14 ms·

Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

67 points by BeryJu 4y ago

LinuxBender 4y ago
Non-JS Version [1] [1] - https://archive.ph/uRz2v https://archive.ph/uRz2v
- ranger_danger 4y ago
  ironically uses crimeflare, which forces the use of JS and endless captchas, especially for devices that are hard to fingerprint
detourdog 4y ago
Nothing I know about CDN's have anything to do with he open internet.
vmoore 4y ago
> In an era where the internet is becoming increasingly important, it's crucial that governments ensure that companies like Cloudflare are not able to use their power to limit access to information or censor speech Cloudflare should be seen as an ISP. An ISP is neutral and doesn't care about what content flows through its network. My only gripe is Cloudflare has to /store/ content on its servers, so it's not really an ISP in the traditional sense.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > My only gripe is Cloudflare has to /store/ content on its servers, so it's not really an ISP in the traditional sense. Traditionally (at least in my experience), back in the pre-HTTPS-everywhere days, ISPs often had Squid proxies, sometimes optional (had to be manually configured) and sometimes "transparent" (the ISP's router forcefully forwarded all connections matching TCP destination port 80 to the Squid proxy). IMHO, that's a close enough analogue to Cloudflare's main business.
- laughinghan 4y ago
  I strongly disagree with the analogy between CDNs and ISPs. ISPs operate on the user-side, they have no business filtering what the user sees. CDNs operate on the server-side, they have the power and responsibility to decide who they want to do business with, and to not provide services to harmful customers—I'm sure we agree ISPs shouldn't provide services to harmful customers either (spam, malware, phishing, etc).
alokjnv10 4y ago
definetly cloudflare is very harmful for the internet. It blocks crawlers. and impose captchas on every website.
- rektide 4y ago
  The concerns listed in the article all seem repevant to companies hosting things. Im so so on cloudflare decrypting traffic for example, which they easily can do. Your arguments are somewhat crudely stated, but the impacts on users are what concern me. The Internet Is For Users. And this policy of blocking & obstructing users along the way is 100% my worst concern about CloudFlare. It's gross to the max. I really like their serverless workers & storage offerings, a lot. They do so much right & have great easy use tech at many levels. But the catchpas also sometimes feel like a spreading dark spot on the internet, where society goes dark. It's the worst.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    It's hilarious as some time ago they vomited this blogpost https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attestation-of-personhood/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest... > "Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness" Yeah no shit Cloudflare, YOU'RE THE REASON FOR IT. And the solution is "use hardware keys and track everyone"
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      > Yeah no shit Cloudflare, YOU'RE THE REASON FOR IT. Cloudflare is not the reason for it - ridiculous amounts of bot traffic is. Bot traffic that is either malicious, resource consuming, or actively trying to bring your website down. CAPTCHAs are just the best tool we have to block them, and I don't believe it is completely fair to have website operators just put up with it for the sake of the users - it's a team effort. Let's solve the internet's actual problems so that we don't need things like Cloudflare to patch symptoms instead of causes.
      - 4y ago
nabla9 4y ago
Cloudflare has pushed against public sentiment and mildly against the government to restrict censorship. They would want nothing more than be just "delivery infrastructure" part of the internet. All the points about transparency, monopolies, and privacy concerns and implicit trust in general level are true, of course. They should be addressed. If you want to resist attacks and deliver content efficiently you need CDN and bigger the network is more efficient it is (Network effect is strongest in networks, no surprise there).
- convery 4y ago
  > Cloudflare has pushed against public sentiment [..] to restrict censorship. Except when they booted sites off their network because Twitter users were upset..
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    Upset over serious, credible, actionable, threats of violence against other people hosted on those sites.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      Was it... I think you may want to research those events more
      - rose_ann_ 4y ago
        And I think you don't have the slightest idea what the commenter you're pretending to reply to, is actually talking about.
        phpisthebest 4y ago
        pretty sure I am fully informed...
        4y ago
gjsman-1000 4y ago
To me, this reeks just a little bit about a symptom, rather than the cause. Which is, why do people use CloudFlare? People don't pay for things with no benefit. The internet doesn't have a built-in CDN system. The internet's not very good at blocking bot traffic or DDoS attacks. The internet's not very good at remembering things when servers go down. And so on. There are, of course, many attempts to fix these shortcomings (IPFS?), but if it wasn't Cloudflare, it would be Akamai. If it wasn't Akamai, it'd be some other company, because you can't convince people anymore to just forgo Cloudflare's benefits for ideological purity. Instead of ranting at Cloudflare, we should be looking into how to replace Cloudflare with open standards and systems. Which is much harder than just ranting in a blog post against the symptoms of a damaged internet.
AndyBlak 4y ago
Posts like this make me really wish this site had a downvote button.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  It does for comments... ;) Why would you downvote a 100% true statement like Cloudflare is destroying the Open Internet the only part I disagree with in the article is their assertion that Government is needed to stop cloud flare
  - wilg 4y ago
    You may not understand what "true" means!
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  There is, its called flag but you cant use it til you reach a certain threshold of karma.
dhdgrygev 4y ago
Cloudflare makes existence on the open internet possible for many companies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Kalium 4y ago
CDNs are inherently "monopolistic", under the definition this author uses. The cost to entry into the market means that there's never going to be a wide variety of providers. That said, there's no shortage of other large CDNs, so the accusation seems odd when Fastly and Akamai go unmentioned.
sylware 4y ago
The security check should detect properly the web engine based on the user agent http header and provide only javascript stuff for geeko/blink/webkit (the only 3), and a noscript/basic (x)html system for all the others (netsurf/links2/edbrowse/lynx/dillo/any lean and light web engine past/present/futur).
NHQ 4y ago
This was never the open internet. You can't send a direct packet to another person without intermediaries and cloud systems. You can barely host a website from your personal computer, most cannot. This internet is as they say sold out.
- Incipient 4y ago
  I mean the internet decided to scale out. I don't think relying on intermediaries counts as "selling out".
  - NHQ 4y ago
    We are the ones that are sold out, by regulatory capture, monopolies, wireless spectra, etc. Section 230 does nothing for people, it created the platforms that censor, and gave the government a hook into the industry. Look, even EFF supports section 230 [0]; btw, EFF is a total sell out operating as a feel good, ideological protector. All they do is swindle the "engineering culture" into pushing these things onto the world. 0. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
huslage 4y ago
Cloudflare is _far_ from a monopoly. Akamai and Microsoft still hold huge leads in a lot of spaces.
- flangola7 4y ago
  Anti trust rules do not only address singular literal monopolies. Oligopolies can also have malign influence. Many of the forced breakups of the 20th century were companies very far being total monopolies.
jefftk 4y ago
> Monopolistic Control of the CDN Market: Another issue is the monopolistic control that Cloudflare has over the CDN market. As one of the largest CDN providers... This is a silly piece, but the claim that Cloudflare is so big that they can push sites around doesn't make sense. Not everyone has released 2022 revenue yet, but in 2021 Akamai took in $3.5B to Cloudflare's $0.66B, Fastly's $0.35B, and Edgecast's $0.29B. Then consider that while we don't have separate revenue numbers for Amazon Cloudfront, Google Cloud CDN, or Azure CDN they're all serious contenders. If Cloudflare offers you bad terms you have many other companies that want your business.
- sybercecurity 4y ago
  They used to write the same stories about Akamai, Microsoft, Google, etc. when they first got big. It's just Cloudflare's turn in the box.
- byyll 4y ago
  Size is not measured by revenue alone. Cloudflare has a 75.6% market share among reverse proxies and 17.6% of all websites use it. [0] [0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy
  - jefftk 4y ago
    This is weighted by site, and counts cnn.com and jefftk.com equally. My understanding is Cloudflare is dramatically disproportionately popular among small sites, I think because of how generous their free plan is? If they were 76% of traffic I'd be worried, but I think a majority of the sites using CF probably are signed up because "why not?", which doesn't actually give CF that much power.
    - byyll 4y ago
      It does count them equally and I agree it's popularity is mostly because of the free tier. From the same website, there is a graph and Cloudflare is lower for high-traffic websites than Cloudfront, Akamai and Fastly. [0] But regardless, that gives Cloudflare power over a lot of sites. [0] https://w3techs.com/diagram/market_technology/cn-cloudflare https://w3techs.com/diagram/market_technology/cn-cloudflare
tannhaeuser 4y ago
The main point of criticism towards Cloudflare is that they both sell services for DDoS protection and services for anonymization and hiding IPs used by DoS attackers at the same time. As such, they have no incentive to improve the situation for users. Nor to work towards IETF or other control plane standards for DoS protection/mitigation. It has been like that on the web for far too long, also with certain other players.
- foverzar 4y ago
  > and services for anonymization and hiding IPs used by DoS attackers at the same time What service are you implying specifically?
laughinghan 4y ago
This is so overwrought. We're not talking about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish here, where Microsoft wanted to exploit their OS monopoly to bend the Internet to its will. Cloudflare's products are popular because they solve real problems; Cloudflare is not responsible for the popularity of outsourcing SSL termination, the difficulty of implementing SSL properly is, and if Cloudflare ceased operating tomorrow there would still be vendors and customers for SSL termination aplenty.
linuxdaemon 4y ago
Question privacy concerns with CloudFlare stating "giving up security for convenience", and then have comments for your blog post on Disqus.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Silly question, but: Why are people flagging this? It's not off topic for this site. It raises some interesting (if clearly debatable) points. I totally get disagreeing with it. But pushing to delist it? Why?
- drewcoo 4y ago
  Likely because it calls out (maybe wrongly) monopoly power.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  It's a series of bad takes strung together into this flimsy idea that a [relatively tiny] service provider has the power to push anything on anyone. That is not to say that a post like this might not be possible, but this series of stub points is so poorly developed, and so full of unsourced nonsense, even defending its presence on HN feels like trying to take the chap shouting at pigeons at the park seriously. It's not debatable, it's risable.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    You could level the same arguments against half the hot take blog posts that end up on the HN front page. I fail to see why this particular post raises so much ire that it warrants flagging, save that it's going after a sacred cow.
    - Kalium 4y ago
      It's not going after a sacred cow. The idea that Cloudflare is evil for centralizing the internet is commonly seen in HN comments. This writer does a terrible job of advancing their argument. None of the points are developed or supported. There's no evidence provided, just a litany of bald assertions. It also seems to fundamentally misunderstand details of how CDNs work in its rush to attack Cloudflare for being a CDN.
foverzar 4y ago
The real problem with cloudflare is the fact that it is the single centralized TLS terminator. Not for a second will I believe that there is no eavesdropping - the temptation is just too high. IMO, the real threat to open internet is our current established certificate management system, but that's a totally different topic.

67 points by BeryJu 4y ago

LinuxBender 4y ago

Non-JS Version [1] [1] - https://archive.ph/uRz2v https://archive.ph/uRz2v

ranger_danger 4y ago
ironically uses crimeflare, which forces the use of JS and endless captchas, especially for devices that are hard to fingerprint

detourdog 4y ago

Nothing I know about CDN's have anything to do with he open internet.

vmoore 4y ago

> In an era where the internet is becoming increasingly important, it's crucial that governments ensure that companies like Cloudflare are not able to use their power to limit access to information or censor speech Cloudflare should be seen as an ISP. An ISP is neutral and doesn't care about what content flows through its network. My only gripe is Cloudflare has to /store/ content on its servers, so it's not really an ISP in the traditional sense.

cesarb 4y ago
> My only gripe is Cloudflare has to /store/ content on its servers, so it's not really an ISP in the traditional sense. Traditionally (at least in my experience), back in the pre-HTTPS-everywhere days, ISPs often had Squid proxies, sometimes optional (had to be manually configured) and sometimes "transparent" (the ISP's router forcefully forwarded all connections matching TCP destination port 80 to the Squid proxy). IMHO, that's a close enough analogue to Cloudflare's main business.
laughinghan 4y ago
I strongly disagree with the analogy between CDNs and ISPs. ISPs operate on the user-side, they have no business filtering what the user sees. CDNs operate on the server-side, they have the power and responsibility to decide who they want to do business with, and to not provide services to harmful customers—I'm sure we agree ISPs shouldn't provide services to harmful customers either (spam, malware, phishing, etc).

alokjnv10 4y ago

definetly cloudflare is very harmful for the internet. It blocks crawlers. and impose captchas on every website.

rektide 4y ago
The concerns listed in the article all seem repevant to companies hosting things. Im so so on cloudflare decrypting traffic for example, which they easily can do. Your arguments are somewhat crudely stated, but the impacts on users are what concern me. The Internet Is For Users. And this policy of blocking & obstructing users along the way is 100% my worst concern about CloudFlare. It's gross to the max. I really like their serverless workers & storage offerings, a lot. They do so much right & have great easy use tech at many levels. But the catchpas also sometimes feel like a spreading dark spot on the internet, where society goes dark. It's the worst.
- ilyt 4y ago
  It's hilarious as some time ago they vomited this blogpost https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attestation-of-personhood/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest... > "Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness" Yeah no shit Cloudflare, YOU'RE THE REASON FOR IT. And the solution is "use hardware keys and track everyone"
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    > Yeah no shit Cloudflare, YOU'RE THE REASON FOR IT. Cloudflare is not the reason for it - ridiculous amounts of bot traffic is. Bot traffic that is either malicious, resource consuming, or actively trying to bring your website down. CAPTCHAs are just the best tool we have to block them, and I don't believe it is completely fair to have website operators just put up with it for the sake of the users - it's a team effort. Let's solve the internet's actual problems so that we don't need things like Cloudflare to patch symptoms instead of causes.
    - 4y ago

nabla9 4y ago

Cloudflare has pushed against public sentiment and mildly against the government to restrict censorship. They would want nothing more than be just "delivery infrastructure" part of the internet. All the points about transparency, monopolies, and privacy concerns and implicit trust in general level are true, of course. They should be addressed. If you want to resist attacks and deliver content efficiently you need CDN and bigger the network is more efficient it is (Network effect is strongest in networks, no surprise there).

convery 4y ago
> Cloudflare has pushed against public sentiment [..] to restrict censorship. Except when they booted sites off their network because Twitter users were upset..
- deanCommie 4y ago
  Upset over serious, credible, actionable, threats of violence against other people hosted on those sites.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    Was it... I think you may want to research those events more
    - rose_ann_ 4y ago
      And I think you don't have the slightest idea what the commenter you're pretending to reply to, is actually talking about.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        pretty sure I am fully informed...
        4y ago

gjsman-1000 4y ago

To me, this reeks just a little bit about a symptom, rather than the cause. Which is, why do people use CloudFlare? People don't pay for things with no benefit. The internet doesn't have a built-in CDN system. The internet's not very good at blocking bot traffic or DDoS attacks. The internet's not very good at remembering things when servers go down. And so on. There are, of course, many attempts to fix these shortcomings (IPFS?), but if it wasn't Cloudflare, it would be Akamai. If it wasn't Akamai, it'd be some other company, because you can't convince people anymore to just forgo Cloudflare's benefits for ideological purity. Instead of ranting at Cloudflare, we should be looking into how to replace Cloudflare with open standards and systems. Which is much harder than just ranting in a blog post against the symptoms of a damaged internet.

AndyBlak 4y ago

Posts like this make me really wish this site had a downvote button.

phpisthebest 4y ago
It does for comments... ;) Why would you downvote a 100% true statement like Cloudflare is destroying the Open Internet the only part I disagree with in the article is their assertion that Government is needed to stop cloud flare
- wilg 4y ago
  You may not understand what "true" means!
nickthegreek 4y ago
There is, its called flag but you cant use it til you reach a certain threshold of karma.

dhdgrygev 4y ago

Cloudflare makes existence on the open internet possible for many companies.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Kalium 4y ago

CDNs are inherently "monopolistic", under the definition this author uses. The cost to entry into the market means that there's never going to be a wide variety of providers. That said, there's no shortage of other large CDNs, so the accusation seems odd when Fastly and Akamai go unmentioned.

sylware 4y ago

The security check should detect properly the web engine based on the user agent http header and provide only javascript stuff for geeko/blink/webkit (the only 3), and a noscript/basic (x)html system for all the others (netsurf/links2/edbrowse/lynx/dillo/any lean and light web engine past/present/futur).

NHQ 4y ago

This was never the open internet. You can't send a direct packet to another person without intermediaries and cloud systems. You can barely host a website from your personal computer, most cannot. This internet is as they say sold out.

Incipient 4y ago
I mean the internet decided to scale out. I don't think relying on intermediaries counts as "selling out".
- NHQ 4y ago
  We are the ones that are sold out, by regulatory capture, monopolies, wireless spectra, etc. Section 230 does nothing for people, it created the platforms that censor, and gave the government a hook into the industry. Look, even EFF supports section 230 [0]; btw, EFF is a total sell out operating as a feel good, ideological protector. All they do is swindle the "engineering culture" into pushing these things onto the world. 0. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

huslage 4y ago

Cloudflare is _far_ from a monopoly. Akamai and Microsoft still hold huge leads in a lot of spaces.

flangola7 4y ago
Anti trust rules do not only address singular literal monopolies. Oligopolies can also have malign influence. Many of the forced breakups of the 20th century were companies very far being total monopolies.

jefftk 4y ago

> Monopolistic Control of the CDN Market: Another issue is the monopolistic control that Cloudflare has over the CDN market. As one of the largest CDN providers... This is a silly piece, but the claim that Cloudflare is so big that they can push sites around doesn't make sense. Not everyone has released 2022 revenue yet, but in 2021 Akamai took in $3.5B to Cloudflare's $0.66B, Fastly's $0.35B, and Edgecast's $0.29B. Then consider that while we don't have separate revenue numbers for Amazon Cloudfront, Google Cloud CDN, or Azure CDN they're all serious contenders. If Cloudflare offers you bad terms you have many other companies that want your business.

sybercecurity 4y ago
They used to write the same stories about Akamai, Microsoft, Google, etc. when they first got big. It's just Cloudflare's turn in the box.
byyll 4y ago
Size is not measured by revenue alone. Cloudflare has a 75.6% market share among reverse proxies and 17.6% of all websites use it. [0] [0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy
- jefftk 4y ago
  This is weighted by site, and counts cnn.com and jefftk.com equally. My understanding is Cloudflare is dramatically disproportionately popular among small sites, I think because of how generous their free plan is? If they were 76% of traffic I'd be worried, but I think a majority of the sites using CF probably are signed up because "why not?", which doesn't actually give CF that much power.
  - byyll 4y ago
    It does count them equally and I agree it's popularity is mostly because of the free tier. From the same website, there is a graph and Cloudflare is lower for high-traffic websites than Cloudfront, Akamai and Fastly. [0] But regardless, that gives Cloudflare power over a lot of sites. [0] https://w3techs.com/diagram/market_technology/cn-cloudflare https://w3techs.com/diagram/market_technology/cn-cloudflare

tannhaeuser 4y ago

The main point of criticism towards Cloudflare is that they both sell services for DDoS protection and services for anonymization and hiding IPs used by DoS attackers at the same time. As such, they have no incentive to improve the situation for users. Nor to work towards IETF or other control plane standards for DoS protection/mitigation. It has been like that on the web for far too long, also with certain other players.

foverzar 4y ago
> and services for anonymization and hiding IPs used by DoS attackers at the same time What service are you implying specifically?

laughinghan 4y ago

This is so overwrought. We're not talking about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish here, where Microsoft wanted to exploit their OS monopoly to bend the Internet to its will. Cloudflare's products are popular because they solve real problems; Cloudflare is not responsible for the popularity of outsourcing SSL termination, the difficulty of implementing SSL properly is, and if Cloudflare ceased operating tomorrow there would still be vendors and customers for SSL termination aplenty.

linuxdaemon 4y ago

Question privacy concerns with CloudFlare stating "giving up security for convenience", and then have comments for your blog post on Disqus.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

Silly question, but: Why are people flagging this? It's not off topic for this site. It raises some interesting (if clearly debatable) points. I totally get disagreeing with it. But pushing to delist it? Why?

drewcoo 4y ago
Likely because it calls out (maybe wrongly) monopoly power.
oliwarner 4y ago
It's a series of bad takes strung together into this flimsy idea that a [relatively tiny] service provider has the power to push anything on anyone. That is not to say that a post like this might not be possible, but this series of stub points is so poorly developed, and so full of unsourced nonsense, even defending its presence on HN feels like trying to take the chap shouting at pigeons at the park seriously. It's not debatable, it's risable.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  You could level the same arguments against half the hot take blog posts that end up on the HN front page. I fail to see why this particular post raises so much ire that it warrants flagging, save that it's going after a sacred cow.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    It's not going after a sacred cow. The idea that Cloudflare is evil for centralizing the internet is commonly seen in HN comments. This writer does a terrible job of advancing their argument. None of the points are developed or supported. There's no evidence provided, just a litany of bald assertions. It also seems to fundamentally misunderstand details of how CDNs work in its rush to attack Cloudflare for being a CDN.

foverzar 4y ago

The real problem with cloudflare is the fact that it is the single centralized TLS terminator. Not for a second will I believe that there is no eavesdropping - the temptation is just too high. IMO, the real threat to open internet is our current established certificate management system, but that's a totally different topic.