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

Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 578 posts

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#371

Post by stingraycharles »

ezfe wrote: post #337
betaby wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare It was better. 'Wget' and 'links' worked with most of the sites.

wget isn't supposed to work on these sites. They've chosen Cloudflare and asked them to do this.

That’s exactly the part that people forget: all these policies are decided to be applied by the website owners. It started with DDoS blocking and they just extended it to more things.

I feel like people here are forgetting the fact just how hostile bad actors on the internet are / can be.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#372

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #68
mosura wrote: post #4

Eventually all Internet protocols will be MITMed by cloudflare. Your single point of interception!

To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.

"To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I'm fine with it."

Cloudflare not only blocking IA but asking for money on behalf of the website operator, as a "service"

https://web.archive.org/web/20250920180605if_/https://www.th...

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#373

Post by nemomarx »

osigurdson wrote: post #355
egorfine wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the internet was worse without Cloudflare It had much more freedom. Currently it's up to Cloudflare to decide whether you will read that article or not. Tomorrow some stupid law will mandate certain ideas to be hidden from children[1] and Cloudflare will happily comply. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

>> Currently it's up to Cloudflare to decide whether you will read that article or not. How is Cloudflare gatekeeping things? I believe you but don't understand the mechanism.

Cloudflare sends certain users they think are bots into infinite captcha loops - the wrong user agent or tor endpoint can do it

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#374

Post by 542458 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #372
stingraycharles wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.

"To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I'm fine with it." Cloudflare not only blocking IA but asking for money on behalf of the website operator, as a "service" https://web.archive.org/web/20250920180605if_/https://www.th...

That's the site owner demanding payment via cloudflare, not cloudflare unilaterally deciding to charge money (as far as I can tell at least).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/

Looks like The Verge either set up an excessively tight pay-per-crawl policy or doesn't want IA scraping their stuff.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#375

Post by stingraycharles »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #372
stingraycharles wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.

"To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I'm fine with it." Cloudflare not only blocking IA but asking for money on behalf of the website operator, as a "service" https://web.archive.org/web/20250920180605if_/https://www.th...

Cloudflare offers a service to website owners to do that, yes. It’s the owners’ decision if they want to monetize on the content.

Is it that bad that Cloudflare offers people these choices?

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#376

Post by neilv »

stingraycharles wrote: post #68
mosura wrote: post #4

Eventually all Internet protocols will be MITMed by cloudflare. Your single point of interception!

To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.

You could run this business like a protection racket, to drive demand to your service, where you can then provide unencrypted traffic of much of the Internet to other parties.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#377

Post by incoming1211 »

542458 wrote: post #374
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I'm fine with it." Cloudflare not only blocking IA but asking for money on behalf of the website operator, as a "service" https://web.archive.org/web/20250920180605if_/https://www.th...

That's the site owner demanding payment via cloudflare, not cloudflare unilaterally deciding to charge money (as far as I can tell at least). https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ Looks like The Verge either set up an excessively tight pay-per-crawl policy or doesn't want IA scraping their stuff.

Cloudflare enabled blocking by default. People were on X complaining about it.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#378

Post by incoming1211 »

r00f wrote: post #203
segmondy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is worse for me with Cloudflare. I'm using a cellphone router for my internet. My guess is I don't get a dedicated IP and probably behind a NAT with other users. 85% of my request needs me to solve a cloudflare captcha. on bad days I have to do this easily 100+ times.

It is not Cloudflare's fault. It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day. Thanks to Cloudflare I was able to reduce my website load threefold and downscale my VMs and my monthly cloud bill, and seeing how 50k daily requests were shown CAPTCHA and not even tried to solve it makes me terrified of running anything without Cloudflare. Don…

I've tried going to sites to buy things and been met with Cloudflare CAPTCHA, only to immediately leave and buy what I wanted elsewhere.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#379

Post by toomuchtodo »

stavros wrote: post #299
toomuchtodo wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please blog about it if you do!

I can, but wouldn't that be a boring post? "I set my SMTP servers to this other thing and they still work"? :P Or do you mean if I get access to the beta? I probably won't :(

I have yet to read a boring stavros post, imgz.org for example. I encourage you to keep writing and keep building. Moar sassy knowledge sharing pls.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#380

Post by thephyber »

incoming1211 wrote: post #377
542458 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the site owner demanding payment via cloudflare, not cloudflare unilaterally deciding to charge money (as far as I can tell at least). https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ Looks like The Verge either set up an excessively tight pay-per-crawl policy or doesn't want IA scraping their stuff.

Cloudflare enabled blocking by default. People were on X complaining about it.

Blocking access to everyone or to scraping crawlers?

They have detailed stats about the behavior of all visitors, including how bot-like they are and how likely they are to scrape your (their users’) content.

Post reply on HN