Comment by pmdr
7 hours ago
> It is not CloudFlare that is ruining the Internet, but the spammers and attackers.
Spammers have been around since forever and it used to be the webmaster/sysadmin's responsibility to deal with spam in a way that would not hinder user experience. With Cloudflare all that responsibility is aggressively passed on to the user, cumulatively wasting _years_.
As for attackers, I wonder if Cloudflare publishes data showing how many of the billions of websites it "protects" have experienced a significant attack. They don't offer free protection to save the internet, but rather for control -- and no single company should have this much control.
> Spammers have been around since forever
Is the fallacy here not obvious? Yes, spammers have been around since forever, but it's not the same amount of spammers. Whether it's two spammers or two million spammers does make a difference.
I think we're long past peak spam. A lot of them seem to have given up due to the rise of SPF and DKIM, and also because people don't really use email so much anymore as a serious form of communication.
I remember some clients in the mid 2000s. They got several spam emails per minute on some accounts. Not kidding. I haven't seen anything like that in recent years.
I've been on the Internet since 1992, directly connected at home (student dorms at the time) vial ethernet cable and university ATM backbone since 1994.
At that time I was an admin of said student network, and at the same time built TCP/IP based network and email infrastructure at a subsidiary of a large German company as a side job.
So I was an admin of routers, switches, various services (email, Usenet server, webservers, fax server).
Funny enough - we only added a firewall in front of the student network to protect against our own student's experiments rather than against outside intrusions, at least initially (for example, one person setting up their own Usenet server brought down DNS by flooding it with queries)!
We never had any problems with spam or attackers. "you just didn't notice the attacks!" - NO. When you go online today you get an eternal stream of automated intrusion attempts, visible in all your log files.
Today does not even remotely compare with the easy-going Internet of the 1990s.
Usenet, forums, email - they were all very much usable with minimal or zero spam, and very basic user management. Today, with such a basic setup like we used to have, you would be 100% and chock-full of spam shortly after putting such a server online.
The responsibility is passed to Cloudflare, and that's the point. Not every site can make a capable solution by themselves.
The responsibility now lies on the user, who has to click through confirmations to prove they are human, thus making their experience a lot worse. It has been my experience the last ten years.