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CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

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Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#121

Post by boudin »

saagarjha wrote: post #94
snek wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is complaining that CloudFlare (as a result of them refusing to track you) requires people to solve captchas over and over again. How is this hurting your privacy exactly?

They don’t make you solve captchas if they have enough information about you to think you’re unlikely to be abusive.

If you're on an ip that is part of a pool they consider unsafe, it's every time. When I use one of my vpns to browse, i end up skipping all websites using cloudfare.

This is a lot and it makes you realise how dangerous this situation is. Way too much traffic goes through cloudflare.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#122

Post by jstanley »

> reCAPTCHA prompts happens a lot, I know its only one click away

This actually isn't true when browsing over Tor. It always makes you do 5 or more rounds of "click the traffic lights", "click the bicycles", etc. I don't know why. It seems to go far beyond checking that you're not a machine, and I suspect they're just abusing Tor users to get free machine-learning training.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#123

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

dfcowell wrote: post #97
cnst wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the problem is worse because, apparently, even solving the captchas repeatedly from a given IP address doesn't make it whitelisted, either. So, it fits the very definition of discrimination against a whole wider group, where the individual actions of any individual actors don't matter.

I’ve lived in Vietnam for the past 5 years and experienced these issues first hand. I’m also part of the team responsible for maintaining a relatively aggressive set of Cloudflare WAF rules at my current employer. In these developing countries, great swathes of users are accessing the internet behind carrier-grade NAT. This makes it increasingly likely that any individual user is sharing a public-facing IP with one o…

> In my experience, I’ve never had to solve more than one CAPTCHA per domain, and frankly clicking a checkbox isn’t that hard.

If it were that easy, there would be little complaint; the complaints seem to be that people get stuck on capchas indefinitely.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#124

Post by marcus_holmes »

souterrain wrote: post #74
adventured wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discrimination by country/region often makes tremendous sense. I tell Cloudflare to block all traffic from China because my services derive zero contribution and zero potential value from the Chinese market. The maximum potential positive contribution from China is near zero. The overwhelmingly likely contribution from China is attacks from within the country. So, to summarize, in my particular case China provides ne…

Except that it is quite likely the best quality Chinese attacks come from compromised machines in the United States.

there is still value in screening out all the low-quality attacks, though

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#125

Post by FDSGSG »

snek wrote: post #87
iliketosleep wrote: post #54

Companies like CloudFlare are contributing to the erosion of user privacy in the name of security. I experience the same kind of issues that the author of the article highlights, just because I take some privacy measures. It's my view that so-called security on the Internet, which implies confidentiality, integrity, and availability, is getting increasingly worse for end users. If I want to give up all of my privacy,…

The article is complaining that CloudFlare (as a result of them refusing to track you) requires people to solve captchas over and over again. How is this hurting your privacy exactly?

This is a downright lie. CloudFlare isn't refusing to track people, CloudFlare is outsourcing the tracking.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#126

Post by Craighead »

buro9 wrote: post #115

> Not to mention their free tier doesn’t cover the complex DDOS attacks that you really should be concerned about This wasn't true in 2016 and isn't true in 2019 either. Whilst the system was named and blogged about in Sep 2017 https://blog.cloudflare.com/meet-gatebot-a-bot-that-allows-u... the internal repo has the first working code drop in Feb 2015. The (D)DoS protection systems and team, which I am the Engineerin…

You are ruining the internet by assisting white supremacists, and terrorists in the name of listening to no governments while functioning solely because of the protection provided by said governments.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#127

Post by throwaway2048 »

Aeolun wrote: post #116
buro9 wrote: post #115

> Not to mention their free tier doesn’t cover the complex DDOS attacks that you really should be concerned about This wasn't true in 2016 and isn't true in 2019 either. Whilst the system was named and blogged about in Sep 2017 https://blog.cloudflare.com/meet-gatebot-a-bot-that-allows-u... the internal repo has the first working code drop in Feb 2015. The (D)DoS protection systems and team, which I am the Engineerin…

Yeah, that was my first thought when reading this. It’s not that Cloudflare is ruining the internet for you. It’s the loads of illegitimate traffic and attacks that just so happen to originate in your country.

I'm sure that's very comforting to him as a user, maybe he should just immigrate to a different country if he wants to use the internet normally.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#128

Post by marcus_holmes »

pavs wrote: post #68
RobertRoberts wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest to the people running websites where 90%+ of the hack attempts come from Hong Kong?

Please stop spreading this false narrative: https://www.slashgeek.net/2016/06/07/cloudflare-making-inter... Most network attacks and Spams actually comes from the United States.

The Spamhaus page mentioned in the article you linked: https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries/ now shows China as the top malicious country. TFA was written in 2016. In the last 3 years China has overtaken the USA.

So it's not a false narrative. Most attacks and spams do come from China, not the US.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#129

Post by marcus_holmes »

luckylion wrote: post #78
lstodd wrote: post #10

This. I route all my traffic via mmy own vpn server at Hetzner for privacy and security reasons and this Cloudflare bullshit is infuriating at times. Besides I guess 95% sites that use their free tier either don't actually need it or would be better off without it.

If you're in Europe and it happens on the website of a European company: make it a GDPR case. If you need to solve a captcha to access the privacy policy, they are clearly in violation.

Can you explain why this is a violation, please?

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#130

Post by marcus_holmes »

As a CTO of a startup trying to build a product on the web, though, CF is awesome. It solves a whole bunch of problems for free, and I don't have to worry about stuff that I would otherwise have to worry about (and I don't have time to worry about those things on top of all the other things I have to worry about).

In a few years, when I have a team of engineers and can spare the resources/expertise, we'll come off CF and do it properly. Until then, CF is a great service.

Sorry that your experience from SEA is not great, but tbh we're not selling in SEA, so any traffic from there is just a resource drain on our servers. Anything to discourage traffic from areas we're not serving is a positive for us.

Anything to discourage bot traffic is a huge positive. CF won't stop the bots, but costing them some minor amount of money per visit is still positive.

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