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That's not a lot of information for such a complex subject. Eg. If you live in a dictatorship and use a VPN. You're traffic is together with a lot of people.

That's not a lot of information for such a complex subject. Eg. If you live in a dictatorship and use a VPN. You're traffic is together with a lot of people. The website owner can disable cloudflare their checks and that will leave their site unprotected. The choice of that is up to the website owner, no?

mlyle 3y ago
It seems like a lot of people are pretending that because there's a contractual relationship between Cloudflare and many websites, that Cloudflare can't cause outsized harms to other parties. It really sucks for a third party to claim you're a bot and as a result you lose access to resources. And the potential for harm is only increasing. Worse still, the false positive rate appears unacceptably high (look at all the people here with substantial issues) and there's no recourse unless you get a highly voted thread on hacker news.
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Tbh. There's a lot of technical folks, worldwide, here. That's a lot of edge cases in comparison. And their technical skills probably skews perception ( exotic browsers, behavior, VPN, Tor, ... ) As such, can you say, by indication, what percentage of web surfers "a lot" is? ( = Including non technical) I don't disagree that people can have problems. I'm just wondering how representative "a lot" in reality is.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Even if it's .01%, 1 out of 10,000 people losing a substantial fraction of utility without recourse sucks.
bravura 3y ago
The website owner can disable cloudflare their checks and that will leave their site unprotected. The choice of that is up to the website owner, no? Yeah but what sort of transparency does Cloudflare offer website owners about what kind of traffic was blocked and *why*?
- acdha 3y ago
  Every blocked request is logged with the corresponding rule. I’ve had multiple times where someone complained about being blocked and didn’t realize that they had malware on their PC.

mlyle 3y ago

It seems like a lot of people are pretending that because there's a contractual relationship between Cloudflare and many websites, that Cloudflare can't cause outsized harms to other parties. It really sucks for a third party to claim you're a bot and as a result you lose access to resources. And the potential for harm is only increasing. Worse still, the false positive rate appears unacceptably high (look at all the people here with substantial issues) and there's no recourse unless you get a highly voted thread on hacker news.

NicoJuicy 3y ago
Tbh. There's a lot of technical folks, worldwide, here. That's a lot of edge cases in comparison. And their technical skills probably skews perception ( exotic browsers, behavior, VPN, Tor, ... ) As such, can you say, by indication, what percentage of web surfers "a lot" is? ( = Including non technical) I don't disagree that people can have problems. I'm just wondering how representative "a lot" in reality is.
- mlyle 3y ago
  Even if it's .01%, 1 out of 10,000 people losing a substantial fraction of utility without recourse sucks.

bravura 3y ago

The website owner can disable cloudflare their checks and that will leave their site unprotected. The choice of that is up to the website owner, no? Yeah but what sort of transparency does Cloudflare offer website owners about what kind of traffic was blocked and *why*?

acdha 3y ago
Every blocked request is logged with the corresponding rule. I’ve had multiple times where someone complained about being blocked and didn’t realize that they had malware on their PC.