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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)

#161

Post by kevindong »

jstanley wrote: post #122

> 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.

Per CloudFlare themselves: "Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/new-data-suggest...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/

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

#162

Post by bogomipz »

alxlaz wrote: post #118
mleonhard wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reCAPTCHA takes time and effort. It includes intentional delays and a random number of iterations (1-3). It also randomly fails and requires reloading the page. Instead of 2 second page loads, you spend 15-20 seconds. This makes browsing over a VPN frustratingly slow. I'm convinced that reCAPTCHA is now just one of Google's tools to keep us all trackable and stop us from protecting our privacy. And CloudFlare is brin…

> This makes browsing over a VPN frustratingly slow. This is my pet peeve, too. I browse over a VPN all the time and these things pop up all the time and I hate them. I wouldn't have a problem with this mechanism if it worked, but it doesn't! It will randomly fail in various silly ways: new challenges are faded in so slowly there's no way you can wait for it, other times it will just keep on asking you to solve new c…

>'Lately, I've taken to solving the challenges badly in subtle ways, just because I can."

Can you elaborate on this technique? Do you just purposefully solve them incorrectly a number of times before solving them correctly or something else?

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

#163

Post by TheCuckedKing »

chrisan wrote: post #151
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?

Shared ip address most likely. With which someone else is triggering the captcha. Or even a range of ips which are or have been allocated to someone else.

I imagine the solution should come about as follows.

Customers complain about captchas and seek alternative isps.

Someone else provides better connections without tainted ip addresses (without sketchy customers)

OR, the current isp decides to crack down on customers who are being labeled as abusive. Problem solved.

Someone is likely providing cheap internet to sketchy people, who taint the experience for other users. It is on them to crack down and stop selling to sketchy users. Ban their payment methods/identities, so cloudflare doesn't have to ban ips.

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

#164

Post by rlt »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #127
Aeolun wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Complain to your ISP, switch ISPs, complain to your government, etc.

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

#165

Post by bogomipz »

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 these developing countries, great swathes of users are accessing the internet behind carrier-grade NAT."

Do you have any citations that CGN is any more prevalent in developing counties than in say Western Europe or the US? The last report from RIPE that I read indicates CGN usage in substantial in both the RIPE and APNIC regions.[1] How would IPv4 resource exhaustion be an economic issue?

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

I imagine if you are personally "responsible for maintaining a relatively aggressive set of Cloudflare WAF rules" as you stated, you've probably become quite proficient at solving CAPTCHAs. I think people that don't mind jumping through hoops are a minority. Also just even if something isn't hard does not mean its any less annoying and degrading of the user experience. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

[1] https://ripe73.ripe.net/presentations/21-ripe73_cgn_richter....

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

#166

Post by sdan »

toast0 wrote: post #156
judge2020 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, not sure on DO's "relations" with VPNs. I've heard they're pretty strict on what you do since they're a somewhat small company that focuses on "droplets"/instances.

Personally I'd reccomend AWS or GCP given the free credits anyways.

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

#167

Post by ynx »

pdimitar wrote: post #157
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.

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?

IMO:

If the country is the source of an outsized number of bad actors then – probabilistically and at scale – "you" are responsible, yes. I'm not trying to be blame-y here in that I mean the probabilistic "you" and not you personally.

Whether you personally deserve the consequences of that responsibility is more ideological than pragmatic - you probably do not deserve it, but how do others find out which you are? That brings up questions of system design, and avenues available for remediation.

If your small country creates outsized issues for the internet as a whole it might not just be defensive measures that are to blame for insufficiently punishing or defeating attackers. In that case, economics and politics might factor in and the question becomes different.

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

#169

Post by CodeWriter23 »

catherd wrote: post #69
sdan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when you hop on a VPN; I kid you not I have to spent literally 20 straight minutes following this bs. It’s infuriating for someone who self-respects their privacy.

I set up a Shopify store from China (where a VPN is mandatory), and eventually had to tell Shopify to delete the site because I literally couldn't complete the captchas any more to access it. Couldn't even back up anything before bailing. Before the complete lockout it was taking around 20 minutes of busses, bikes, sidewalks, and stoplights each login. Nasty feeling when you come back and you realize you have to log…

Isn’t this more of a function of the totalitarian regime that requires you to use a VPN, than CloudFlare?

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

#170

Post by extempore »

ynx wrote: post #167
pdimitar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IMO: If the country is the source of an outsized number of bad actors then – probabilistically and at scale – "you" are responsible, yes. I'm not trying to be blame-y here in that I mean the probabilistic "you" and not you personally. Whether you personally deserve the consequences of that responsibility is more ideological than pragmatic - you probably do not deserve it, but how do others find out which you are? Tha…

It’s interesting how smoothly this logic can move between “your country”, “your religion”, “your ethnicity”, “your ideology”. I am not making a case for or against any of these. But if pragmatic arguments for group punishment hold currency when there is known collateral damage, arguments from principle lose currency in equal measure.
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