Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare” • Hacker News Board

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#261

Post by eigenvalue » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #155

morrbo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

II love cloudflare. It has really helped out with several sites/projects that I have worked on and the service is top notch. I am also an investor. I tend to invest in stuff which I use a lot or trust/respect the employees. Weirdly what made me really invest is the level of geekiness on the company. I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome". I just wanted…

It's a bit of a sad story, but maybe you'll like this read about one of the guys who laid the foundation for their tech and his sad decline: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline... I really liked the stories of his skill when he was in his prime. Very inspiring.

Wow, thanks for linking to the article. What an awful story. Makes you think about the wisdom of undertaking major elective surgery if it's not absolutely required in the short term.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#262

Post by Reelin » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

ygjb wrote: post #242

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's always a line This is where you've gone wrong. There isn't always a line, some businesses are in the business of selling products and services and not in the business of policing content. And if some of their customers are pedophiles or the like then have the police arrest the pedophiles and leave the fry cooks and gas station attendants out of it, even if the pedophiles eat food and drive cars.

No. The reason why freedom of speech (or freedom of expression, if you're Canadian like me) is important in a government context is because the government (in theory) has a monopoly on violence. Businesses and private individuals should not be expected to uphold and enforce freedom of speech because requiring them to do so puts them at odds with themselves. An employer expected to uphold freedom of speech must then r…

> The reason why freedom of speech ... is important

This view is (IMO) far too narrow. Freedom of expression, particularly political expression, is absolutely essential to the functioning of western society as it currently exists. Personally, I also see it as an ideal to be pursued in and of itself regardless of any functional need for it.

Government regulation has a high potential for abuse for a number of reasons (the monopoly on violence is merely one) so it makes sense to take steps to constrain it in certain critical cases. Note that this doesn't imply anything about private entities; it is simply a logical consequence of a functional need or ideal in the context of our current system.

As to private entities (businesses, etc) things vary based on context. Certainly I don't have any wish (for example) to force YouTube to host pornographic content. However there may well exist cases where broader freedom of expression (either the functional need or the ideal) requires protection against private entities.

California actually has such a law - an employer is not permitted to take actions that would "influence or tend to influence" their employees political activities outside of the workplace. This can get very complicated (as you might imagine) when an employer takes an official political stance on an issue.

US telecoms are also subject to regulation of this sort (ie common carrier laws). Personally I think that infrastructure companies (Cloudflare and other CDNs, as well as those providing the physical layer) ought to be subject to something broadly similar. It would help protect usage of and access to the underlying infrastructure for everyone by shielding the relevant companies from negative public opinion (public outrage campaigns accomplish nothing if the company is legally required to serve all customers).

> ... have turned into the cesspools of the internet

Broadly, I think you are tending to conflate infrastructure providers with social networks (and similar end user sites). There are important differences (for example) between FedEx and an online retailer, even though they might both be involved in getting a physical product to you.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#263

Post by strombofulous » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #250

Cloudflare is horrible for blind people. Screen readers, the programs that use synthesized speech to tell us what's on the screen, cannot read images. Good captchas usually have audio equivalents (which come with their own set of problems), but this one doesn't. If you're blind and flagged by Cloudflare for some reason, you're cut off from accessing half the internet, potentially critical banking/governmental/medical…

I use audio captchas. Google will usually only let you do 2 or 3 before banning you and making you do image-based ones. I'm pretty sure the button is just there to make it seem accessible.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#264

Post by kazagistar » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #245

cellar_door wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad analogy. Cloudflare is not inspecting individual packets for hate speech. They are refusing to do business with an organization that negatively affects their brand (The Daily Stormer). They should have the right to make that choice as a private entity. Funny you bring up Fedex: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/business/fedex-washington-red...

"They should have the right to make that choice as a private entity." No they should not. And the analogy works: if you're getting filtered on the basis of your content - at the packet level or not - then it's fundamentally against Net Neutrality. Wait until the PR team at Verizon decides they don't want to publish your content because you're too vocal about BLM. Or, they will only support you if you do support BLM,…

There is clear regulation in many countries: nazi speech gets you thrown in jail, the rest is mostly fine. See njmerious european countries like Germany that aren't some dystopia hellscape. That reflects a lot of what happens voluntarily today anyway, but it can't of course be formalized into regulatory law in the USA, because such regulation is restricted by the first amendment.

Your panic is unwarranted anyways, because many of those countries do allow free speech restrictions, yet no runaway crazy banning has happened yet. Its just a fictional slippery slope made up to protect hate speech. Words don't protect against tyrany anyways; actually fighting against tyranny does.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#265

Post by sciurus » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #259

“Cloudflare apparently fat-fingered a routing update and sent all of their global traffic to a single POP, vaporizing it almost instantly.” Made me chuckle, as it gave me the image of a large server in some massive server farm glowing red, then bursting in a massive burst of light as dozens of bearded Sysadmins run out of the building screaming.

In my experience the sysadmins would be running in the opposite direction.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#266

Post by ebg13 » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 11:08 PM UTC

zenincognito wrote: post #246

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #43

Honest question: I've never really understood the back of the napkin math of how Cloudflare functions economically, which I feel would go a long way towards my understanding of why/how they were able to become such an integral and generally positive part of the Internet. Did they have some crazy in to get cheap bandwidth? Did they bet big on bandwidth prices falling? Did they figure something else out that nobody saw…

Worth noting that cloudflare does a poor job of identifying and allowing crawlers specially Google. I have a site with 1 mil URLs , nothing big and every time you turn on cloudflare it reduces the crawler to 1k visits or less per day. If you compare your logs for visits for Google and Bing with CF turned on/off there is a huge difference. Suffice to say, that in over 5-6 projects I have added CF to, it's never worked…

> I have a site with 1 mil URLs , nothing big

A million URLs isn't big?

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#267

Post by Reelin » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 11:10 PM UTC

nix23 wrote: post #256

Reelin wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This misses the point to an impressive degree. No one here is disputing the current legality and I think everyone here understands the difference between government and private services. The argument is that we've come to depend on privately owned backbone infrastructure in much the same way we depend on publicly owned roads. Furthermore, the operators of that infrastructure have shown themselves to be vulnerable to…

>we've come to depend on privately owned backbone No, you can use any other service you want. CF has no private toll roads, in fact you can make your own 'toll' road right know. But if you have your private toll road you can forbid any bumper sticker you don't want on YOUR road.

> if you have your private toll road you can forbid any bumper sticker you don't want on YOUR road

If this existed in reality somewhere in the US (or wherever you happen to live) are you seriously saying that you would be ok with it?! Do you really not see the necessity of having neutral infrastructure?

> CF has no private toll roads

They are largely analogous. They transport your traffic from point A to point B for a fee. Yes, competitors exist. No, you can't just go build your own any more than you can simply whip up a viable Twitter or Facebook clone in a weekend. Claiming otherwise is either to be profoundly misinformed or to advance an argument in bad faith.

> > we've come to depend on privately owned backbone

> No, you can use any other service you want.

... which is also private and subject to the same pressures due to public outrage. Disputing that we have come to depend on privately owned basic infrastructure in general because we could switch to depending on a different piece of privately owned infrastructure is to again miss the point entirely. There is not (to the best of my knowledge) a government operated CDN or network backbone which you could make use of in order to avoid such concerns.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#268

Post by 1f60c » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 11:15 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #250

Cloudflare is horrible for blind people. Screen readers, the programs that use synthesized speech to tell us what's on the screen, cannot read images. Good captchas usually have audio equivalents (which come with their own set of problems), but this one doesn't. If you're blind and flagged by Cloudflare for some reason, you're cut off from accessing half the internet, potentially critical banking/governmental/medical…

Thank you for sharing your experience.

Cloudflare switched to using hCaptcha a couple months ago, I think and I only just noticed that they do not offer an audio-based captcha.

However, hCaptcha integrates with Privacy Pass[0], and you can top up your tokens by solving a captcha at [1] and [2]. What you could do (and I realize this is far from ideal), is getting a sighted friend to solve a couple of captchas so you have enough tokens to last you a couple months.

[0]: https://privacypass.github.io/

[1]: https://captcha.website/

[2]: https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy-pass

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#269

Post by userbinator » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #250

Cloudflare is horrible for blind people. Screen readers, the programs that use synthesized speech to tell us what's on the screen, cannot read images. Good captchas usually have audio equivalents (which come with their own set of problems), but this one doesn't. If you're blind and flagged by Cloudflare for some reason, you're cut off from accessing half the internet, potentially critical banking/governmental/medical…

Just like Google, it is also horrible for those who use more "nonstandard" configurations. I don't remember if it's CF or Google or someone else but I recall coming across sites that would block you if you have JS disabled, claiming that you're a bot, and the ban-page was the same across those sites, so it was a common "provider".

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#270

Post by jiggawatts » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #250

Cloudflare is horrible for blind people. Screen readers, the programs that use synthesized speech to tell us what's on the screen, cannot read images. Good captchas usually have audio equivalents (which come with their own set of problems), but this one doesn't. If you're blind and flagged by Cloudflare for some reason, you're cut off from accessing half the internet, potentially critical banking/governmental/medical…

The "human detector" of the modern internet doesn't accept disabled people as sufficiently human. That's... the most dystopian thing I've heard in a while!