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Cloudflare Beta (2009)
- jgrahamc 4y agoHuh. Oddly enough I'd never read this.
- O__________O 4y agoRealize (now) you’re Cloudflare’s CTO, but might be worth pointing it out when you’re replying to Cloudflare related topics; you obviously have been around HN awhile so guessing it’s unlikely to make a difference, but in my experience on HN people generally appreciate the clarity.
- jgrahamc 4y agoYeah, but I worry about: https://c.tenor.com/a_NihQtSKK0AAAAC/anchorman-ron-burgundy.gif https://c.tenor.com/a_NihQtSKK0AAAAC/anchorman-ron-burgundy....
- O__________O 4y agoIn my experience, better to mention it, but understand your experience might say otherwise.
- yencabulator 4y agoThink of it more as a name tag & uniform a franchise restaurant makes its employees wear, so you know who works there. Takes away the prestige pretty quick ;)
- stingraycharles 4y agoFWIW I agree with that approach. HN audience recognizes you anyway which gathers the upvotes, and if it’s really confusing someone will point out you’re the CF CTO anyway.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hombre_fatal 4y agoThey have it in their bio which is the HN norm, not announcing one’s creds at every turn. But I think these “HNers would appreciate it!” community spokesman kinds of comments are kinda lame. I don’t think HNers need to be spoon fed “I’m Cloudlfare’s CTO btw! :^D” every time the guy rears his head. Especially just to say he never read TFA before…
- O__________O 4y agoSaid the user with “this account is a GPT-3 bot” in their profile. Like I said, pointed this out 100s of times over years and my experience says otherwise; not my first account, nor will it be my last. Also, not dang, not trying to be dang, but also firmly believe HN is a community and important for the community to express themselves, but also would be more than happy to respect dang’s wishes.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago> They have it in their bio which is the HN norm, not announcing one’s creds at every turn. No, appending something like "(disclaimer: CF employee)" is absolutely the norm anytime it could even remotely be construed as a conflict of interest. It might be fine here, but this is an edge case.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoI disagree that every comment you make in a community has to stand alone and reintroduce yourself lest a newcomer flies off the handle without knowing who they’re responding to. That is just annoying. Nor do I think it’s a convincing point coming from someone who suggests they aren’t new here. imo people new to a community could slow their roll esp in a debate.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoAlright; I've been on HN for 5 years. Since we're all friends who know each other so well, how about you tell me about myself? I'm reasonably active and I have an extremely recognizable username, so you should of course remember me quite well.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoI just flagged/downvoted as content-less/off topic (as it is) and move on. No need to simp for online execs
- O__________O 4y agoDon’t agree about the flagging/down voting, since normally community agrees it is appropriate; also, how would the user even know that was an issue. Do agree there appears to be degree of simp like behavior going on, which is interesting.
- LinuxBender 4y agoI contributed some VM's to this early on in the project but then pulled out of it. There were no stats to show how my nodes were contributing and I was concerned that I might lose my VPS account since I could not tell how this was being used. I liked the idea.
- jedberg 4y agoThat's funny, I figured they would have shown it to you for recruiting purposes. :) I remember Matt always talking about how Cloudflare was his ultimate vision for the honeypot project -- a way to block bad actors on the internet by aggregating information.
- jgrahamc 4y agoHe tried to recruit me very early on although I don't think in 2009 (I believe it was the year after) and I wasn't ready to go to the US and they weren't ready to have someone in London.
- ranger_danger 4y ago
- O__________O 4y agoDidn’t down vote you, but generally bad form to hijack a thread just to pop a question about a completely unrelated topic; both from the thread and post itself.
- dang 4y agoRelated, I guess: Matthew Prince: CloudFlare Was Inspired by Project Honeypot and the DHS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071978 - Sept 2019 (1 comment) Project HoneyPot: The Web's Largest Community Tracking Online Fraud and Abuse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614182 - April 2014 (1 comment) 1 Billion Spammers Served - Deep Insights into Spam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996698 - Dec 2009 (13 comments)
- benzible 4y agoUnspam, Prince's company before Cloudflare, which created Project Honeypot, had a slightly unsavory (to me, at least) business model of lobbying state legislatures to pass laws requiring "no-contact" registries with requirements that were tailored for Unspam. Looks like they succeeded in 2 states and some version of the company exists: https://www.unspam.com https://www.unspam.com Prince gave up on it and got an MBA at Harvard but he's still listed on the company website.
- lupire 4y agoBenjamin Franklin called that "doing well by doing good" when he lobbied for a national postal service.
- Xeoncross 4y ago2 second explanation: https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc?t=156 https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc?t=156
- benzible 4y agoThe whole concept wasn't feasible and had serious privacy issues. Good summary of why it was rejected at the national level here: https://www.govtech.com/security/us-turns-down-do-not-spam.html https://www.govtech.com/security/us-turns-down-do-not-spam.h... > A registry of individual e-mail addresses also suffers from severe security/privacy risks that would likely result in registered addresses receiving more spam because spammers would use such a registry as a directory of valid e-mail addresses. It ultimately would become the National Do Spam List. Furthermore, a registry of domains would have no impact on spam and a third-party forwarding service model could have a devastating impact on the e-mail system. Also, the laws Unspam pushed for were intentionally tailored to make them the only suitable vendor. Leveraging personal connections and paid lobbying to compel taxpayers to fund a counterproductive, privacy-violating and monopolistic service is not what I'd call "doing good" but YMMV.
- googlryas 4y agoWhy does the do not call registry work, but the do not email wouldn't?
- radicaldreamer 4y agoI think one interesting thing about Cloudflare is that once enabled on a domain, it can be used to serve different versions of that domain to different audiences, enabling things like selective censorship and propaganda. Cloudflare has also taken investments from the intelligence agencies (at least in the US).
- cj 4y agoTo be fair, the ability to serve different content to different users was (is) a primary feature of essentially all web servers. This has been the case for multiple decades.
- radicaldreamer 4y agoThe difference is that this is a man-in-the-middle where you don't need coordination with the web server at all.
- thephyber 4y agoIt’s important to understand and internalize the difference between capability and willingness/desire to do something. Servicing different content based on different visitors is a feature of any web server. If you are insinuating that CloudFlare does this without the domain/website owner’s permission/knowledge, cite your sources. That is the kind of insinuation/rumor that can destroy/erode the reputation of a cybersecurity company.
- lupire 4y ago> Provide the service at no cost... because you shouldn't have to pay to ensure your website is protected. Was that a lie? https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/ says "Contact Sales"
- throwawayKiwi9 4y agoIt also says "Sign Up". With a very comprehensive free tier of services.
- cj 4y agoNo. Basic DDoS protection with Cloudflare is free.
- saghm 4y agoI don't think it's terribly surprising that there might be companies out there who charge for things that they think should be free because they can get away with it. That said, in this case it sounds like pretty standard marketing speak, and I tend to be skeptical that anything sounding like that is a genuine profession of values rather than a catchy tagline (which probably explains my lack of surprise at the first thing as well)
- dkersten 4y agoAre you ignoring the part of that page where if you click sign up, you can create an account for free, and get protection and services for free? Sure, its not everything they offer is free, but enough for most users is.
- thephyber 4y agoAspirational business model goals in 2009 won’t be 100% realized 13 years later. That doesn’t mean the original goal was a “lie”. That word requires intent. And DDoS mitigation is part of the free feature set. Im guessing some of their largest customers may be kicked off the free tier if they are too much of a resource burden.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eastdakota 4y agoWow. That brings back memories.
- eastdakota 4y agoA bit more about this as I’m remembering. Cloudflare’s original “data center” (which was really just a single server) was located in Chicago. We had the zip/postal code for Project Honey Pot participants from when they signed up so we emailed anyone within a certain radius around Chicago to be our first beta testers. We knew they were the folks most likely to have acceptable performance. The original way you signed up for Cloudflare was to give us your GoDaddy username and password and we’d login, slurp the DNS records, then update the name servers. It was magic when it worked. But it was almost too easy so if something broke people didn’t know how to undo what we’d done. Worse: sometimes we’d miss a DNS record like an MX record and be unable to even contact the user. The crazy thing is we emailed people basically with the content on this page and asking Project Honey Pot users to give us their user names and password. A scary number of people just did without asking any questions. We put this page up to prove this was a legitimate project after a (scary) few people asked us: “How do I know this isn’t phishing??” Fun to find it still kicking around 12+ years later.