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What makes Google's legitimate over OP's? A big part of the net neutrality fight was "allowing the little guy a chance to play with the big boys". Part of the

What makes Google's legitimate over OP's? A big part of the net neutrality fight was "allowing the little guy a chance to play with the big boys". Part of the service says:- for Bandwidth Alliance partners, we’re going to hand the IP of the bot to the partner and get the bot kicked offline... If the infrastructure provider hosting the bot is part of the Bandwidth Alliance, we’ll share the bot’s IP address so they can shutdown the bot completely. The Bandwidth Alliance allows us to reduce transit costs with partners and, with this launch, also helps us work together with them to make the Internet safer for legitimate users. My reading of that is if CF decide your IP is bad, they can leverage the providers Bandwidth Alliance status to shutdown the providers customer. What if CF's systems misfire? Will there be a grace period? Will there be an appeals process? Will CF compensate anyone effected and have their hosting withdrawn from a misfire? No one likes bad bots, but I'm feeling more and more uneasy allowing CF decide which is which.

slig 7y ago
> What makes Google's legitimate over OP's? They bring real visitors and customers. Random bots running on AWS or TOR bring me headaches and bigger bills.
- mfontani 7y ago
  Random bots _using common "real browser" user-agent strings_ piss me off to no end.
  - slig 7y ago
    And that's exactly what random bots do.
- Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
  > They bring real visitors and customers. if this is to be believed [0] less then 50% of google searches result in a click though to the site, so one could argue that because of things like snippets in search results Google don't always drive traffic to your site. [0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-result-in-a-click/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches...
  - slig 7y ago
    I think that's fair. If the user was able to get what they're looking for without having to click, good for them. I'm betting that Google knows when that happen and uses it as a positive signal towards that site.
avip 7y ago
>What makes Google's legitimate over OP's? Respecting robots.txt, using a well-known ua, coming from publicly declared, google owned IP block.
- AznHisoka 7y ago
  "well-known ua" So if you're a small business that wants to build the next Google, you can't? Because obviously, your User Agent won't be well known when you start.
  - cft 7y ago
    I think IPO empowered Matthew Prince with his benevolent extrajuditial internet court is becoming a real threat for the open web.
    - AznHisoka 7y ago
      I don't have a problem with Cloudflare's reach and power, but would love for them to be transparent as to what they constitute a bad bot. What's the rules? Follow robots.txt, Scrape just X pages a minute, what else?
      - Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
        The problem I see is they won't explicitly say what would trigger being flagged as bad (nor what would be considered allowable) as they would claim (as almost everyone in the anti cheat field does) it would give too much info to the bad guys to avoid detection. I would love for them to prove me wrong though and be open about such things.
        danShumway 7y ago
        > it would give too much info to the bad guys to avoid detection. I'm pretty sympathetic to this line of thought, so don't take this as 'you're wrong', but I notice that we would never apply this logic to laws, or environmental standards, or contracts. You'd never hear someone say, "if we have a clearly defined tax code, that will just make it easier for people to find loopholes." Where I do hear this argument come up is explicitly in contexts of moderation and abuse policies. And it's something that sounds very reasonable, but it's hard for me to get away from the fact that in most other contexts it sounds problematic to me. Maybe part of the problem is Cloudflare's scale? Maybe the reason it feels bad to have a police officer pull me over because, "we think you're going too fast" instead of "you went over a posted limit", is because that's a critical infrastructure that I can't avoid. Cloudflare is a private company, and even if it wasn't, I don't know if it would be big enough presence that I would worry about their policies. But when I hear things like this: > Our goal is nothing short of making it no longer viable to run a malicious bot on the Internet. And we think, with our scale, we can do exactly that. That maybe shifts the situation a tiny bit farther away from "moderation policy on a personal blog" towards "policeman pulling me over because I broke a law I didn't know existed." I dunno. I'm not 100% sure how to feel about it. I do think that Cloudflare should be able to filter traffic however they see fit, but that doesn't mean that every strategy they choose is inherently good, or that it might not be problematic for them to lack transparency about their standards.
kordlessagain 7y ago
> I'm feeling more and more uneasy allowing CF decide which is which. Don't worry, their proprietary AI will figure it all out.
- Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
  OK... That made me giggle. It was a giggle I needed so thank you :-)
manicdee 7y ago
So it’s like YouTube copyright takedowns but for a victim’s entire internet connection?

slig 7y ago

> What makes Google's legitimate over OP's? They bring real visitors and customers. Random bots running on AWS or TOR bring me headaches and bigger bills.

mfontani 7y ago
Random bots _using common "real browser" user-agent strings_ piss me off to no end.
- slig 7y ago
  And that's exactly what random bots do.
Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
> They bring real visitors and customers. if this is to be believed [0] less then 50% of google searches result in a click though to the site, so one could argue that because of things like snippets in search results Google don't always drive traffic to your site. [0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-result-in-a-click/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches...
- slig 7y ago
  I think that's fair. If the user was able to get what they're looking for without having to click, good for them. I'm betting that Google knows when that happen and uses it as a positive signal towards that site.

avip 7y ago

>What makes Google's legitimate over OP's? Respecting robots.txt, using a well-known ua, coming from publicly declared, google owned IP block.

AznHisoka 7y ago
"well-known ua" So if you're a small business that wants to build the next Google, you can't? Because obviously, your User Agent won't be well known when you start.
- cft 7y ago
  I think IPO empowered Matthew Prince with his benevolent extrajuditial internet court is becoming a real threat for the open web.
  - AznHisoka 7y ago
    I don't have a problem with Cloudflare's reach and power, but would love for them to be transparent as to what they constitute a bad bot. What's the rules? Follow robots.txt, Scrape just X pages a minute, what else?
    - Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
      The problem I see is they won't explicitly say what would trigger being flagged as bad (nor what would be considered allowable) as they would claim (as almost everyone in the anti cheat field does) it would give too much info to the bad guys to avoid detection. I would love for them to prove me wrong though and be open about such things.
      - danShumway 7y ago
        > it would give too much info to the bad guys to avoid detection. I'm pretty sympathetic to this line of thought, so don't take this as 'you're wrong', but I notice that we would never apply this logic to laws, or environmental standards, or contracts. You'd never hear someone say, "if we have a clearly defined tax code, that will just make it easier for people to find loopholes." Where I do hear this argument come up is explicitly in contexts of moderation and abuse policies. And it's something that sounds very reasonable, but it's hard for me to get away from the fact that in most other contexts it sounds problematic to me. Maybe part of the problem is Cloudflare's scale? Maybe the reason it feels bad to have a police officer pull me over because, "we think you're going too fast" instead of "you went over a posted limit", is because that's a critical infrastructure that I can't avoid. Cloudflare is a private company, and even if it wasn't, I don't know if it would be big enough presence that I would worry about their policies. But when I hear things like this: > Our goal is nothing short of making it no longer viable to run a malicious bot on the Internet. And we think, with our scale, we can do exactly that. That maybe shifts the situation a tiny bit farther away from "moderation policy on a personal blog" towards "policeman pulling me over because I broke a law I didn't know existed." I dunno. I'm not 100% sure how to feel about it. I do think that Cloudflare should be able to filter traffic however they see fit, but that doesn't mean that every strategy they choose is inherently good, or that it might not be problematic for them to lack transparency about their standards.

kordlessagain 7y ago

> I'm feeling more and more uneasy allowing CF decide which is which. Don't worry, their proprietary AI will figure it all out.

Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
OK... That made me giggle. It was a giggle I needed so thank you :-)

manicdee 7y ago

So it’s like YouTube copyright takedowns but for a victim’s entire internet connection?