6 ms·

Was worried about CF getting their claws dug into archive.org, but on reading, this is a decidedly non-evil deal, actually it sounds wonderful. Still, I worry i

Was worried about CF getting their claws dug into archive.org, but on reading, this is a decidedly non-evil deal, actually it sounds wonderful. Still, I worry if there might be some unseen long term interest in the archive. Never forget Dejanews

ttul 6y ago
Keep in mind how Cloudflare makes most of their money: They sell a web proxy service with security and performance features including a CDN. Cloudflare's interests are furthered by improving that service in ways that help its customers. Keeping the Web Archive healthily stocked with content is aligned with their long term revenue growth.
- james412 6y ago
  T+10 years I very much expect CloudFlare's core business to have expanded significantly. I remember that time my Googler friend told me they were about to release that one thing they'd absolutely never do, Chrome came out a few weeks later, now look at Firefox You need to pay attention to the silent positioning of these companies to even guess at where they might go, so deals with things like archive.org may have some unseen substance to them that might only become obvious much later
  - adventured 6y ago
    As a business they absolutely are not going to stay in the CDN lane as a primary. Akamai has $3b in sales and an $18b market cap. Cloudflare has $348m in sales and an $10.8b market cap. Akamai is their maximum ceiling if they focus primarily on the CDN segment. Cloudflare is rapidly approaching their valuation ceiling if they stick to CDN as their core (and they'd have to start killing Akamai just to get there; the CDN business is increasingly a slower growth segment in the larger cloud industry). Companies all around them in the cloud are growing faster, yet few are more important than Cloudflare. Zero question Cloudflare will continue to aggressively branch out, leveraging their critical positioning. In the not-so-distant future CDN will not be the center of their business. CDN is and will remain a springboard for them, a gateway drug, milk at the back of the grocery store.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Great comment. Cloudflare is not a CDN. They are an edge computing platform that happens to offer CDN services. Could Akamai grow into that market faster than Cloudflare can consume it? TBD.
      - brynx97 6y ago
        Edge computing is super interesting, and today's CDN providers should be able to provide it given their current infrastructure deployment. It could really bring in the next era of computing and technology once certain networks/providers reach critical mass to provide edge services within 5-10ms to customers.
        peterburkimsher 6y ago
        If jgrahamc is reading this, I'd really like to know if Cloudflare wants to work with telcos. Imagine a small server in every cell tower, with locally-cached maps/Wikipedia/latest movies. Some communication couldn't be cached (e.g. real-time video calls), but a lot of broadcast media could be. Of course there are copyright implications, and it might require partnering with Netflix or others. The quick load times would be great for users, and the reduced load on the backbone would be good for the telecom companies. If you'd like me to chat to some friends in telcos in New Zealand about this, drop me an email. It's not my job now (I'm in IoT) but I know who to talk to if you'd like to get this kind of thing moving.
        mcdevilkiller 6y ago
        AFAIK Netflix (and YouTube and others) already do this edge caching. They partner with telcos, as you said.
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
  - altdatathrow 6y ago
    They control SSL decryption for a massive number of websites. Governments will gladly fund Cloudflare for eternity.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      Akamai as well then?
      - dimitrios1 6y ago
        Much of the US Government already uses it, so yes.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - mlindner 6y ago
      If your root CA is subject to the laws of a government that can take the root certificates and MITM the connection with those root CAs that's not much better. Cloudflare just makes it easier.
      - firloop 6y ago
        Certificate Transparency makes this significantly harder to do stealthily. I’m not convinced that Cloudflare is a deep state operation either, but Cloudflare's ability to secretly MITM is a position afforded to a select few, and certainly not every CA.
      - abiogenesis 6y ago
        It's much easier (and virtually undetectable) to MITM when you are also the reverse proxy though.
- tus88 6y ago
  More like a web blocker "service". It is profoundly unhelpful to me that a proxy service cares if I have Javascript disabled in my browser.
  - prawnsalad 6y ago
    That’s the website that has manually enabled a feature if it requires Javascript. Cloudflare does not require Javascript out of the box.
    - FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
      Please clarify. I thought all those captcha puzzles were coming from Cloudflare. Are you saying they are only enabled if the destination page has JS?
      - wadkar 6y ago
        I believe GP is referring to a setting that a cloudflare user has to flip for requiring visitors to enable JavaScript
KingOfCoders 6y ago
When users are used to this (getting redirected to a archived copy when the site is down/not available) and when this trial baloon has been proved to work, Cloudflare will replace archive.org with their own infrastructure. This is the common game plan.
- sp332 6y ago
  Doesn't CF already have an "Always Online" feature using their own infrastructure? So this seems like the opposite happening.
- eternalban 6y ago
  Previous iteration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  Uh, no. We're literally doing the opposite. We used to have our own caching infrastructure for "Always Online" and we're getting rid of it and using archive.org instead.
  - jorams 6y ago
    How do you handle robots.txt? The previous incarnation of Always Online didn't care about robots.txt, while archive.org does.
    - jgrahamc 6y ago
      https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-always-online-and-the-internet-archive-team-up-to-fight-origin-errors/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-always-online-and-th... We tell archive.org about the URI, they crawl it. They handle robots.txt.
      - AnonHP 6y ago
        archive.org doesn't handle robots.txt in any meaningful way (see my comment above at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24516875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24516875 ). If that's changed recently, I'd like to know more.
neop1x 6y ago
Not long ago, CF has been blocking access from Tor. And they are blocking access from my web crawler sometimes. I don't like CF as they act as a police or gatekeeper to the origin website, deciding who to penalize and who do not, while pretending to be speeding up websites and protecting from 'threads'.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > while pretending to be speeding up websites and protecting from 'threads'. They do though. That's why people pay them lots of money to do those two things. Not sure what part you think is "pretending"?
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  One of the first 100 people to use cloudflare when it launched. Paying them today to speed up a couple of websites while protecting them. They rock at making big things possible for very small companies.
  - trevorsstar 6y ago
    Hey, me too! Do you have the first-users t-shirt?
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  They’re acting more as a security guard. Which is to say that they’re intentionally employed by the owner of the property you’re trying to enter. Often specifically to “bounce” users like you, malicious or not. Believe it or not there are legitimate reasons for wanting only real human users on your website!
cookiengineer 6y ago
What worries me is that Cloudflare is deanonymizing a huge load of TOR users, and the issue that comes with it is that a huge part of TOR users actually needs access to the web archive due to country-wide DNS censorships (European countries included). As Cloudflare is deanonymizing TOR users pretty much with every website that's hosted on it, I fear they are abusing that power once again to deanonymize users of the web archive. Cloudflare always claims it's not their issue and that it's a webmaster setting with the shitty captchas and Google's infamous Prism-sponsored PREFS cookie - but to be honest they should just not have implemented it in the first place if privacy was a core value of their company. The "DDoS" protection basically fingerprints a machine and user inside an encrypted HTTPS connection; which makes the encryption tunnel itself obsolete.
raxxorrax 6y ago
I don't know really. Cloudflare is notoriously in conflict with different archive sites and now this announcement makes that sound not too credible. I think we will see selective removal of certain content.
resynth1943 6y ago
> Was worried about CF getting their claws dug into archive.org SAME. From the title, I assumed the Wayback Machine would be using Cloudflare. Nice prank, boys.

ttul 6y ago

Keep in mind how Cloudflare makes most of their money: They sell a web proxy service with security and performance features including a CDN. Cloudflare's interests are furthered by improving that service in ways that help its customers. Keeping the Web Archive healthily stocked with content is aligned with their long term revenue growth.

james412 6y ago
T+10 years I very much expect CloudFlare's core business to have expanded significantly. I remember that time my Googler friend told me they were about to release that one thing they'd absolutely never do, Chrome came out a few weeks later, now look at Firefox You need to pay attention to the silent positioning of these companies to even guess at where they might go, so deals with things like archive.org may have some unseen substance to them that might only become obvious much later
- adventured 6y ago
  As a business they absolutely are not going to stay in the CDN lane as a primary. Akamai has $3b in sales and an $18b market cap. Cloudflare has $348m in sales and an $10.8b market cap. Akamai is their maximum ceiling if they focus primarily on the CDN segment. Cloudflare is rapidly approaching their valuation ceiling if they stick to CDN as their core (and they'd have to start killing Akamai just to get there; the CDN business is increasingly a slower growth segment in the larger cloud industry). Companies all around them in the cloud are growing faster, yet few are more important than Cloudflare. Zero question Cloudflare will continue to aggressively branch out, leveraging their critical positioning. In the not-so-distant future CDN will not be the center of their business. CDN is and will remain a springboard for them, a gateway drug, milk at the back of the grocery store.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Great comment. Cloudflare is not a CDN. They are an edge computing platform that happens to offer CDN services. Could Akamai grow into that market faster than Cloudflare can consume it? TBD.
    - brynx97 6y ago
      Edge computing is super interesting, and today's CDN providers should be able to provide it given their current infrastructure deployment. It could really bring in the next era of computing and technology once certain networks/providers reach critical mass to provide edge services within 5-10ms to customers.
      - peterburkimsher 6y ago
        If jgrahamc is reading this, I'd really like to know if Cloudflare wants to work with telcos. Imagine a small server in every cell tower, with locally-cached maps/Wikipedia/latest movies. Some communication couldn't be cached (e.g. real-time video calls), but a lot of broadcast media could be. Of course there are copyright implications, and it might require partnering with Netflix or others. The quick load times would be great for users, and the reduced load on the backbone would be good for the telecom companies. If you'd like me to chat to some friends in telcos in New Zealand about this, drop me an email. It's not my job now (I'm in IoT) but I know who to talk to if you'd like to get this kind of thing moving.
        mcdevilkiller 6y ago
        AFAIK Netflix (and YouTube and others) already do this edge caching. They partner with telcos, as you said.
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
- altdatathrow 6y ago
  They control SSL decryption for a massive number of websites. Governments will gladly fund Cloudflare for eternity.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Akamai as well then?
    - dimitrios1 6y ago
      Much of the US Government already uses it, so yes.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - mlindner 6y ago
    If your root CA is subject to the laws of a government that can take the root certificates and MITM the connection with those root CAs that's not much better. Cloudflare just makes it easier.
    - firloop 6y ago
      Certificate Transparency makes this significantly harder to do stealthily. I’m not convinced that Cloudflare is a deep state operation either, but Cloudflare's ability to secretly MITM is a position afforded to a select few, and certainly not every CA.
    - abiogenesis 6y ago
      It's much easier (and virtually undetectable) to MITM when you are also the reverse proxy though.
tus88 6y ago
More like a web blocker "service". It is profoundly unhelpful to me that a proxy service cares if I have Javascript disabled in my browser.
- prawnsalad 6y ago
  That’s the website that has manually enabled a feature if it requires Javascript. Cloudflare does not require Javascript out of the box.
  - FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
    Please clarify. I thought all those captcha puzzles were coming from Cloudflare. Are you saying they are only enabled if the destination page has JS?
    - wadkar 6y ago
      I believe GP is referring to a setting that a cloudflare user has to flip for requiring visitors to enable JavaScript

KingOfCoders 6y ago

When users are used to this (getting redirected to a archived copy when the site is down/not available) and when this trial baloon has been proved to work, Cloudflare will replace archive.org with their own infrastructure. This is the common game plan.

sp332 6y ago
Doesn't CF already have an "Always Online" feature using their own infrastructure? So this seems like the opposite happening.
eternalban 6y ago
Previous iteration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups
jgrahamc 6y ago
Uh, no. We're literally doing the opposite. We used to have our own caching infrastructure for "Always Online" and we're getting rid of it and using archive.org instead.
- jorams 6y ago
  How do you handle robots.txt? The previous incarnation of Always Online didn't care about robots.txt, while archive.org does.
  - jgrahamc 6y ago
    https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-always-online-and-the-internet-archive-team-up-to-fight-origin-errors/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-always-online-and-th... We tell archive.org about the URI, they crawl it. They handle robots.txt.
    - AnonHP 6y ago
      archive.org doesn't handle robots.txt in any meaningful way (see my comment above at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24516875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24516875 ). If that's changed recently, I'd like to know more.

neop1x 6y ago

Not long ago, CF has been blocking access from Tor. And they are blocking access from my web crawler sometimes. I don't like CF as they act as a police or gatekeeper to the origin website, deciding who to penalize and who do not, while pretending to be speeding up websites and protecting from 'threads'.

viraptor 6y ago
> while pretending to be speeding up websites and protecting from 'threads'. They do though. That's why people pay them lots of money to do those two things. Not sure what part you think is "pretending"?
gogopuppygogo 6y ago
One of the first 100 people to use cloudflare when it launched. Paying them today to speed up a couple of websites while protecting them. They rock at making big things possible for very small companies.
- trevorsstar 6y ago
  Hey, me too! Do you have the first-users t-shirt?
lwansbrough 6y ago
They’re acting more as a security guard. Which is to say that they’re intentionally employed by the owner of the property you’re trying to enter. Often specifically to “bounce” users like you, malicious or not. Believe it or not there are legitimate reasons for wanting only real human users on your website!

cookiengineer 6y ago

What worries me is that Cloudflare is deanonymizing a huge load of TOR users, and the issue that comes with it is that a huge part of TOR users actually needs access to the web archive due to country-wide DNS censorships (European countries included). As Cloudflare is deanonymizing TOR users pretty much with every website that's hosted on it, I fear they are abusing that power once again to deanonymize users of the web archive. Cloudflare always claims it's not their issue and that it's a webmaster setting with the shitty captchas and Google's infamous Prism-sponsored PREFS cookie - but to be honest they should just not have implemented it in the first place if privacy was a core value of their company. The "DDoS" protection basically fingerprints a machine and user inside an encrypted HTTPS connection; which makes the encryption tunnel itself obsolete.

raxxorrax 6y ago

I don't know really. Cloudflare is notoriously in conflict with different archive sites and now this announcement makes that sound not too credible. I think we will see selective removal of certain content.

resynth1943 6y ago

> Was worried about CF getting their claws dug into archive.org SAME. From the title, I assumed the Wayback Machine would be using Cloudflare. Nice prank, boys.