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CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

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Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#81

Post by optimiz3 »

therealmarv wrote: post #45
sjwright wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thwarting denial of service attacks isn’t a bug. You seem to be confused about what your rights are around website availability. Hint: you have no rights. Absent specific coercion by government, the owner of the website had all the rights. If she wants to require you to solve a Where’s Waldo first, that’s her prerogative. Your choice is to accept the terms or go elsewhere.

It's discrimination by country/region. It's like saying: oh, you are from Africa or Asia. The chance is higher you are a criminal, so do this test first.

Which is completely legal and encouraged. Here's an example: if you've ever shipped an ad-monetized free app, you've probably disabled regions like Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc.

You know why? Because the ad-revenue is worthless (and often malicious) and the users will be more trouble than they are worth. Same thing is happening with net traffic from other low value regions. One star reviews because users from $banned_region are complaining about lag due to their crappy wifi and/or some other issue you have no control over (defective ram in their 6 year old 2nd hand phone comes to mind)? Sign me up!

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#83

Post by lilyball »

skrebbel wrote: post #19
ridgewell wrote: post #9

Is the situation improved by using the Privacy Pass add-on [1] from Cloudflare? Supposedly: >Privacy Pass is a Chrome/Firefox browser extension to make browsing Cloudflare-protected websites a better experience for users. In particular, if a user IP address is designated to have a poor reputation then the user may have to solve a Cloudflare CAPTCHA page before they can gain access to such websites. Privacy Pass uses…

So wait, "we shipped a bug, so we made a browser extension that lets you circumvent the bug". That's cloudflare's answer? I'm not impressed. EDIT: people seem to be confused as to what bug cloudflare shipped. The bug is not having people solve captchas because their IP has a bad reputation. It's having them solve it over and over again . You can put it however you want it, but if my app's UX is fine without cloudflar…

You calling this a "bug" makes it sound like you expect Cloudflare to violate your privacy by tracking which websites you've visited in order to determine that you're not a threat. It sounds like the point of Privacy Pass is the only information it gives Cloudflare is that you've solved a Captcha recently but otherwise provides no information about where you did it (beyond the fact that it's a Cloudflare property).

Given the fact that they've resorted to providing an extension to do this, this suggests that they've deliberately engineered their services to not have access to that data internally, and that's a good thing.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#84

Post by sdan »

judge2020 wrote: post #36
sdan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when you hop on a VPN; I kid you not I have to spent literally 20 straight minutes following this bs. It’s infuriating for someone who self-respects their privacy.

Maybe try a personal VPN on digital ocean? You'd be guaranteed a clean IP that only you have access to, as it's very likely CF only flags VPN IPs because some malicious traffic is coming from them. The only issues with this are sites that block the digital ocean ASN (like Crunchyroll).

Yeah this works. If you're going to setup AlgoVPN might as well set it up on multiple locations (which I speculate is probably going to cost you n times more, given the n number of locations you choose).

AlgoVPN works great regardless of provider. It's more secure and private than public VPNs (not to mention fast).

This comparatively to stuff like ExpressVPN where I had to go through the aforementioned hurdles.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#85

Post by lilyball »

therealmarv wrote: post #58
cracker_jacks wrote: post #20

What is the alternative solution here? How do you effectively protect access to websites while simultaneously making sure you never get false positives? I really don't think going back to not having Cloudflare-like services is a step forward. Is there another way?

It's afaik only Cloudflare's way. You don't see that behaviour from Google or Facebook. They really now how to handle the Internet in the "second" and "third world". Cloudflare is like: we don't care about you, you are too poor or a bot. Here is a extension if you are tech-savvy enough to find and install it.

From my perspective Google is far worse. I don't ever see Cloudflare's Captchas but I get Google's all the damn time, because I try to avoid Google properties. They intentionally punish people that aren't regularly using their products.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#86

Post by optimiz3 »

knolax wrote: post #59
RobertRoberts wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asia is the #1 attacker of all websites I work with. Since 100% of the traffic (based on our analysis) coming from Asia is not legitimate business traffic, how would you advise those responsible for these sites security to handle this? Edit: I have no interest in using Cloudflare...

Presumably you have a method to deter attacks that's better than IP-blocking an entire continent, otherwise you'd be utterly hopeless the moment somebody decides to attack from a North American IP.

North American IPs have North American law enforcement.

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#87

Post by snek »

iliketosleep wrote: post #54

Companies like CloudFlare are contributing to the erosion of user privacy in the name of security. I experience the same kind of issues that the author of the article highlights, just because I take some privacy measures. It's my view that so-called security on the Internet, which implies confidentiality, integrity, and availability, is getting increasingly worse for end users. If I want to give up all of my privacy,…

The article is complaining that CloudFlare (as a result of them refusing to track you) requires people to solve captchas over and over again. How is this hurting your privacy exactly?

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#88

Post by Thorrez »

cnst wrote: post #48
therealmarv wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's discrimination by country/region. It's like saying: oh, you are from Africa or Asia. The chance is higher you are a criminal, so do this test first.

And the problem is worse because, apparently, even solving the captchas repeatedly from a given IP address doesn't make it whitelisted, either. So, it fits the very definition of discrimination against a whole wider group, where the individual actions of any individual actors don't matter.

>1.The IP address you are on has shown problematic activity online recently in one of our data sources. If you would like to look your IP up, then please look your IP up at Project Honeypot. If the IP address shows data for malicious activity, you can see why there. You can also attempt to whitelist your IP directly on that page by connecting from that IP. If no bad activity is seen from the IP address after a two-week period, then the challenge behavior will stop against that IP address.

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/203366080-W...

Re: CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)

#89

Post by mastazi »

_bxg1 wrote: post #26
cnst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define a VPN? Noone other than myself has ever used my IP addresses in X years.

Honestly I wonder if even an unusual setup like a static IP would register on one of their heuristics. It could flag as a web server, which would theoretically be more likely to ping a site rapidly than a personal computer.

Why would a static IP be considered something unusual? I’ve almost always had one with all of the home broadband services that I’ve used over the years.

(Edit: I mean that the static IP was almost always included by default in the standard setup, I didn’t have to request or purchase one)

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