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Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

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Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#91
post #46

I see so many people in these threads always complain about Cloudflare or Google CAPTCHA loops.. but even when using Private Internet Access (one of the most abused VPNs), I rarely if ever got on a full-on loop. Maybe Google CAPTCHA made me solve 3 things instead of one. Cloudflare is always just a checkbox. And I have my Brave and Firefox profiles hardened. I'm not saying you aren't experiencing this, but I am curio…

It's because you have previous cookies/state in your browser that you got from non-VPN addresses, which adds to your trust score. Do it with a clean browser with AdBlock and many, many things block you.

If you don't clear your state or keep its original origin VPN only, you're breaking a big point of using VPNs.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#92
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe don’t put critical services on the open internet. I know most tech people would balk at such a possibility, but the status quo isn’t really compatible with either long-term goal: * If we want the internet to be a place of anonymity and free speech, then we shouldn’t be putting critical services on the public internet - or we need to stop using intermediaries like Cloudflare where a single court order could…

What if there’s no singular “we” and different people / companies have different needs?

That’s basically what I was getting at, albeit in (deliberately) far more inflammatory terms. There’s this misconception at a very fundamental level that the internet is a “place” that can be regulated, or obstructed, as human needs change and evolve.

It is little more than a multitude of computers talking to each other in a similar “language”. It is not a singular place or entity, and attempting to regulate the entirety of it as such is fundamentally impossible.

And the sooner people and governments understand that, the sooner we can resume difficult discussions on its use.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#93
post #84
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple: Connect larger NICs and do "dumb" DDoS filtering at your fattest point. Consider an HTTP daemon serving static content on a physical server. If that physical server has a 10Gig NIC it will withstand 90%[0] of the real-world DDoS attacks which would affect the same server with a 1Gig NIC. "Dumb" DDoS filtering means blocking UDP and SYN floods, and other simple attacks. Your goal is essentially to block traffi…

> I made it up I appreciate the honesty, at least

This conclusion stems from that it is much easier to launch a DDoS from a single server w/ spoofed traffic than to use a botnet. If you have a single 10Gig server, you will likely not be able to take down another 10Gig server unless the target is already doing near 1gbps[0]. I believe most "noise" DDoS which effects random website operators is considerably less than 10Gbps, and pretty much every giant attack uses spoofed traffic which can be blocked upstream without a WAF. So long as your upstream is big enough.

[0]: I made it up, again.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#94

I was unaware of this controversy so in brief: 1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable 2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing. 3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court) 4. Based on t…

I might be out of date but. I think the article is incorrect. It is the same corp that owns both the streaming rights and the ISPs. The court order allows those ISPs to block IP-addresses of sites that hosts illegal streaming. I find it hard to see how CF could have a case here.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#95
post #41

Of course it could claim lives. Hopefully Prince has considered people have also likely died as a result of Cloudflare's repeating captcha which holds the next page in front of you like a carrot on a stick, never letting you know that you will be clicking that box forever. I'm sure while someone's in the process of keeling over is the perfect time to arbitrarily scrutinize their connecting details. You need to contac…

When I've tried to get a customer of CloudFlare to fix a consistent block of their site -- not safety-critical, but mission-critical, and costing them a SaaS sale -- nobody seemed to care.

My impression is that everyone knows that Cloudflare is blocking some legitimate people, but nobody -- neither the customer, nor Cloudflare -- cares enough to solve that problem.

It's similar to why Google doesn't have much tech support. Or why people can be locked out of their Google or Apple accounts without recourse. Caring about the people who fall through the cracks that you created isn't profitable.

When the Internet is part of the basic material of society, we need to rediscover ideals like "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".

And we need to start removing from power the entities who are too lazy or greedy to uphold our ideals.

(Before someone jumps on literal numbers: That doesn't mean let through 10 botnet floods, rather than prevent grandma from finding a doctor. That could just mean, for example, don't block grandma because one of her browser headers looks suspiciously like an incompetent script kiddie, even though you can see that her traffic isn't yet part of a DDoS flood. Once you change the parameters to be more consistent with a fair and just society, maybe that means that, say, a Web site's servers do see a brief blip, as a new DDoS attack spins up, so it's not a perfectly smooth ride, but every legitimate person remains served. First, don't run over grandma; apply your engineering creativity with that hard requirement in mind.)

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#96

I was unaware of this controversy so in brief: 1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable 2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing. 3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court) 4. Based on t…

> Cloudflare goes public in frustration, noting that they could just send take down requests for infringing content like every other rights holder in the world,

Live sports piracy has the unusual property that you have to be able to get the block in place within the ~90 minutes of a football match, even at weekends and across time zones. Otherwise there’s no point.

If the courts let Cloudflare slow roll this, at the legal system’s normal snail-like pace, the law would be effectively useless.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#97
I was always unsure about cloudflare as an end user - I don’t want all my traffic going through one provider, but their business use case seemed reasonable.

Then my in-laws got tricked into sending login credentials to a phishing page fronted by cloudflare. It was obviously spoofing IDP logins of Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. I sent a request assuming they would disable the domain and it was immediately closed (in minutes) as not an issue. It made no sense that they would want to front phishing sites. I eventually got them to look more closely and it was removed, but it soured my perception of them.

I think large scale internet businesses may need to start having more liability in matters like this. Being blocked from an entire country seems extreme, but if there are financial incentives to solve the problem, the problem will get solved.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#99
post #95
post #41

Of course it could claim lives. Hopefully Prince has considered people have also likely died as a result of Cloudflare's repeating captcha which holds the next page in front of you like a carrot on a stick, never letting you know that you will be clicking that box forever. I'm sure while someone's in the process of keeling over is the perfect time to arbitrarily scrutinize their connecting details. You need to contac…

When I've tried to get a customer of CloudFlare to fix a consistent block of their site -- not safety-critical, but mission-critical, and costing them a SaaS sale -- nobody seemed to care. My impression is that everyone knows that Cloudflare is blocking some legitimate people, but nobody -- neither the customer, nor Cloudflare -- cares enough to solve that problem. It's similar to why Google doesn't have much tech su…

Do you ever find that advocating for these tenets feels "weird" nowadays? As in, don't you know these publicly traded companies are legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust? What do you expect them to do? To start acting silly?

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#100
post #18
post #6

sounds like centralising most of the the internet behind a single easy target (Cloudflare) is a bad idea

All systems seem to converge to these monopolies. Google, X, Facebook, Cloudflare. All minor player are absorbed or eliminated.

Classic economies of scale. It’s a lot more efficient for one company to make one million services of lemonade than it is for one million people to make one serving each. Even if the homemade version is “better”.
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