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Cloudflare is horrible for privacy. It is also a bit of a sovereignty issue for European countries to have all their citizens web habits to be MITM by a forging

Cloudflare is horrible for privacy. It is also a bit of a sovereignty issue for European countries to have all their citizens web habits to be MITM by a forging power (no matter how friendly they seam). Edit: not even going in to the sovereignty issue of having an American private company effectively decide your internet regulations.

ronsor 3y ago
The EU regularly de-facto tries to decide regulations for other countries. All is fair in a globally connected world.
- Sporktacular 3y ago
  Yeah, but it generally goes in the direction of more privacy, environmental and labor standards. Less so from other countries.
- rini17 3y ago
  That is how American tech monopolies like to paint what the EU does. Lol
  - immibis 3y ago
    dumb question: why do I have the option to downvote your comment, but not many other comments in this thread?
    - greyface- 3y ago
      Downvoting is only available for comments that are less than 24h old and not replies to you.
schleck8 3y ago
Cloudflare exists out of necessity for the most part. The alternatives to shield from large scale DDoS are all US American too.
- mike_d 3y ago
  Which lets be honest isn't a problem that 99% of the sites using Cloudflare need to solve. Nobody is going to waste energy and time to attack your blog with your vacation photos. The huge wave of DDoS extortion attacks that happened 3-4 years ago was mostly enabled by "booter" services that themselves hid from law enforcement behind Cloudflare. Here is an example: https://therecord.media/feds-seize-ddos-booter-sites-in-latest-takedown https://therecord.media/feds-seize-ddos-booter-sites-in-late... Feel free to punch any of the sites they mention into dns.coffee and look at the historical nameservers. All Cloudflare.
  - OmarAssadi 3y ago
    Beat me to it. More often than not, every time I run into the run-of-the-mill booter or other super blatantly illegal things, at least some portion of the infrastructure is behind CloudFlare. I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of abuse reports I've personally filed that seemingly go nowhere. OVH at least takes down the booters and other proper malicious stuff. However, copyright infringement reports go ignored to the point to where I stopped bothering--not that I had any right to care when I torrented loads, but it was a little annoying that ~$10 software, with no DRM, regional discounts, and a dozen ways to pay still ended up pirated to the point to where it wasn't worth selling (fun story: I still have email records from when a pretty beloved multi-billion dollar tech company launched their ROG-clone sub-brand and pirated our XenForo plugins to use on their site instead of ponying up $10 -- maybe one day I'll have to ask them for a laptop). CloudFlare, on the other hand, at best, just passed on whatever I send in, and whoever their actual providers were never cared either, so nothing gets done. It can feel like rackeetering; sign-up for protection from the people attacking you ...whom we also protect and refuse to take down. That said, I think 99% of small sites, personal blogs, etc, really don't need any of the services offered; the most useful offering for most people is literally probably DNS. Game servers and gaming-related communities, or at the least the ones I am most attracted to, are just about the only thing I think requires DDoS mitigation regardless of size. Our little Garry's Mod TTT server with a max player limit of like ~24 people would get attacked a couple of times a week at least. And good lord, the RuneScape community is another breed of toxic. The way I learned to program was by reverse engineering the game, and we'd work on private servers that were essentially from-scratch MMORPG servers that just emulated the RuneScape mechanics and protocol. One aspect of the game, though, is PvP -- when you kill another player in the wilderness, unlike in a lot of other MMOs, you get most, if not all, of their items they have on them. I could perhaps understand DDoSing another player during combat in order to steal their gear. But what made me stunned beyond belief was that when I hosted a "spawn PKing" server (e.g., PvP-only, but you don't have to work for your gear; everything is free - it's just for fun), they'd literally lure each other into TeamSpeak to grab IP addresses and DDoS each other for.... nothing :) (and so you can imagine also just how often we'd get hit with massive attacks ourselves)

ronsor 3y ago

The EU regularly de-facto tries to decide regulations for other countries. All is fair in a globally connected world.

Sporktacular 3y ago
Yeah, but it generally goes in the direction of more privacy, environmental and labor standards. Less so from other countries.
rini17 3y ago
That is how American tech monopolies like to paint what the EU does. Lol
- immibis 3y ago
  dumb question: why do I have the option to downvote your comment, but not many other comments in this thread?
  - greyface- 3y ago
    Downvoting is only available for comments that are less than 24h old and not replies to you.

schleck8 3y ago

Cloudflare exists out of necessity for the most part. The alternatives to shield from large scale DDoS are all US American too.

mike_d 3y ago
Which lets be honest isn't a problem that 99% of the sites using Cloudflare need to solve. Nobody is going to waste energy and time to attack your blog with your vacation photos. The huge wave of DDoS extortion attacks that happened 3-4 years ago was mostly enabled by "booter" services that themselves hid from law enforcement behind Cloudflare. Here is an example: https://therecord.media/feds-seize-ddos-booter-sites-in-latest-takedown https://therecord.media/feds-seize-ddos-booter-sites-in-late... Feel free to punch any of the sites they mention into dns.coffee and look at the historical nameservers. All Cloudflare.
- OmarAssadi 3y ago
  Beat me to it. More often than not, every time I run into the run-of-the-mill booter or other super blatantly illegal things, at least some portion of the infrastructure is behind CloudFlare. I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of abuse reports I've personally filed that seemingly go nowhere. OVH at least takes down the booters and other proper malicious stuff. However, copyright infringement reports go ignored to the point to where I stopped bothering--not that I had any right to care when I torrented loads, but it was a little annoying that ~$10 software, with no DRM, regional discounts, and a dozen ways to pay still ended up pirated to the point to where it wasn't worth selling (fun story: I still have email records from when a pretty beloved multi-billion dollar tech company launched their ROG-clone sub-brand and pirated our XenForo plugins to use on their site instead of ponying up $10 -- maybe one day I'll have to ask them for a laptop). CloudFlare, on the other hand, at best, just passed on whatever I send in, and whoever their actual providers were never cared either, so nothing gets done. It can feel like rackeetering; sign-up for protection from the people attacking you ...whom we also protect and refuse to take down. That said, I think 99% of small sites, personal blogs, etc, really don't need any of the services offered; the most useful offering for most people is literally probably DNS. Game servers and gaming-related communities, or at the least the ones I am most attracted to, are just about the only thing I think requires DDoS mitigation regardless of size. Our little Garry's Mod TTT server with a max player limit of like ~24 people would get attacked a couple of times a week at least. And good lord, the RuneScape community is another breed of toxic. The way I learned to program was by reverse engineering the game, and we'd work on private servers that were essentially from-scratch MMORPG servers that just emulated the RuneScape mechanics and protocol. One aspect of the game, though, is PvP -- when you kill another player in the wilderness, unlike in a lot of other MMOs, you get most, if not all, of their items they have on them. I could perhaps understand DDoSing another player during combat in order to steal their gear. But what made me stunned beyond belief was that when I hosted a "spawn PKing" server (e.g., PvP-only, but you don't have to work for your gear; everything is free - it's just for fun), they'd literally lure each other into TeamSpeak to grab IP addresses and DDoS each other for.... nothing :) (and so you can imagine also just how often we'd get hit with massive attacks ourselves)