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Cloudflare Calls

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Calls

#11

Post by endisneigh »

dewey wrote: post #8
teddyh wrote: post #2

Another “Let’s make Cloudflare the central server of the Internet” service, from what I can see.

I'm really getting tired of this kind of take. You never really see that if AWS adds a product, or GCP adds a product or any other products from bigger CDNs. What do you suggest? Cloudflare should stop releasing products? Regulation that you are only allowed to handle x% of the total internet traffic?

You do see plenty of complaining about Amazon and Google, and yes, [some] people on here are very much pro regulation.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#12

Post by teddyh »

dewey wrote: post #8
teddyh wrote: post #2

Another “Let’s make Cloudflare the central server of the Internet” service, from what I can see.

I'm really getting tired of this kind of take. You never really see that if AWS adds a product, or GCP adds a product or any other products from bigger CDNs. What do you suggest? Cloudflare should stop releasing products? Regulation that you are only allowed to handle x% of the total internet traffic?

> You never really see that if AWS adds a product, or GCP adds a product or any other products from bigger CDNs.

Accusations of hypocrisy is not an argument. Instead of accusing me (and all other detractors) of not criticizing others enough, please elaborate why this isn’t what I described.

Cloudflare (and others) keep releasing products which makes their central role more central and less vulnerable to competition. They ought not to do that, and I would argue for laws which prevent them from doing that if necessary.

Regarding the problem, this kind of problem should not be solved by one central actor. Instead, these problems should be solved by new network and protocol designs.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#13

Post by Xeoncross »

> "With a traditional WebRTC implementation, both the patient and therapist’s devices would talk directly with each other, leading to exposure of potentially sensitive data such as the IP address... When using Calls, you are still using WebRTC, but the individual participants are connecting to the Cloudflare network. If four people are on a video call powered by Cloudflare Calls, each of the four participants' devices will be talking only with the Cloudflare network. To your end users, the experience will feel just like a peer-to-peer call, only with added security and privacy upside.

Can someone clarify this? WebRTC is encrypted generally even if you leak metadata like IP address. Is Cloudflare stating they will be the middleman and therefore have access to the decrypted video stream?

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#14

Post by bombcar »

rixthefox wrote: post #7

They really do want to be the center of everything it seems. I wish they would stop trying to be the Cisco of Networking in the sense of trying to convince a lot of people to let them handle critical network functions for a ton of networks. All it will take is one major outage for everyone to see this is a bad idea. Why trust a cloud provider who could go down and take half the Internet with it? Why centralize it tha…

I'm waiting for them to buy tailscale.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#15

Post by nine_k »

rixthefox wrote: post #7

They really do want to be the center of everything it seems. I wish they would stop trying to be the Cisco of Networking in the sense of trying to convince a lot of people to let them handle critical network functions for a ton of networks. All it will take is one major outage for everyone to see this is a bad idea. Why trust a cloud provider who could go down and take half the Internet with it? Why centralize it tha…

It reminds me the days of Google flourishing in early 2000s: they added more and more wonderful stuff (such as mail, or maps) while improving their flagship offering, search, more and more. A lot of people were their sincere fans.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#16

Post by corytheboyd »

dewey wrote: post #8
teddyh wrote: post #2

Another “Let’s make Cloudflare the central server of the Internet” service, from what I can see.

I'm really getting tired of this kind of take. You never really see that if AWS adds a product, or GCP adds a product or any other products from bigger CDNs. What do you suggest? Cloudflare should stop releasing products? Regulation that you are only allowed to handle x% of the total internet traffic?

I agree, this rhetoric is getting old.

So we're supposed to go use one of thousands of other tiny cloud platform providers?

Okay let's entertain that idea. The first bare minimum items on your vendor approval checklist are things like "can I trust this business to exist in 10 years" , "do they have enough resources to support me when shit hits the fan", and "are they mature enough to deliver on the shiny bullet points on their homepage and in their sales pitch".

Isn't this process going to naturally select a small handful of providers? What am I missing here?

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#18

Post by lnsp »

Xeoncross wrote: post #13

> "With a traditional WebRTC implementation, both the patient and therapist’s devices would talk directly with each other, leading to exposure of potentially sensitive data such as the IP address... When using Calls, you are still using WebRTC, but the individual participants are connecting to the Cloudflare network. If four people are on a video call powered by Cloudflare Calls, each of the four participants' device…

As far as I understood it: the premise of added security is based on the fact that the other WebRTC peers only see Cloudflare's IP instead of your own. Also nobody knows who you are exactly talking to except Cloudflare. I would still expect that the media channels itself still remain encrypted when even when multiplexed by Cloudflare's network.

edit, yes it's encrypted:

> Finally, all video and audio traffic that passes through Cloudflare Calls is encrypted by default. Calls leverages existing Cloudflare products including Argo to route the video and audio content in a secure and efficient manner.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#19

Post by endisneigh »

corytheboyd wrote: post #16
dewey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really getting tired of this kind of take. You never really see that if AWS adds a product, or GCP adds a product or any other products from bigger CDNs. What do you suggest? Cloudflare should stop releasing products? Regulation that you are only allowed to handle x% of the total internet traffic?

I agree, this rhetoric is getting old. So we're supposed to go use one of thousands of other tiny cloud platform providers? Okay let's entertain that idea. The first bare minimum items on your vendor approval checklist are things like "can I trust this business to exist in 10 years" , "do they have enough resources to support me when shit hits the fan", and "are they mature enough to deliver on the shiny bullet point…

> Isn't this process going to naturally select a small handful of providers? What am I missing here?

No. It's possible to not do a lot and still last a very long time. Consider zippers, YKK has existed for almost a century and they only manufacture zippers.

Re: Cloudflare Calls

#20

Post by robertlagrant »

nine_k wrote: post #15
rixthefox wrote: post #7

They really do want to be the center of everything it seems. I wish they would stop trying to be the Cisco of Networking in the sense of trying to convince a lot of people to let them handle critical network functions for a ton of networks. All it will take is one major outage for everyone to see this is a bad idea. Why trust a cloud provider who could go down and take half the Internet with it? Why centralize it tha…

It reminds me the days of Google flourishing in early 2000s: they added more and more wonderful stuff (such as mail, or maps) while improving their flagship offering, search, more and more. A lot of people were their sincere fans.

Sort of agree, except Cloudflare's new products all seem to scale nicely off their core competencies, so they can offer them more cheaply and (hopefully) more reliably. Maps and mail were more like "ways of getting to know you really really well".
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