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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)

#171

Post by marcus_holmes »

luckylion wrote: post #139
marcus_holmes wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why this is a violation, please?

Privacy policies need to be immediately accessible to users. Hiding your privacy info page behind captchas, using unclear names for links ("service status" as a link to privacy info for example), making users click through multiple pages to find it etc makes you non-compliant. Basically: you cannot hide the information, you cannot make users jump through hoops (captchas, require signup/login, pay for accessing) to re…

Thanks, that's very useful.

Presumably the fact that it's not the site owner mandating the captcha, but an intermediary service provider doesn't matter then?

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

#172

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#173

Post by Aeolun »

throwaway_bad wrote: post #134
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.

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.

> 1+1=2, but I want it to be 3, why are you not attempting to fix it?

How do you fix that which is not broken?

I understand the problem you are trying to point out, but the problem is not in the technology, it’s in the application.

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

#174

Post by Aeolun »

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.

I’m fairly certain that my message wasn’t to comfort anybody. It sucks, but it’s a fact of life.

You could argue that this is a great improvement over the status quo, which just blocked entire countries out of hand.

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

#175

Post by pdimitar »

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…

> If your small country creates outsized issues for the internet...

It's small enough that it probably couldn't even bring down a single CloudFlare-protected website IMO. And when we've seen stats here on HN about recent attacks on GitHub, the total bandwidth was what, 1.35Tbps (~169GB/s)? (Link: https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-was-hit-with-the-larges...)

I've met sysadmins here in my small country -- guys and girls who administer several thousand gigabit-fiber-to-the-home 1Gbps connections -- who said that for a ~$15,000 tech investment they can build small infrastructure that can withstand 10Tbps DDoS attack, if their upstream ISPs don't cripple bandwidth under pressure.

Not saying they might not have overestimated themselves but it's a data point regardless.

I don't know for sure either way because I am not a professional sysadmin or a hardware guy. But I feel a lot of hosting providers are just chickening out. Perhaps it's the ingress/egress charges? But 169GB/s definitely doesn't sound that scary. My $140 router can handle sustained 110MB/s for hours. I can't imagine there are no clusters of enterprise-grade tech that cannot sustain 200GB/s constantly?

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

#176

Post by jstanley »

kevindong wrote: post #161
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/

A sensible CAPTCHA would be fine, but reCAPTCHA is borderline malicious towards Tor users.

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

#177

Post by dang »

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.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar.

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

#178

Post by song »

switch007 wrote: post #105
pavs wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they were suggesting the websites they run, 90%+ of the attacks come from Hong Kong, i.e. not that 90% of all website attacks come from HK. No way of knowing unless they publish the logs/stats

I think most likely they are amalgamating Hong Kong and China like some people do on the thread here. And yes, indeed some Data Centers in China are a big source of spam and automated attack, but it just doesn't make sense to block an entire country when you can just block hosting providers.

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

#179

Post by alxlaz »

bogomipz wrote: post #162
alxlaz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If it asks me to identify traffic lights, for example, I also include a couple of squares that aren't traffic lights, like a tree on the side of the road. I'm more selective than a random algorithm, so that correctly gets me labeled as a meatbag, but I'm definitely not providing good answers, either.

At this point, to be honest, I'm really not sure about the effectiveness of this mechanism anymore. It seems to me like a poorly-trained neural net with convincing human-like interaction (e.g. clicks spaced unequally) could produce exactly slightly-incorrect results that let me through. There's no way a smart 17 year-old wizzkid hasn't figured it out already and getting rich selling it to spammers in onion space.

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

#180

Post by luckylion »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #171
luckylion wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy policies need to be immediately accessible to users. Hiding your privacy info page behind captchas, using unclear names for links ("service status" as a link to privacy info for example), making users click through multiple pages to find it etc makes you non-compliant. Basically: you cannot hide the information, you cannot make users jump through hoops (captchas, require signup/login, pay for accessing) to re…

Thanks, that's very useful. Presumably the fact that it's not the site owner mandating the captcha, but an intermediary service provider doesn't matter then?

It really shouldn't, because the site owner is the one making the choice to use CF; CF is acting on their behalf (and the security-settings the site owner chooses at CF does influence whether and how often captchas are shown to users, i.e. "I'm under attack" mode). It would be different if the user's ISP did this.

This is another related issue, too, as CF is a data processor, so the controller (=site owner) needs to make users aware that their data is being shared with CloudFlare, as SSL terminates at CF, the content is analyzed and it's then (optionally re-encrypted) transmitted to the origin.

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