Why would anybody in the right mind centralize his/her infrastructure?
I doubt that people actually need something like Cloudflare.
Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
11–20 of 127 posts
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#12This is the same company that has repeatedly gone to the mat to ensure Nazi’s and targeted hate campaigns remain active online. But this is where they draw the line? They have on multiple occasions had long and public campaigns talking about how important it is to fight censorship in all its forms except a random DMCA troll in Hong Kong? I don’t think Cloudflare really love “free speech” as much as they pretend in th…
They’ve never gone to the mat to defend free speech. They make a public statement indicating the discomfort they feel blocking content and then they censor it a few days later.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#13Honestly, if I wasn't a technical guy and I saw my channel and all my content on some piped.kavin.rocks or yewtu.be which aren't visually distinguishable from all the non-alternative-YouTube-frontend tube sites, I would assume someone's ripping all my content and impersonating me as well. I can totally see where the DMCA is coming from.
And even knowing the technical differences, one may want to dissociate with a stupid domain name like yewtu.be.
Edit: I showed " rel="nofollow">https://yewtu.be/channel/ to a content creator friend just now. Predictably, the reaction is "WTF, am I being impersonated? What should I do?"
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#14Cloudflare is making my live very difficult right now. Spammers are hosting websites using free domains, like .ml, .tk, so an unlimited supply of random domains, hosting them behind cloud flare which prevents us from easily getting the page content or blocking the IP for a period of time since the IP is shared. Lots of spam hosted on cloudflare these days.
You can get the originating IP via mod_remoteip, or its nginx brethren. You can block those IPs in your firewall, or via the Cloudflare firewall.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#15By now Cloudflare is more of an obstacle to the free web than it is helping. A centralized entity, whose scripts from randomly named subdomains you must allow to run on your machine, or be stuck at their obnoxious "checking your browser" page endlessly reloading, because some web dev decided to put their website behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent reasons for me to simply close the browser tab and leave the site.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#16Cloudflare is making my live very difficult right now. Spammers are hosting websites using free domains, like .ml, .tk, so an unlimited supply of random domains, hosting them behind cloud flare which prevents us from easily getting the page content or blocking the IP for a period of time since the IP is shared. Lots of spam hosted on cloudflare these days.
How do they make it hard to get the page content? Is it easier/better to block by IP than to block unknown free domains?
No op, but
I believe that once you put your website behind cloudflare it's really hard, if not imposible to get content using requests. Don't know about scraping tho.
Also, I think it's better to block unknown free domains, because (public) IPs can have thousands of devices asociated with them. Once you block a domain, the "scammer" has to buy a new one.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#17By now Cloudflare is more of an obstacle to the free web than it is helping. A centralized entity, whose scripts from randomly named subdomains you must allow to run on your machine, or be stuck at their obnoxious "checking your browser" page endlessly reloading, because some web dev decided to put their website behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent reasons for me to simply close the browser tab…
I remember working on denial-of-service protection code for an embedded device.
One problem was that if the code was TOO aggressive in protecting from a denial of service attack, you could actually help an attack or be the culprit yourself by denying legitimate traffic.
I think this is what cloudflare is doing. They are imprecise and they are denying legitimate traffic.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#18I used to love Cloudflare but their argument for free speech absolutism went out the window when they started making judgement calls about which sites to block and which to keep. Now I'm just disappointed but not surprised. Will probably move off entirely once Tailscale funnels allow for custom termination CNAMEs.
If this particular instance is them getting DMCA'd then it's not really their fault, but I'm confirmation biasing it with a pattern I see of them making more and more judgement calls about what to host and becoming more like a standard 100% profit-driven megacorp hosting provider.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#19This is the same company that has repeatedly gone to the mat to ensure Nazi’s and targeted hate campaigns remain active online. But this is where they draw the line? They have on multiple occasions had long and public campaigns talking about how important it is to fight censorship in all its forms except a random DMCA troll in Hong Kong? I don’t think Cloudflare really love “free speech” as much as they pretend in th…
They’ve never gone to the mat to defend free speech. They make a public statement indicating the discomfort they feel blocking content and then they censor it a few days later.
They have in this case https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1485731108822077443 I don't have the case docket link easily available, but it was referenced somewhere around that thread.
Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
#20I used to love Cloudflare but their argument for free speech absolutism went out the window when they started making judgement calls about which sites to block and which to keep. Now I'm just disappointed but not surprised. Will probably move off entirely once Tailscale funnels allow for custom termination CNAMEs. If this particular instance is them getting DMCA'd then it's not really their fault, but I'm confirmatio…
Not to mention that their priorities when it comes to blocking decisions seems odd. DDoS-for-hire (stressers), piracy, ISIS support-forums, revenge-porn etc. are all fine because free speech. But a forum supporting nazis, an imagebord with lax moderators, and a forum archiving illegal/insane activity that people post online are all nuked because.. ... reasons..