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A public letter to CloudFlare to fix their snoopy vendor

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Re: A public letter to CloudFlare to fix their snoopy vendor

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is answered quite clearly in the linked page. GitHub Pages originally didn't support SSL on custom domains, so people would often put Cloudflare in front of it. Now GHP does support SSL on custom domains, so Cloudflare is no longer needed, but obviously a lot of sites still exist with the original setup.

> GitHub Pages originally didn't support SSL on custom domains, so people would often put Cloudflare in front of it. I've done this myself and I'm fixing it now! (Some JavaScript APIs I've experimented with over the years require HTTPS - from WebAuthn, which hey, fair enough - to Web MIDI, which hey, what the heck? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Secure... )

The major browser vendors committed to all genuinely new features being Secure context only. Secure context means either HTTPS or the local machine.

If the feature is something you could do with a polyfill anyway then it's not really a new feature, it usually makes no sense to restrict it. But something like Web MIDI you clearly can't build with a polyfill, so restricting that makes sense.

The reason to do this for new features is that by definition if your HTTP site already works, it didn't use them, if it relied on features that didn't exist it didn't work. So this prevents backsliding, your HTTPS site might stop working if you downgrade it to HTTP, but your 1997 HTTP site still works since obviously that doesn't use Web MIDI, or indeed probably CSS.

For a few features, vendors are going back and removing Insecure Context support, but this work is slow because inevitably even if it was a terrible idea people relied on it working (e.g. EME is used extensively from HTTP, because you know you really care that people can't pirate your mediocre training video, but you don't care enough to prevent them trivially intercepting it during download...)

Re: A public letter to CloudFlare to fix their snoopy vendor

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use a free Cloudflare Origin CA certificate and set to strict. Encryption for the whole round trip unless someone accesses origin server directly. https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/origin-configuration/o...

But now do I have no way to access the S3 bucket not through cloudflare?

You know it's supposed to have a certificate from Cloudflare, so, you can choose to trust that certificate (knowing it is correct for this purpose) or you can use tooling that doesn't care.

If you mean can you present it for general access by people on the Internet, no, not really, because the certificate aren't trusted, you would need a proxy layer.

Re: A public letter to CloudFlare to fix their snoopy vendor

#113
post #107
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, if you can't afford IPv4 then no one else can afford it either, which means the incentive to adopt IPv6 is extremely strong and thus you no longer need IPv4.

Why won’t Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc. simply own all most IPv4 addresses and leave all end users using NAT (or even CGNAT) to access them? This cements their businesses, since then nobody can reasonably host their own servers except through them.

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Re: A public letter to CloudFlare to fix their snoopy vendor

#114

Why not use Github Pages without Cloudflare? It also supports native IPv6 if that was the reason. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28710629

A lot of the impacted websites are old, from before GitHub Pages offered TLS support.

Re: A public letter to CloudFlare to fix their snoopy vendor

#115

Couldn't you just setup a proxy or VPN in the "cloud" and bypass all of this?

Actually, no. I run these tests on Digital Ocean servers in Bangalore, which almost always hits the DEL Cloudflare POP, where Airtel is the upstream and blocks the connection.

To fix this, an Indian user must actively avoid Cloudflare POPs, which is a bad proposition. Also, it shouldn’t be up to end-users of Neovim to fix what is CF/Airtel’s fault.

Re: A public letter to CloudFlare to fix their snoopy vendor

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the webcam API requires HTTPS, I guess that makes sense?

If it didn't, then whenever you visited a non-HTTPS site, an MITM could inject code into the page that turns your webcam on and then spies on you. Permission prompts help somewhat with this, but not really enough, given that the address bar provides no clue that you're not talking to who you think you are (beyond the generic "Not secure" warning that users usually ignore since it's so common). Allowing this would be…

Ah, that makes a lot of sense! Hadn't even considered that, thanks!

Re: A public letter to CloudFlare to fix their snoopy vendor

#117

Cloudflare powered censorship in Pakistan works in a similar fashion. ISPs block websites, but because Cloudflare's data center forwards using local ISPs, you get a nice secure blocked page.

I did come across several reports from Pakistani users as well while researching for this today. Do these ISPs limit themselves to court-ordered blocks in your case?

Could you also mention Turkey & Pakistan in your letter as well?
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