4 ms·

Oh, cool! CloudFlare, my favorite company, just made a speedtest! - It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent.

Oh, cool! CloudFlare, my favorite company, just made a speedtest! - It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent. - It collects and saves your data, also without asking. - It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why. Of course CloudFlare would screw up a speedtest. They screw up at everything else they do, so I'm 100% not surprised.

deleted 6y ago
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owenmarshall 6y ago
> It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent. 1) fast.com, 2) this feels like a reach, isn't "going to a speed test site" a pretty clear indicator of what the user intends to do? > It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why. I'm confused what your platonic ideal of a speed test is. Off the top of my head, I may care about: * "speed to my ISP" * "speed to something I care about that's 'nearby'" (fast.com to a Netflix box peered close to me) * "speed to a CDN" (speed.cloudflare.com) * "speed to a random data center somewhere" (speedof.me and friends) * "speed to a box I own" I'd be amazed if I didn't see significant deviation between all of those measures.
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  I am on the fence about the consent thing. Yes, it's a speed test, but no, you don't really necessarily know that when it gets linked on some site. Burning through quite a bit of potentially metered data without asking first seems... rude, at the very least.
- cryptoquick 6y ago
  It's not hard to put a button. And not putting one (and still collecting the resulting data) is against the law in several places around the world. Trust me, if you have a gigabit fiber connection like mine, you would notice that their results are way, way off the mark. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368
zzzcpan 6y ago
For your third point - the map, all the rendering and javascript overhead screw with the results, especially on weaker hardware, not to mention how loaded the server is and all the links on the way to the server.
- cryptoquick 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314728
  - zzzcpan 6y ago
    Just ran the test on another machine (different hardware, OS, browser) and got pretty different result. Also uncovered a bug, on my 100 mbit ethernet they show almost 200 mbit upload speed.

deleted 6y ago

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owenmarshall 6y ago

> It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent. 1) fast.com, 2) this feels like a reach, isn't "going to a speed test site" a pretty clear indicator of what the user intends to do? > It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why. I'm confused what your platonic ideal of a speed test is. Off the top of my head, I may care about: * "speed to my ISP" * "speed to something I care about that's 'nearby'" (fast.com to a Netflix box peered close to me) * "speed to a CDN" (speed.cloudflare.com) * "speed to a random data center somewhere" (speedof.me and friends) * "speed to a box I own" I'd be amazed if I didn't see significant deviation between all of those measures.

rndgermandude 6y ago
I am on the fence about the consent thing. Yes, it's a speed test, but no, you don't really necessarily know that when it gets linked on some site. Burning through quite a bit of potentially metered data without asking first seems... rude, at the very least.
cryptoquick 6y ago
It's not hard to put a button. And not putting one (and still collecting the resulting data) is against the law in several places around the world. Trust me, if you have a gigabit fiber connection like mine, you would notice that their results are way, way off the mark. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368

zzzcpan 6y ago

For your third point - the map, all the rendering and javascript overhead screw with the results, especially on weaker hardware, not to mention how loaded the server is and all the links on the way to the server.

cryptoquick 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314728
- zzzcpan 6y ago
  Just ran the test on another machine (different hardware, OS, browser) and got pretty different result. Also uncovered a bug, on my 100 mbit ethernet they show almost 200 mbit upload speed.