluate these things. If it makes sense and can be useful, it's likely going to be done. Notice that there is no law against this in the US if you exclude US citizens. It's perfectly legal and within their mission parameters to do it for non-US citizens. I used to think my judgments were a bit too much on the paranoid side but when Snowden published his leaks it turned out that I was roughly right about every capability the NSA had except for their internal security.

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

#274

Post by petcat »

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 rather have 30 day vacations, a proper life with 40h work week, healthcare, union membership, than SV salaries

This is an appeal to mediocrity and it doesn't really hold when comparing EU to Silicon Valley tech jobs. Young engineers in the Silicon Valley (or NYC, or Seattle) have excellent health care, generous vacation and other benefits, and they also make substantially more money.

Why would a young, ambitious engineering graduate care about taking 30 days off when they have the opportunity to work on frontier tech that is only available in the US? And make an absurd salary doing it? Healthcare is also less of a concern because 20 somethings and 30 somethings barely use any social benefits anyway. And like I said earlier, they also have exceptional private health care through their employer.

This claim that the European lifestyle is somehow better despite the extreme salary difference really just doesn't hold when comparing to early/mid-career tech workers in the US.

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

#275

Post by strictnein »

celsoazevedo wrote: post #263
strictnein wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, but the comment I was replying to stated:

"the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers"

Which implies that they are looking at it all and records it.

The vast, vast majority of Cloudflare's traffic is worthless to an intelligence agency.

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

#276

Post by JumpCrisscross »

iso1631 wrote: post #200
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go ask almost anyone in Asia I think it’s fair to say the U.S. and Russia are Europe’s principal geopolitical adversaries, today, while for anyone in Asia or Oceania it’s China. (Africa and South America are being weirdly carved up—it’s not particularly clear who is trying to colonize versus trade with them.)

> colonize versus trade Very similar pressures in reality.

> similar pressures in reality

In the way slavery and employment are similar, sure. In practice they’re very different things, even if one—when taken to the extreme—can turn into the other.

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

#277

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

coldbrewed wrote: post #260
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like complaining that the police are mean while your heroin dealer is so nice to you.

In this metaphor the police are corrupt, running a protection racket, and might get drunk and shoot you while your dealer is in the mafia. The mafia link might be a problem at some point but the person with the badge and the gun is a problem right now.

[flagged]

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

#278

Post by [deleted] »

expedition32 wrote: post #229
zerozerotwo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a hilariously delusional comment. Who do you think is financially backing the Russians who bomb your cities?

Who do you think is financially backing the Chinese? The trillion euro of EU imports...

[deleted]

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

#280

Post by simondotau »

Tepix wrote: post #148
simondotau wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do they offer even 10% of the features Cloudflare offers to free customers? To imply that Cloudflare is merely a fancy CDN is to miss the whole point.

It's the same issue as being cloud agnostic. If you use their unique features, you're locking yourself in. Is it worth it?

I get it. I’ve consciously avoided that exact trap with AWS. But Cloudflare aren’t giving me “features” so much as they’re allowing my site, which is routinely DDOSed, the ability to remain online at all.
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