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The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

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Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#201

Post by philipallstar »

kordlessagain wrote: post #192
philipallstar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As if anybody could viably stop using them. It is as easy to not use them as it ever was. There has been no actual centralisation. Everything is done using open protocols. I don't know what more you could want. Compare it to Windows where there is deep volume discounting and salespeople shmoozing CTOs and getting in with schools, healthcare providers etc etc. That's actual lock-in.

When the tubes go down the tubes it will be the fault of those who are complacent.

This is just silliness.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#203

Post by [deleted] »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #79

Does the author of this post not see the irony of posting this content on Github? My counter argument is that "centralization" in a technical sense isn't about what company owns things but how services are operated. Cloudflare is very decentralized. Furthermore, I've seen regional outages caused by things like anchors dropped by ships in the wrong place, a shark eating a cable. Regional power outages caused by squirr…

[deleted]

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#204

Post by [deleted] »

rkomorn wrote: post #97
jcattle wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. However I don't think I would have wrote that if those thoughts were shared on a blogging platform. Most blogging platforms do not qualify as critical infrastructure. GitHub with all its CI/CD and supply chain attacks does. There is a certain particular irony of this being written on critical (centralized) infrastructure without any apparent need. Maybe it was intended, maybe not, in any case I found it…

I agree. I think the whole point is someone like TFA author has a pretty broad choice of places they can choose to publish this and choosing GitHub is somewhat ironic. Reminds me of the guy who posted an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg like "we are not for sale" on LinkedIn, a place that literally sells access to its users as their main product.

[deleted]

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#205

Post by zero_shift »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #79

Does the author of this post not see the irony of posting this content on Github? My counter argument is that "centralization" in a technical sense isn't about what company owns things but how services are operated. Cloudflare is very decentralized. Furthermore, I've seen regional outages caused by things like anchors dropped by ships in the wrong place, a shark eating a cable. Regional power outages caused by squirr…

As explained in other comments, I only used Gist because publishing to my own site failed. So GH is my redundancy :-)

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#206

Post by rkomorn »

zero_shift wrote: post #202
jcattle wrote: post #88

"The Cloudflare outage was a good thing [...] they're a warning. They can force redundancy and resilience into systems." - he says. On Github.

I published it as a Gist because my own blog deployment pipeline was in a non-functioning state.

FWIW, even if I agree(d) there's some irony in choosing GitHub, I don't think it invalidates your points.

I do agree with the gist of your... gist. :)

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#207

Post by hombre_fatal »

immibis wrote: post #170
hombre_fatal wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty much exactly like it does now but with less captchas. This just isn't true. e.g. I saw a 30x increase in traffic on my forum due to AI bots that I had to use CF to block. CF is mainly empowered by the naive ideals of the internet's design that never built-in countermeasures against bad actors. You're expected to just deal with it yourself somehow. And that means outsourcing it, especially as residential IP a…

You didn't have to use CF to block them. You chose to use CF to block them. How was your experience with Anubis or https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away ? Or you could simply... serve the requests. If your normal traffic is only, like, 1 request per minute, then 30x that is still pretty low and there's no actual reason to worry about it. Web hosting providers don't offer bot blockers because first, they have no r…

I don't want to serve the traffic at all. It's a popular forum that I run out of charity.

I would have to upgrade my infrastructure to serve 30x the traffic just for bots. And it's traffic that busts my cache because it hits all over my forum at once, like deep into page 64 of topics made years ago.

Or, I can use CloudFlare to block the bots.

I was referring to web hosts offering DDoS protection. Basically all of them null route you if you receive a big enough volumetric attack, even the ones that claim to offer DDoS protection.

Also, whether AI is behind specific DDoS current events isn't relevant to the point of AI bots multiplying automated internet traffic.

These work against the claim that the internet without CF would be a mere difference in captchas which is dismissive of real challenges faced by the modern internet.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#208

Post by Xelbair »

WJW wrote: post #148
Xelbair wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can as easily get attackers from within your own networks, you're falling for fallacy that everything on the 'inside' is secure.

Just because one group of attackers is (/might be) inside your network doesn't mean you also have to let all other groups in. There is zero reason to let (say) North Koreans interact with your gas pump API, other than that the internet is set up so that it is virtually impossible to prevent unfriendly parties from contacting your servers.

but you can be secure from all at the same time with similar effort, meanwhile most actual attacks that lead to damages come from the inside the network?

extreme shortsightedness.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#209

Post by Xelbair »

throwaway0352 wrote: post #132
Xelbair wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more so when most of the internet is also down. What are customers going to do? Go to competitor that's also down? It is extremely annoying, will ruin your day, but as movie quote goes - if everyone is special, no one is.

I think you’re viewing the issue from an office worker’s perspective. For us, downtime might just mean heading to the coffee machine and taking a break. But if a restaurant loses access to its POS system (which has happened), or you’re unable to purchase a train ticket, the consequences are very real. Outages like these have tangible impacts on everyday life. That’s why there’s definitely room for competitors who can…

Cash exists, physical tickets exists.

those things shouldn't be fully tied to the internet/intranet anyways.

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