3 ms·

The irony of cloudflare complaining about blocking IPs is risible. Their entire business has been one of the worst abusers of ToR users based on their associati

The irony of cloudflare complaining about blocking IPs is risible. Their entire business has been one of the worst abusers of ToR users based on their association of IPs to exit nodes. Before you step in and go “captchas aren’t blocking!”, consider that the end result is exactly the same with just a different statistical success rate. Cloudflare has systematically discriminated against privacy sensitive users for years based on IP and now they cry foul when it happens to them. Hilarious. Maybe this will have a decent outcome in provoking more interest in decentralization.

kortilla 4y ago
This blog post is written for lay persons, presumably because it’s meant to persuade policy makers and not people who understand this is exactly how CF operates and they don’t like the taste of their own medicine.
bootsmann 4y ago
The company I work for operates in the IPsec space and to be entirely fair to cloudflare here, serving captcha to anyone from a tor exit node is probably a fairly reasonable way to approach it. The amount of threats that rely on tor (and cheap untrustworthy vpn services) for anonymization more than justifies it. Any statistical model trying to block threats will naturally start flagging tor exit-nodes just by nature of the amount of attacks people try to abuse it for.
hackernewds 4y ago
> "captchas aren't blocking!", consider that the end result is exactly the same with just a different statistical success rate. How so? The outcomes could be different depending on how different the statistical success rates are
- uconnectlol 4y ago
  They essentially made the internet unusable for Tor users. If you either got lucky or sat there for 5 minutes (that's 300 seconds), you could make it onto a website. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181351 Right now it's broken again, they just give you a captcha that breaks 90% of the time and fucktarded propaganda points that don't even make any sense to anyone over 30, like "in 2003, botnets were 1000-5000 computers now they are millions".

kortilla 4y ago

This blog post is written for lay persons, presumably because it’s meant to persuade policy makers and not people who understand this is exactly how CF operates and they don’t like the taste of their own medicine.

bootsmann 4y ago

The company I work for operates in the IPsec space and to be entirely fair to cloudflare here, serving captcha to anyone from a tor exit node is probably a fairly reasonable way to approach it. The amount of threats that rely on tor (and cheap untrustworthy vpn services) for anonymization more than justifies it. Any statistical model trying to block threats will naturally start flagging tor exit-nodes just by nature of the amount of attacks people try to abuse it for.

hackernewds 4y ago

> "captchas aren't blocking!", consider that the end result is exactly the same with just a different statistical success rate. How so? The outcomes could be different depending on how different the statistical success rates are

uconnectlol 4y ago
They essentially made the internet unusable for Tor users. If you either got lucky or sat there for 5 minutes (that's 300 seconds), you could make it onto a website. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181351 Right now it's broken again, they just give you a captcha that breaks 90% of the time and fucktarded propaganda points that don't even make any sense to anyone over 30, like "in 2003, botnets were 1000-5000 computers now they are millions".