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[disclaimer: I work for CF] CloudFlare also regularly speaks about attacks and mitigations, therefore is helping the community to build better defences. Other

• scrollaway 10y ago
  Cloudflare gets so much undeserved hate on HN. You guys do amazing work, provide an incredible service and your writeups are awesome. Thank you.
  • kristofferR 10y ago
    Yeah, but they've also the "Wifi Captive Portal" of the internet, which frequently creates trouble (if you're using Tor for example).
    • corobo 10y ago
      Tor is used for abuse. If you want the privacy* you get with Tor the price you pay is that sites and services will check that you're not one of the abusers. At least it's not a flat-out ban. Any other large network on such a small IP space (as an example maybe a NAT-using mobile ISP) would be checked just as harshly. * Or any other reason you're using it. Edit: If I'm wrong can you please reply explaining why? I'm having an emotional rollercoaster of up and downvotes here! Please do feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, we all need learnin'
      • rickycook 10y ago
        that's a pretty poor excuse. why is privacy only available by submitting to a poor experience? privacy should be default, not a punishment
        • Karunamon 10y ago
          You're looking at it purely from the user side. Look at it from the admin side. Tor is basically a massive open proxy, and by blocking it or throwing up human checks like captchas, you eliminate a significant source of spam and abuse. There's not much to be done about this otherwise - a Tor user is sharing a network with a significantly higher than usual amount of the bad elements of the internet.
          • deno 10y ago
            You can put captchas where they belong—on comments etc. Instead, Cloudflare punishes people simply browsing; they nuke the 99.99999% of visitors that have zero intention of interacting with the page beyond doing few GETs. Oh and don’t forget they’ll even put the captchas on subdomains, like img.domain.tld. Go visit stackoverflow via VPN/TOR and watch how the site has no styling/images even if you do their stupid captcha on stackoverflow.com. They’ll still serve you another one on static{1-50}.stackoverflow.com. Fun.
            • Karunamon 10y ago
  • supergreg 10y ago
    I think their work is fantastic, but I really don't like that every site I visit meets me with CF's captcha page. It's not only annoying per se, but the privacy implications are unsettling. I welcome the competition.
    • majke 10y ago
      This was never the intention. Part of the problem is inertion - cf operates large and complex application that was designed back when we had only a handful of customers. Part of the problem is technical - the privacy-centric anti-abuse technologies don't exist yet. Please do help us fix this. Report issues, help us understand when we have incorrect IP reputation. Help us find captcha accessibility problems. And maybe - join the team to actually code the fix.
      • jwr 10y ago
        Problem is, your "incorrect IP reputation" concept is fundamentally flawed. As an example, I noticed that most VPN exit nodes have "incorrect IP reputation", which means if I want to browse the internet without my government spying on me, I have to wade through all your CAPTCHAs.
        • IntelMiner 10y ago
          Keep in mind, unless you're using your own personal VPN off a self-hosted machine, you're likely to be sharing your IP address with other (potentially) malicious actors trying to hide their tracks
          • deleted 10y ago
            [deleted]
          • frandroid 10y ago
            Same as if being on an ISP though.
            • 10y ago
  • rmdoss 10y ago
    I love CloudFlare, but understand the concern some people have. With the amount of sites they have behind them, and the amount of visibility and data they can extract, it is actually a bit scary to think what will happen if they get compromised or "do evil". But so far, they seem to take the open and ethical approach and actually follow the "do no evil" mantra. CloudFlare is another Google in the making and I hope they keep like that. thanks,
• eeZi 10y ago
  I work for a hosting company. Can confirm that CloudFlare's posts help us building our own defenses and I'm grateful that they're sharing their knowledge. So, thank you!