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I liked the CloudFlare concept (protecting good people) until I found it protects bad people as well: scammers, thieves, cybersquatters, phishing. CloudFlare ma
by pjbrunet 11y ago
I liked the CloudFlare concept (protecting good people) until I found it protects bad people as well: scammers, thieves, cybersquatters, phishing. CloudFlare makes it very difficult to contact the web host cloaked by CloudFlare.
CloudFlare is helping the scum of the Internet. They need to be held accountable for what they're serving, if they're not going to reveal who is hosting the site. If there's a way to find the originating IP of these scumbags, I would like to know. Obviously traceroute doesn't work because the IPs show up as CloudFlare.
The way I see it, CloudFlare should be required to publish who is hosting the websites they cloak. Otherwise you're encouraging a lawless Internet where anything goes without any consequences. I sincerely hope these larger companies address this problem.
I hope some journalists dig into this because I think there's a good story here. Maybe CloudFlare doesn't have the staff to review the activities of the sites they're protecting? That's a serious problem, in my opinion, because their cloaking technology is very effective.
- harshreality 11y agoHave you thought about that beyond your knee-jerk reaction? One of the primary reasons for using cloudflare is resistance to denial of service attacks, and you want cloudflare to helpfully publish the real IP of the server CF is proxying for? Scammers, thieves, phishing, and cybersquatting are weak or nonsensical reasons for demanding that CF reveal the IP they're proxying for. If a site is breaking the law, use the legal system to request the real server IP from cloudflare. I suppose you're also against Tor, because it cloaks client-side evildoers like CF cloaks server-side evildoers?
- pjbrunet 11y agoI should be able to easily contact the web host and say, "Heads up, your server is doing some bad stuff." This works because hosts don't want to be in business with scum. They take care of it. Because it's the right thing to do, or because they would rather not be involved in a lawsuit, on the wrong side of a PR nightmare. Pretty basic, Internet 101. If I email abuse@cloudflare.com nobody gives a shit. It's irresponsible. A lawsuit should be a last resort. I'm not advocating a more or less anonymous Internet by criticizing CloudFlare. PS: I enjoyed your comment and upvoted it.
- snug 11y agoHave you tried https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/ https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/
- codexon 11y agoCloudflare also protects websites that provide denial of service attacks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10194724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10194724 At the very least, they should be revealing the IPs of these websites.