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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)

#141

Post by uponcoffee »

creato wrote: post #101
DarkmSparks wrote: post #82

Heh. I just found out last week my hosting provider had put my websites on cloudflare for me. They are not my hosting provider anymore. How did I find out? Traffic to the sites (all legitimate) fell circa 75% overnight. (non english sites)

> Traffic to the sites (all legitimate) How do you know it was all legitimate? I don't understand how cloudflare can stay in business if they cause a 75% drop in legitimate traffic to any website.

> I don't understand how cloudflare can stay in business[...]

VC backing and recent IPO have them swimming in cash, but they currently aren't profitable.

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

#142

Post by johndough »

southerndrift wrote: post #120
johndough wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar for me. From the 732745 login attempts last month, 52% were from China, followed by US with 13%. Here is a graph: https://i.imgur.com/YPAuTXO.png The sheer volume of bot traffic surprised me at first, especially since my website has zero human visitors as far as I can tell, but the numbers are consistent month after month. Nevertheless, my $1/month VPS can handle the traffic without a problem, so I see no nee…

Where do you get a $1/month VPS?

A few years ago, I found a promotional offer on lowendbox.com for chicagovps.net, but currently there are none that cheap.

However, keep in mind that low price often comes at a cost. For example, cloudatcost had a cheap VPS with a onetime payment for life (yeah, I know, too good to be true), but then retroactively invented a maintenance fee. Also several days of downtime were not uncommon.

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

#143

Post by marcinzm »

616c wrote: post #140
privateSFacct wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your country is causing harm to the rest of the world by not discouraging (or even encouraging) unethical behavior online, maybe the problem isn't the algo but your system? At least try to fix it.

Yeah that's cool. Let's classify your personal behavior by your host or birth country and see how you like it. I see a throwaway account but let us know, what country are you from? Seeing how abusive US behavior is on the internet and in other domains, for me as an American, I'd be afraid to practice what you preach.

>Yeah that's cool. Let's classify your personal behavior by your host or birth country and see how you like it.

It's not classifying personal behavior, it's putting an additional barrier based on the country you're from. This is done in pretty much every other form of international interaction as well (visas, extradition, commerce, etc.).

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

#144

Post by jitbit »

I live in the EU, but use a self-hosted VPN (for privacy reasons) on a German IP (digitalocean). And I too get the annoying reCaltcha prompts or even bans “your IP range has been blocked” all the time.

PS. To be fair it’s not just coming from Cloudflare-protected sites. Webmasters and SaaS-app devs add this to their WAF layers everywhere. :(

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

#145

Post by cthaeh »

optimiz3 wrote: post #81
therealmarv wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's discrimination by country/region. It's like saying: oh, you are from Africa or Asia. The chance is higher you are a criminal, so do this test first.

Which is completely legal and encouraged. Here's an example: if you've ever shipped an ad-monetized free app, you've probably disabled regions like Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc. You know why? Because the ad-revenue is worthless (and often malicious) and the users will be more trouble than they are worth. Same thing is happening with net traffic from other low value regions. One star reviews because users from $bann…

The hate for poor people in this comment is insane.

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

#146

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

optimiz3 wrote: post #81
therealmarv wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's discrimination by country/region. It's like saying: oh, you are from Africa or Asia. The chance is higher you are a criminal, so do this test first.

Which is completely legal and encouraged. Here's an example: if you've ever shipped an ad-monetized free app, you've probably disabled regions like Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc. You know why? Because the ad-revenue is worthless (and often malicious) and the users will be more trouble than they are worth. Same thing is happening with net traffic from other low value regions. One star reviews because users from $bann…

Another example: on Ebay, one bit of bog standard anti-fraud advice is prohibiting international bids. This is because the overwhelming majority of bidders living in certain countries are fraudsters. The tiny slice of legitimate traffic attempting to make international purchases is not worth the massive increase in exposure to fraud risk.

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

#147

Post by almost_usual »

uponcoffee wrote: post #141
creato wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Traffic to the sites (all legitimate) How do you know it was all legitimate? I don't understand how cloudflare can stay in business if they cause a 75% drop in legitimate traffic to any website.

> I don't understand how cloudflare can stay in business[...] VC backing and recent IPO have them swimming in cash, but they currently aren't profitable.

Out of all the recent S-1s they have one of the strongest aside from Zoom.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

cirno wrote: post #39
judge2020 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO's blog posts make it clear that CF really wants to bee the city water company that sells access to "dumb pipes": pipes that can route, filter and transform the stuff that goes through them while not knowing about exactly what it is that is going through them (at least when some maliciousness filters haven't triggered); the city water doesn't want to start cutting people's water off because of what they use th…

I understand that, and I don't think websites should be deplatformed just for saying unpopular things. But when a site clearly crosses into blatant criminality, it's disappointing when everyone who has the power to rein them in (Google with PageRank, CloudFlare with protection, the US government with criminal proceedings) decides to pass the buck on to someone else. It's always someone else's problem, meanwhile peopl…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by luord »

I live in a developing country and I did experience an odd surge in recaptcha triggering for sites behind cloudflare around the end of 2016, but it really hasn't happened since.

It's barely anything at all, but my personal website is behind cloudflare and I've never had any trouble.

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

#150

Post by gpvos »

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,…

I take privacy measures too (no VPN though) and I get Recaptcha on some sites because of that, but not particularly on Cloudflare-hosted sites as far as I can see.
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