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The internet is worse for me with Cloudflare. I'm using a cellphone router for my internet. My guess is I don't get a dedicated IP and probably behind a NAT w

The internet is worse for me with Cloudflare. I'm using a cellphone router for my internet. My guess is I don't get a dedicated IP and probably behind a NAT with other users. 85% of my request needs me to solve a cloudflare captcha. on bad days I have to do this easily 100+ times.

hnav 1y ago
Have you played with IPv6 vs IPv4? Wonder what's worse there, CGNAT-ed IPv4 or an inherently low-reputation IPv6.
gruez 1y ago
But what's the counterfactual? People use cloudflare because they want protection from ddos attacks and bots. If cloudflare didn't exist there would probably be similar measures.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Businesses want to protect the continuity of their business operations, and to that end they buy such protection as a service, from a business that managed to MitM half the Internet in order to provide such service. Point being, it's a commercial subverting the Internet from inside, reshaping it to better serve the interests of commerce. It is indeed protection, but it's accomplished by reducing variance. 99% of legitimate commerce on the Internet follows the same patterns, use a small subset of possibilities offered by the technology - so why not just block the remaining 1% that doesn't fit and call it a day? It will stop most of the threats to running businesses on the Internet. The 1% of legitimate commerce that doesn't fit the pattern? It's not being ignored per se, just pressured to adapt and conform to the majority. What is being ignored is that the Internet is not just a place of commerce, and non-commercial use cases, ideas such as empowering people to better their lives, are gradually becoming impossible, as fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them. Some of us still remember the Internet being more than just a virtual mall, and are unhappy about it gradually becoming one. And it's not like CloudFlare, et al. are hostile to non-commercial interests as a matter of principle - it's just out of scope for them.
  - bkettle 1y ago
    I actually think that Cloudflare has made publishing on the internet _more_ accessible for many individuals. I’ve helped a few people get personal websites running on Cloudflare pages and run my own there—it’s free and extremely easy. They could obviously pull the plug at any point, but with static sites it’s easy to avoid lock-in. If it weren’t for Cloudflare and other services that give free, easy hosting, I suspect there would be even fewer of the non-commercial small-internet sites that you value.
    - nulbyte 1y ago
      There have been places that host personal and hobby websites for free for at least the last 30 years. Some older ones have left, and newer ones keep coming along. Cloudflare didn't make this any more accessible.
      - tonyhart7 1y ago
        but most of them are dogshit tho
  - sally_glance 1y ago
    Your first paragraph summarize why businesses want to use Cloudflare and how it helps them maintain their business. Your second paragraph talks about other (non-commercial) sites. I think I'm missing the link here. Why would the admins of such sites resort to Cloudflare if 'fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them' by making that choice? They could very well choose to implement their own or no measures at all. I think the issue is that the general threat level has massively increased compared to the past - not in terms of sophistication but frequency/scale. But that's a consequence of widespread adoption, nothing Cloudflare in particular is responsible for.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      > Why would the admins of such sites resort to Cloudflare if 'fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them' by making that choice? They could very well choose to implement their own or no measures at all. Marketing and free tiers. But my point is that Cloudflare is addressing threats that predominantly affect businesses, and does so well, but the way it does is effectively changing the whole Internet to be more hospitable for commerce, and less hospitable for any other kind of use.
r00f 1y ago
It is not Cloudflare's fault. It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day. Thanks to Cloudflare I was able to reduce my website load threefold and downscale my VMs and my monthly cloud bill, and seeing how 50k daily requests were shown CAPTCHA and not even tried to solve it makes me terrified of running anything without Cloudflare. Don't blame site owners and service that is trying to help them. Blame the fact that 90% of today's Internet traffic is bots
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  It's cloudlare's fault that it's so common to have very overzealous blocking. Site owners need access to bot protection but that doesn't mean highly flawed protection gets to be blameless.
  - monkeywork 1y ago
    That reads more like: - site owners can have protection as long as it doesn't inconvenience me.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Close. Replace "me" with "legitimate users" and replace "inconvenience" with "very aggressively inconvenience or entirely block". Then yeah you have it.
    - IgorPartola 1y ago
      I mean, yeah that is what it is. You can have “protection” or you can have me as a customer. I am not here to solve broken CAPTCHAs all day long.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  Of course it's cloudflare's fault. They monetized and scaled a service that blocks humans from interacting with websites. They're also essentially a deanonymization reverse proxy that can track everyone's browsing history and decide whether you get to see websites based on social credit.

hnav 1y ago

Have you played with IPv6 vs IPv4? Wonder what's worse there, CGNAT-ed IPv4 or an inherently low-reputation IPv6.

gruez 1y ago

But what's the counterfactual? People use cloudflare because they want protection from ddos attacks and bots. If cloudflare didn't exist there would probably be similar measures.

TeMPOraL 1y ago
Businesses want to protect the continuity of their business operations, and to that end they buy such protection as a service, from a business that managed to MitM half the Internet in order to provide such service. Point being, it's a commercial subverting the Internet from inside, reshaping it to better serve the interests of commerce. It is indeed protection, but it's accomplished by reducing variance. 99% of legitimate commerce on the Internet follows the same patterns, use a small subset of possibilities offered by the technology - so why not just block the remaining 1% that doesn't fit and call it a day? It will stop most of the threats to running businesses on the Internet. The 1% of legitimate commerce that doesn't fit the pattern? It's not being ignored per se, just pressured to adapt and conform to the majority. What is being ignored is that the Internet is not just a place of commerce, and non-commercial use cases, ideas such as empowering people to better their lives, are gradually becoming impossible, as fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them. Some of us still remember the Internet being more than just a virtual mall, and are unhappy about it gradually becoming one. And it's not like CloudFlare, et al. are hostile to non-commercial interests as a matter of principle - it's just out of scope for them.
- bkettle 1y ago
  I actually think that Cloudflare has made publishing on the internet _more_ accessible for many individuals. I’ve helped a few people get personal websites running on Cloudflare pages and run my own there—it’s free and extremely easy. They could obviously pull the plug at any point, but with static sites it’s easy to avoid lock-in. If it weren’t for Cloudflare and other services that give free, easy hosting, I suspect there would be even fewer of the non-commercial small-internet sites that you value.
  - nulbyte 1y ago
    There have been places that host personal and hobby websites for free for at least the last 30 years. Some older ones have left, and newer ones keep coming along. Cloudflare didn't make this any more accessible.
    - tonyhart7 1y ago
      but most of them are dogshit tho
- sally_glance 1y ago
  Your first paragraph summarize why businesses want to use Cloudflare and how it helps them maintain their business. Your second paragraph talks about other (non-commercial) sites. I think I'm missing the link here. Why would the admins of such sites resort to Cloudflare if 'fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them' by making that choice? They could very well choose to implement their own or no measures at all. I think the issue is that the general threat level has massively increased compared to the past - not in terms of sophistication but frequency/scale. But that's a consequence of widespread adoption, nothing Cloudflare in particular is responsible for.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    > Why would the admins of such sites resort to Cloudflare if 'fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them' by making that choice? They could very well choose to implement their own or no measures at all. Marketing and free tiers. But my point is that Cloudflare is addressing threats that predominantly affect businesses, and does so well, but the way it does is effectively changing the whole Internet to be more hospitable for commerce, and less hospitable for any other kind of use.

r00f 1y ago

It is not Cloudflare's fault. It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day. Thanks to Cloudflare I was able to reduce my website load threefold and downscale my VMs and my monthly cloud bill, and seeing how 50k daily requests were shown CAPTCHA and not even tried to solve it makes me terrified of running anything without Cloudflare. Don't blame site owners and service that is trying to help them. Blame the fact that 90% of today's Internet traffic is bots

Dylan16807 1y ago
It's cloudlare's fault that it's so common to have very overzealous blocking. Site owners need access to bot protection but that doesn't mean highly flawed protection gets to be blameless.
- monkeywork 1y ago
  That reads more like: - site owners can have protection as long as it doesn't inconvenience me.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Close. Replace "me" with "legitimate users" and replace "inconvenience" with "very aggressively inconvenience or entirely block". Then yeah you have it.
  - IgorPartola 1y ago
    I mean, yeah that is what it is. You can have “protection” or you can have me as a customer. I am not here to solve broken CAPTCHAs all day long.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
Of course it's cloudflare's fault. They monetized and scaled a service that blocks humans from interacting with websites. They're also essentially a deanonymization reverse proxy that can track everyone's browsing history and decide whether you get to see websites based on social credit.