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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)

#151

Post by chrisan »

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…

> To address other parts of the blog though, there is nothing in our system that defaults to "do X for IP/Country y"... what there is, is learned state about traffic, clients, and the many layers of customer expressed configuration.

If it is not IP/country, then what would cause this user to be prompted for captcha repeatedly?

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

#152

Post by sjwright »

cthaeh wrote: post #145
optimiz3 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If insane is a new word for nonexistent

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

#153

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

jitbit wrote: post #144

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. :(

It's probably less about the German IP and more about DigitalOcean.

Most people live in homes, not datacenters, which means that web sites expect human traffic to come from residential IPs, not datacenter IPs. What comes from the datacenter IPs is an endless stream of costly abuse, so they get CAPTCHA'd (if they want to support use cases like yours) or blocked (if they don't care about those)

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

#154

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

Networking in Asia seems to be really complicated due to the various political interests in play. I remember our Cloudflare rep explaining that China had two or three telcos that refused to exchange traffic directly so you had to send everything through Japan and back to the telco you wanted in China.

I’ve always wondered how all the expats in Bali accomplish anything. Everybody says they can work remotely via the internet and run their businesses, but when I was there the internet would go down for the entire island frequently and could be down for minutes or hours.

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

#155

Post by pdimitar »

marcinzm wrote: post #143
616c wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

Plenty of things in history have been done en masse and now we're left wondering how could the people back then even accept those barriers.

Restating the current status quo isn't changing anything.

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

#156

Post by toast0 »

judge2020 wrote: post #136
toast0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many other VPNs are operating out of Digital Ocean?

I know torguard, at least for their wireguard endpoints, operates out of Digital Ocean.

Sorry, i was too vague. There are a bunch of VPNs running in DO. If you don't want to look like a VPN, it's not a great place to be.

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

#157

Post by pdimitar »

privateSFacct wrote: post #138
throwaway_bad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This parallels the conversation going on in the ML world right now. "They just so happen to look like gorillas!" This is not okay. I know it's just a pile of linear algebra and there's no conspiracy to screw a particular country. But once it's brought up that your system is causing harm by increasing inequality in the world, you can't just say "But that's what the algo is spitting out!". At least try to fix it.

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.

My country is very small yet has 6.5 million people. Surely you can't be serious by saying that I'm to be responsible what each of them is doing on the internet?

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

#158

Post by pdimitar »

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…

What learned state says it's okay to prompt for captchas every other click if you've never been a bad internet citizen, exactly?

Help me here.

You aren't being specific. You only restated that you leave a lot of visitors at the mercy of statistical algorithms.

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

#159

Post by falcolas »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #51
song wrote: post #43

As someone living in Hong Kong I hate cloudflare. Way too many websites behind cloudflare block hong kong or cause me to have a captcha. This causes me to often route my traffic to my own vpn to counter that which is really annoying. At least I'm lucky enough that my VPN is for some reason still not detected as a cloud hosting provider by either cloudflare or netflix.

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

If they’re failed attempts, why care about them at all?

If you have good security practices, you don’t have to worry about the script kiddies. If you have bad security practices, blocking Asia won’t help you.

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

#160

Post by falcolas »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #55
therealmarv wrote: post #37

Experienced the same during my Asia travels with Cloudflare 2016/2017. Actually that was the biggest reason/negative ad not to consider Cloudflare when choosing a CDN. They simply don't respect Asia and other non first class countries with their standard settings. It's like good Internet only for the rich people in the world! I'm aware on the Chrome extension (really, why should I install this sh&+t on the first plac…

Asia is the #1 attacker of all websites I work with. Since 100% of the traffic (based on our analysis) coming from Asia is not legitimate business traffic, how would you advise those responsible for these sites security to handle this? Edit: I have no interest in using Cloudflare...

Consider it a community-run pentest, and look for them to actually get past the gatekeepers. Set an alert for a successful login from an “Asian” IP and push them towards a honeypot. They’re doing work for you for free; take advantage of it.
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