4 ms·
sounds like centralising most of the the internet behind a single easy target (Cloudflare) is a bad idea
by blibble 1y ago
sounds like centralising most of the the internet behind a single easy target (Cloudflare) is a bad idea
- 77pt77 1y agoAll systems seem to converge to these monopolies. Google, X, Facebook, Cloudflare. All minor player are absorbed or eliminated.
- afiori 1y agoI agree that oligopolies are more stable than polyopolies, but a huge part of why the internet collapsed in a handful of companies is how stock markets and venture capital love monopolies.
- shermantanktop 1y agoThis is what happens when everyone is incented to trade low-probability risk for short-term profits. Because who would bet that a giant CDN would be blocked like this?
- okanat 1y agoIt is the result of lack of regulation. They are all allowed to buy their competition.
- yoyohello13 1y agoI think we are partially to blame for this too though. For the last 10-20 years the whole goal of a founder was to grow a business, get acquired then exit. If founders instead focused on building a sustainable business maybe we would have a more diverse tech landscape.
- j_maffe 1y agoTo be fair, even the ones that don't want to get acquired know the bitter road ahead from the opposition aggression.
- SoftTalker 1y agoNobody would fund a founder who wanted to build a sustainable business. It would have to be bootstrapped, and there are a lot of such businesses, but you never hear about them because they stay small.
- __loam 1y agoX is a minor player. Replace it with AWS
- 77pt77 1y agoI meant for what it does. Is there anything even remotely comparable to twitter (outside of the PRC)?
- brookst 1y agoClassic economies of scale. It’s a lot more efficient for one company to make one million services of lemonade than it is for one million people to make one serving each. Even if the homemade version is “better”.
- dakiol 1y agoYeah. I think this is the elephant in the room. I keep stumbling upon "We need to verify you are a human" by Cloudflare in many sites around the web. Crazy.
- jtbayly 1y agoSadly including on my site that kept getting overwhelmed by bots this year. I didn’t know what else to do.
- 418tpot 1y agoHave you tried anubis? https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
- thayne 1y agoAnubis is affective against certain kinds of bots and abuse, but wouldn't be that affective against large scale DDoS attacks. And it does have a negative impact on usability, as users have to wait for the browser to do the proof of work, which may or may not be worse than cloudflare's captchas.
- DoctorOW 1y agoAnubis is a partial mitigant of DDOS attacks, since it's less resource intensive to serve the Anubis page than the origin[1]. Cloudflare's captchas are only convenient for a subset of users, I'll bet there'd be decent money in one of the competing CDNs (Fastly maybe?) including an Anubis-like captcha. [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864108
- thayne 1y agoYes, it's a partial mitigator, but it isn't as complete of a solution as a CDN, for a number of reasons. For one thing, with Anubis your server is still responding to requests, so a full scale DDoS could potentially take you down without having to actually complete the PoW, they just have to make enough requests. Using a CDN for DDoS typically has multiple levels of protection: - caching reduces load on your server - In the event of a (D)DoS attack, the cdn can absorb the attack traffic with their much higher capacity than your server(s) - The CDN can block certain kinds of attacks, especially low level (D)DoS attacks without the traffic ever touching your servers - Since the CDN fronts many sites, it can have more information about which IP addresss, and user agents are more suspicious. This one is a little controversial, because there is a conflict between getting an accurate profile of how suspicious a request is, and preserving the privacy of users. - It may have built in support for some kind of bot detection, such as captcha or a proof of work. IDK about the free tier of cloudflare, but for paid offerings at least, this is usually optional. In short, Anubis could be part of a DDoS mitigation plan, but if you are worried about a targeted attack, it probably isn't sufficient. And critical services are potentially a valuable target for attacks.
- bearjaws 1y agoI have yet to find a platform that is as comprehensive as Cloudflare. Bot protection, waiting rooms, cheap static assets, WAF. Odds are if you are running a popular platform, you need all of these things.
- pier25 1y agoUnfortunately there aren't that many competing services. AFAIK BunnyCDN is the only service that comes close but their cloud offerings are kinda new and they charge egress.
- stego-tech 1y agoMy sarcasm well is tapped, but this is why I was sus of CDNs like Cloudflare and Akamai at the outset. Yes, they’re highly convenient and enable more sites and services to weather large attacks or traffic spikes, but we willingly sunk a huge swath of the net behind a handful of for-profit entities and yet somehow expected nothing but sunshine and roses forever. Stop. Trusting. Companies. To. Do. The. Right. Thing. Cloudflare could’ve prevented this if they’d taken a stand on anything but profit motives, but they’ve repeatedly chosen not to. Piracy sites pay the bills just like Porn or Government sites, after all, and companies won’t turn down money unless forced to through regulation.
- DoctorOW 1y agoYou seen to be implying that Cloudflare has been abusing this position of power, but then listing things it allows? Porn, of consenting adults, is actually a great example of business Cloudflare's right to take on. You may not care for it, but legal/ethical pornography is a matter only of taste. We'd be far worse off if Cloudflare was blocking content based off of personal preference.
- ipaddr 1y agoDidn't they kick off far right websites like stormfront? They still block from personal preference it's just preferences you agree with.
- DoctorOW 1y ago(in)famously they refused to do that until ordered to by law enforcement.
- dc396 1y agoErr, no. At least not according to Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ TL;DR: "The tipping point for us making this decision [to discontinue service] was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology."
- thayne 1y agoI don't entirely disagree, but at the same time, La Liga shouldn't have this much power to shut down large swaths of the internet because of a handful of piracy sites, that probably only have a minimal impact on their income anyway. Also, CDNs have inherent economies of scale and network effects, so it is natural that there would be just a few at the top.
- phoronixrly 1y agoOnly it's not La Liga censoring, it's a court order as far as I can understand from the TF article. Should the judicial system of a country have the power to shut down large swaths of the Internet after presumably due process and in accordance with the law? IMO yes. Now, the question really turns out to be "Is a law stating that large swaths of the Internet must be censored to stop a handful of piracy sites just?" No. It isn't.