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Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

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Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#71

Post by kiririn »

bArray wrote: post #58

I also get CloudFlare now blocking my access to RSS feed MP3s for some podcasts. Once the almighty CloudFlare deems you a threat, your IP is burned. These days I can use less and less of the internet. I really want to just see us get to the point where we don't have to rely on such services. I refuse to use them or any other for services I run, DDoS be damned.

I also refuse to use them for anything. A decade or so ago I spent 2 years barely able to access any site using cloudflare, won’t forget that

It goes to show the flaws of centralised services where you are not the customer. Not only is there no one to complain to, you can’t even take your money/traffic elsewhere as the competitors probably use cloudflare too

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#72

Post by cumshitpiss »

newsclues wrote: post #41
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that is a comment about alt right commentators online. YewTube sounds like an anti Semitic joke.

No post body was provided.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#73

Post by bjord »

codedokode wrote: post #43

Cloudflare might end a golden era of scraping, when it was trivial to scrape data from any site. Now Cloudflare helps site owners to make sure than only humans can read their contents manually. As more site owners switch to similar services, web will become less and less machine readable. No automated data processing, no archiving.

this won't stop the overall trend, but it can help you get around cloudflare's effective scraping blocking (copying my comment from a previous thread):

If you're scraping with Python, try cloudscraper—among other things(!), it supports JS rendering (basically the bare-minimum check cloudflare does), without needing to run a full browser in the background. It's built on requests, so integration was pretty easy.

https://github.com/venomous/cloudscraper

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#74

Post by WirelessGigabit »

mst wrote: post #67
marginalia_nu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Internet security has, in my experience, always been about "being just hard enough a target the bad actors decide to go torment somebody else." It was true twenty years ago too, the only difference I can see between then and now is that you can outsource that task for a (relatively) small amount of money if you want to. Then again, the last time I dealt with a site under DDoS, something in their stack was leaking the…

I'm surprised you're handing incoming requests from everybody. We only process the CloudFlare ones and drop the rest.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#75

Post by quanticle »

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…

>The big unanswered question is how they'll manage to stay good given the obvious incentive of abusing this setup.

Why do you think they're still "good"? CloudFlare has chosen to abandon sites that held free speech (abhorrent speech, but still free speech) while still protecting forums upon which credit cards and methamphetamine were listed for sale on the front page.

To me, that's not a sign of a "good" actor.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#76

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

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…

I always figured that the main thing Cloudflare protected against was DDoS attacks, not bots (DDoS may be caused by bots, but with significantly different outcomes -- a single bot in and of itself won't take down a website)

RE bots: TikTok has incredible bot protection that comes from engineering (webmssdk) instead of network-based filtering. I'm not even sure if they use Cloudflare.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#77

Post by CHY872 »

iquerno wrote: post #42
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 never really understood Cloudflare's intent, because from the marketing material it seems that you get DDOS "protection", free TLS certs, everything in a monthly package, affordable, bla bla bla. But from some basic calculations I get that R2, Workers and egress bandwidth beyond a few terabytes costs just as much as Oracle cloud / Alibaba. But what I dislike the most is how little control you have over what's going…

I think the ability to put TLS in front of a non-TLS'd website comes of a few properties:

1. It's probably better than nothing. 2. It's a legacy thing.

A company like Cloudflare has to make a choice - how frequently do we break users who've set up their site in a way that is no longer in line with security best practices? It looks like the decision they've made is to break infrequently. Certainly the site I set up in 2014 when their free TLS was new still runs, and I haven't made changes.

I believe that you can set up strict TLS between Cloudflare and the end host if you choose, but it's up to you. I think in that instance, your 'little control you get' is actually more control, no?

And, if you look back even a few years, TLS was both uncommon and expensive. Cloudflare was a pioneer by offering free TLS certificates in I think 2014 (only 8 years ago!). LetsEncrypt started in 2015 and was niche for quite some time. I think even now you can find Linux distros preferring to ship their data over HTTP with GPG-keys recommended for the security. Of course in 2022 even simple sites should be TLS'd, but Cloudflare's existed for a while.

And, TLS to the client but plaintext from CDN to site is still better than cleartext the whole way, because it (generally) stops the ISP from snooping on its customers.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#79

Post by waboremo »

quanticle wrote: post #75
marginalia_nu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The big unanswered question is how they'll manage to stay good given the obvious incentive of abusing this setup. Why do you think they're still "good"? CloudFlare has chosen to abandon sites that held free speech (abhorrent speech, but still free speech) while still protecting forums upon which credit cards and methamphetamine were listed for sale on the front page. To me, that's not a sign of a "good" actor.

Free speech doesn't exist within the context of a privately held website.

Re: Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped

#80

Post by Cyberdog »

newsclues wrote: post #41
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that is a comment about alt right commentators online. YewTube sounds like an anti Semitic joke.

Jesus, people see nazis behind every blade of grass nowadays.

Pray tell, what is antisemitic about "YewTube?" Just that it's one letter away from "JewTube?" Sure, but if the creators intended to be antisemitic, why not just call it that then?

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