Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 127 posts

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#31

Post by marginalia_nu »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #15

By now Cloudflare is more of an obstacle to the free web than it is helping. A centralized entity, whose scripts from randomly named subdomains you must allow to run on your machine, or be stuck at their obnoxious "checking your browser" page endlessly reloading, because some web dev decided to put their website behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent reasons for me to simply close the browser tab…

On a theoretical level, a service like Cloudflare is the most terrifying entity on the Internet I'm aware of. They've accumulated an insane degree of insight into the traffic flow of the web (since their entire service is essentially acting as a HTTPS middle man), and their business is offering protection against bot spam that could ruin most websites. Even if they aren't operating the bots themselves, they're essentially displacing the bot problem to the unprotected websites. Like the overall shape of this operation is something the cosa nostra could have cooked up in the 1970s.

However, being on both sides of this, both operating a bot for my search engine, and operating a web service that is aggressively targeted by bots. They're not actually bad to deal with.

The big unanswered question is how they'll manage to stay good given the obvious incentive of abusing this setup. Maybe this CEO has a moral backbone, but will the next, and when they're acquired by the Meta-Amazon-Alphabet group in 15 years, will they still stick to these principles?

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#32

Post by [deleted] »

shrimpx wrote: post #30
danr4 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know… the so called free web is also a bot paradise, and like it or not cloudflare is actually helping mitigate it to some degree. It comes with a cost but maybe it’s worth it?

Cloudflare has played a major part in making VPNs suck, by providing a service that actively blacklists VPN IPs and selling companies on integrating the VPN blocker into their services. It's probably true that some VPNs are used for nefarious stuff, but it's also lame that Cloudflare is such an anti-privacy warrior.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#33

Post by pas »

ilyt wrote: post #25

I still dunno how people got conned that DoH aka. "tunnel your every DNS request to american entity that is required by law to spy on you on demand" to be the new "standard" for the browsers

in the US ISPs sell your DNS request data, compared to this Cloudflare seems an improvement

in other parts of the world ISPs give your DNS data to the not so secret police and compared to that Cloudflare is a huge improvement

in the parts where ISPs don't sell your DNS data you should switch to a different DoH provider

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#34

Post by RobotToaster »

danr4 wrote: post #21
zelphirkalt wrote: post #15

By now Cloudflare is more of an obstacle to the free web than it is helping. A centralized entity, whose scripts from randomly named subdomains you must allow to run on your machine, or be stuck at their obnoxious "checking your browser" page endlessly reloading, because some web dev decided to put their website behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent reasons for me to simply close the browser tab…

I don’t know… the so called free web is also a bot paradise, and like it or not cloudflare is actually helping mitigate it to some degree. It comes with a cost but maybe it’s worth it?

The web basically relies on bots to exist, search engines wouldn't work without them, Archive.org uses them to archive the web, etc.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of bots are actually nefarious.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#35

Post by zelphirkalt »

luckylion wrote: post #23
zelphirkalt wrote: post #15

By now Cloudflare is more of an obstacle to the free web than it is helping. A centralized entity, whose scripts from randomly named subdomains you must allow to run on your machine, or be stuck at their obnoxious "checking your browser" page endlessly reloading, because some web dev decided to put their website behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent reasons for me to simply close the browser tab…

What scripts from random subdomains are you referring to? I know that from Cloudfront (Amazon's CDN), not Cloudflare. CF usually keeps everything on your domain. The "checking your browser" isn't a default CF thing btw, that's up to the site owner and how paranoid they are (with or without reason). It's annoying me too, but we have sites on CF and practically nobody sees any checks when they access our sites.

Good to know that this page is due to the cloudflare customer! I am only seeing the results of that paranoia in my daily browsing and it sucks. I recently had to ban Gitlab into its own browser profile, because with my previous main profile settings, it simply wouldn't let me log in. I am treating it from now on as contagious, because of that "checking your browser" bs.

(I did write a support request message to Gitlab, but their support clearly sucks. What do I know what kind of subscription my employer has? I don't care! They are paying for me, so Gitlab should offer a modicum of support, if I cannot even log in on their shitty site any longer, because of their changes. But they stonewalled with something like: "We need to know your subscription level blablabla before we can continue the process." kinda automated e-mail. Well, duh! Check your friggin database for my subscription level. Oh but then you would actually have to work. Ah that's a problem of course. Better stonewall a paying (paid for) customer.)

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#37

Post by rurtrack »

sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #29
sdze wrote: post #11

Why would anybody in the right mind centralize his/her infrastructure? I doubt that people actually need something like Cloudflare.

Because they save us ~20 thousand a month in bandwidth cost.

We got 10k visits in a single day. Cost of data transfer: zero

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#38

Post by BlackLotus89 »

oefrha wrote: post #13

Honestly, if I wasn't a technical guy and I saw my channel and all my content on some piped.kavin.rocks or yewtu.be which aren't visually distinguishable from all the non-alternative-YouTube-frontend tube sites, I would assume someone's ripping all my content and impersonating me as well. I can totally see where the DMCA is coming from. And even knowing the technical differences, one may want to dissociate with a stu…

Why is yewtu.be a stupid domainname? It's an "alternative" spelling of youtu.be that's easy to memorize and fast to type. I use a plugin to redirect to newpipe instances, but if I hadn't one I would probably use yewtu.be because it would suck to always type something like piped.kavin.rocks or invidious.pussthecat.org

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#39

Post by ZoF »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #31
zelphirkalt wrote: post #15

By now Cloudflare is more of an obstacle to the free web than it is helping. A centralized entity, whose scripts from randomly named subdomains you must allow to run on your machine, or be stuck at their obnoxious "checking your browser" page endlessly reloading, because some web dev decided to put their website behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent reasons for me to simply close the browser tab…

On a theoretical level, a service like Cloudflare is the most terrifying entity on the Internet I'm aware of. They've accumulated an insane degree of insight into the traffic flow of the web (since their entire service is essentially acting as a HTTPS middle man), and their business is offering protection against bot spam that could ruin most websites. Even if they aren't operating the bots themselves, they're essent…

He has shown time and again that his backbone's strength depends on how loud the public noise is. Kiwifarms most recently. You can dislike them(kiwifarms etc) and there is a case for them to be taken offline imo, but it is the governments job.

Exactly what you do _not_ want protecting the neutral internet. They've done better being neutral than some might have, but that's in reality more insidious because clearly there are points they will bend on and those points will change over time and almost certainly continue to erode.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#40

Post by ricardo81 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #15

By now Cloudflare is more of an obstacle to the free web than it is helping. A centralized entity, whose scripts from randomly named subdomains you must allow to run on your machine, or be stuck at their obnoxious "checking your browser" page endlessly reloading, because some web dev decided to put their website behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent reasons for me to simply close the browser tab…

Crawling websites behind Cloudflare can also be problematic if they (CF) decide that your bot doesn't fit their definition of OK. This is problematic for new search engine entrants and a multitude of other services, particularly given how many sites now live behind CF.

Years back their DNS service also stopped honouring ns_t_any requests (for reasons of DDOS amplification apparently).

I do tend to agree with you about centralisation, gatekeepers particularly.

Post reply on HN