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Why people are still using and promoting Cloudflare when the company is repeatedly trying to position itself as an internet gatekeeper? There is already a cons
by akagusu 5y ago
Why people are still using and promoting Cloudflare when the company is repeatedly trying to position itself as an internet gatekeeper?
There is already a consensus that internet gatekeeping is bad for people, so why people are volunteering for this?
This company already has a tremendous control over what people can or cannot see on internet since a lot of websites use it has CDN, but there should be a limit on what companies can do or cannot.
In this particular case, we have blind people blocked from internet, and it doesn't matter if this is not on purpose or it is just a side effect, because in practice they are been blocked, and yet something like this is unable to make a scratch its reputation.
- vorpalhex 5y agoI don't think Cloudflare is intentionally trying to gatekeep the internet. At the same time the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Their CDN service has allowed a lot more sites to exist than the two it has harmed (and I don't consider those two to be great losses). However they are certainly becoming an internet chokepoint and we need more alternatives to them for the good of the internet.
- wombarly 5y agoBecause without CloudFlare we would: Pay thousands in bandwidth costs per month; Double or triple our servers to handle peaks (they cache and serve the HTML for us); Be down constantly because of DDOS attacks.
- rhizome 5y agoDemand wouldn't drive bandwidth prices down?
- netr0ute 5y agoIf you're lucky, bandwidth is free.
- grishka 5y agoIs DDOS such a frequent occurrence that you would be down "constantly"?
- MrStonedOne 5y agoYes
- wombarly 5y agoYea our sites used to be DDOSed daily for 2 months. We're now getting a DDOS once or twice a week. Edit: Some numbers, most of them are between 2k-5k requests per second. But we had some with 20k-30k rps.
- busymom0 5y agoDo you solve it using the "Under Attack" mode on CF where it shows the "redirecting in 5 seconds" msg? I am curious how CF takes care of the DDOS.
- wombarly 5y agoCloudflare detects the DDOS and will block it, notifying you by email. We almost never use the Under Attack Mode unless it's actually affecting us. The biggest thing we do to help ourselves when we're under attack is making sure that the pages being ddosed (homepage, etc) is being cached by them. There will always be some requests that CF doesnt block, so the cache ensures they get served by them.
- vbezhenar 5y agoI like Cloudflare, because it provides some very essential services with free tiers. It is big enough, so I can trust them. I can be sure that they won't inject ads into my HTML pages. I can be sure that their DNS will not replace NXDOMAIN with fake ad responses. I can be sure that they won't log my VPN traffic trying to extract passwords or something like that. For sure I don't support their decision to ban blind users and hope to see that resolved. But that's not enough to change my mind, not even remotely.
- grishka 5y ago> I can be sure that they won't inject ads into my HTML pages. But they will harass your visitors with captchas for no good reason. I also sometimes run into Cloudflare's "this website is using a protection service" with no way around; it turns out it's a geoblock because it does load just fine when I use a VPN through Germany. The internet was meant to be decentralized. The IP addresses were meant to be used for routing and for routing only, and otherwise treated equally.
- mattl 5y agoPeople use Cloudflare to limit traffic from particular countries and Cloudflare exposes Tor as a country that can be blocked. The Internet wasn’t meant be decentralized. The ARPANET was meant to be able to function in the event of a war.
- MattGaiser 5y agoPeople don’t want the Internet gate kept. They do want their sites protected though.
- SimeVidas 5y ago> Why people are still using and promoting Cloudflare I use Cloudflare because it hosts my website for free.
- the_other 5y agoYou understand this makes you a dependant, not a customer, right?
- SimeVidas 5y agoI pay nothing, so I’m obviously not a customer. If Cloudflare decides to stop hosting my site free of charge, I will have to find another host. In that sense I depend on them. Is that what you meant by dependant?
- the_other 5y agoNot exactly. The same is true for paying customers. When you pay for a service, you have some leverage with them. You funded part of the service, you're a stakeholder. If they mess up, they lose your business. When you don't pay, you have no leverage.
- akagusu 5y agoCloudflare does not host your website for free, a paid customer is paying more on its plan to subsidize your website.
- pxue 5y agoBecause the pendulum is swinging towards ease of creation over control. I can spin up a simple web app or a simple cloud function and get it globally distributed in minutes, for free. That's amazing
- alabamacadabra 5y agoPerhaps amazing shouldn’t be what wins in the long run?
- arodyginc 5y agoIf your function could be shutdown in minutes on a bad will, would that be amazing?
- pxue 5y agoNop. But likei said the tradeoff is clear, ease vs control. Im sure we would have had this talk when on-premise transitioned to the cloud. Same arguments apply
- userbinator 5y agoMore and more, "because security" has become the go-to reason, almost a thought-terminating cliche, for destroying freedom and privacy. It's really disturbing to see.
- johnnyApplePRNG 5y agoCloudflare is indispensable for a number of businesses, crypto exchanges especially off the top of my head.
- manigandham 5y ago1) Blind people are not "blocked from the internet". This is an accessibility issue with one of their security products. It's no different than an employer using other security measures that might limit usage for certain people, but it's the employer who makes the ultimate decision. 2) The reason people keep using Cloudflare is because it has the best product suite and pricing. There are competitors but none have approached the same features or (ironically) accessibility as CF. 3) Mission statements are nothing more than politics and PR. People put entirely too much faith in corporations and their associated mottos as if they're divine principles to live by. It's up to users to make their own rational decisions by weighing the risks, and in that regard, Cloudflare has actively helped fight censorship by helping improving connectivity and access to software, information, and privacy.
- mwcampbell 5y ago> People put entirely too much faith in corporations and their associated mottos as if they're divine principles to live by. FWIW, I'm not that naive. I just thought that publicly shaming them with their own PR might be a good tactic to get this accessibility problem solved.
- akagusu 5y ago1. It doesn't matter the name you give to what is happening , if they can't access the internet, in practice they are blocked. 2. People use cloudflare not because it is the best product but because they have a good marketing and offer free tier. It is Silicon Valley 101. 3. PR is just people manipulation and you saying they helped privacy and information access says their PR is very effective.
- manigandham 5y ago> "if they can't access the internet" But they can. They just can't read the information because the software is not fully compatible yet. What if the screenreader software didn't exist or wasn't working? Are you going to make the same complaint? > "People use cloudflare not because it is the best product" Care to share some evidence? Are you just assuming you know better than everyone? The company didn't reach $35B market cap because of a free tier (which is also considered part of the product by the way). > "says their PR is very effective." Actually, I said PR should be ignored and you should instead look at their actions, which do back up what I claim. It sounds like you're completely unfamiliar with the company and instead have some irrational vendetta against them. Not sure why, but it certainly doesn't lead to any productive discussion. Let's end it here.
- handrous 5y agoTheir "self serve" tiers, and especially the $200 one (the only one with an SLA at all) are really, really good value, is why. Depending on your needs, their enterprise offerings are, too. And boycotts are, broadly, not effective enough to justify any personal risk/harm/expense at all.
- uluyol 5y agoWow geez. There's been a lot of BS being thrown around about Cloudflare. I don't work for them, but I have been following the company for years. On Cloudflare being a gatekeeper: yes, if you care about load, cost, and attacks, you need one. Cloudflare offers real value to their customers by providing these services. Will that lead to Cloudflare controlling the web? Well, you've got a number of direct competitors (Akamai and Fastly, to name two) in addition to the CDN offerings provided by cloud providers. Cloudflare isn't the first CDN, isn't the largest, and won't have a monopoly on being an internet middleman. Compare Cloudflare's network (https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ https://www.cloudflare.com/network/) to Google's (https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure). On the necessity of gatekeepers on the internet: this is the way the internet works. You are responsible for peering with the rest of the worls at a physical location and dealing with the traffic that comes your way. If you want to be close to your users (to avoid bandwidth bottlenecks and provide lower latency), you need to install equipment all over the place and peer with other networks. If you want to deal with bad traffic, you need the capacity and software to handle/filter it. You can always build your own CDN if you want, but the only way to deal with these issues is a CDN. Maybe if the internet worked differently things would be different. But that would be a huge change, especially since someone has to foot the cost of building these services. I guess you could somehow distribute the cost (though I don't see how), but you'd also have to someone deal with the management and development of said infra, and I have no idea how such a thing would work without a central entity being responsible. Anyway sorry for the rant.
- BobbyJo 5y ago> ... have no idea how such a thing would work without a central entity being responsible. Isn't this true of the entire internet? And that exists just fine thanks to a plethora of companies and nations.
- stickfigure 5y agoIf by "just fine" you mean "anyone with a botnet can take down your website (or, if small enough, country) at will". Thus we have CloudFlare et al.