Comment by lostlogin
3 days ago
I don’t know the history here, do you have some examples?
My usage is pretty much limited to their DNS.
3 days ago
I don’t know the history here, do you have some examples?
My usage is pretty much limited to their DNS.
They're pretty reviled by people who go out of their way to be private via things like VPNs and locked down browsers, because that constantly trips their bot detection and makes using the web miserable.
And in places where CGNAT is in use, so that many people are on the same IP address, and botnets are active on that address.
I live in India in such a situation, and most of the time it’s not too bad, but I still encounter Cloudflare CAPTCHAs pretty frequently. At times, it’s been almost half the web is blocking you. And occasionally, it actually is blocking you, not just a CAPTCHA. It’s also not rare, when being more aggressively blocked, for a site to break because it tries loading scripts from another domain, which is then CAPTCHAing so that scripts just won’t load.
Back when I lived in Australia, I practically never got Cloudflare blocks.
The mechanism may be understandable and even justifiable to a considerable extent, but the poor definitely end up suffering more from Cloudflare than the rich.
They’ve got a pretty long history of helping scammers and criminals.
https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/service-providers/too-...
So the better internet is for everyone, is that so bad?
I’d rather have them help everyone than make arbitrary decisions about who gets served. That’s what we have the legal system for.
It gets into the weeds fast. I thought I was all for free speech, then the Christchurch terrorist shared his live stream of him killing people.
The legal system is too slow and private companies have a dubious record of what they police. What’s a good model to follow?
8 replies →
> I’d rather have them help everyone than make arbitrary decisions about who gets served. That’s what we have the legal system for.
They don't get to have common carrier status without any of the regulation or obligations that go with it.
They also help the groups which sell DDoS services. And sell the DDoS protection. Even if we ignore their morally messed up choices, their business is both making things worse for everyone and sells the cure.
1 reply →
There's a ton of sites that ISPs wouldn't sell service to if it wasn't for Cloudflare making it difficult to determine where those sites were. It's basically /dev/null for abuse reports.