9 ms·

Participate in the “Internet Slowdown” with one click

108 points by rdl 12y ago

aw3c2 12y ago
Right after telling Cloudflare all about who visits your websites. Please only show this to US americans, it would be weird to slap this in the face of the majority of the world population.
- rdl 12y ago
  If you're a current customer, you already trust us with your logs. We've got a good track record of fighting for user privacy, and IMO if you wanted to get records of a site's visitors, you'd probably go directly to the site if at all possible -- smaller sites generally aren't in a position to fight subpoenas and letters, whereas we do. (disclaimer: I work at CloudFlare after selling my crypto startup to them earlier in the year, and work on security/privacy products) I agree it's kind of unfair to non-USA people to suffer website slowdowns over US politics. It's also unfair for non-USA people to get spied on by NSA or droned by CIA. Unfortunately they don't ask me :)
idlewords 12y ago
There's something baffling about making a strong stand for net neutrality while promoting the heavily centralized web. Cloudflare seems like a neat company, and I enjoy their technical posts here and elsewhere very much, but the phenomenon they represent is just as harmful to the web as the object of this protest.
- hitchhiker999 12y ago
  Unfair! They are providing a damn good service in the current paradigm. They are standing up for something important in a reasonable way. Decentralisation will be the next great hurdle, I'm sure we've all been thinking about it for a while now - no need to dismiss those trying to get something done before then.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Google provides damned good email services in the "current paradigm" while operating essentially as the vanguard of the centralized Internet.
  - idlewords 12y ago
    The whole net neutrality debate is an artifact of centralization. It wouldn't exist without near-monopoly ISPs and very large companies that dominate online traffic. From that perspective, fighting for net neutrality is papering over a more fundamental problem.
- rdl 12y ago
  You could make an argument that CloudFlare is centralization, but you could ALSO make an argument that CloudFlare, by letting smaller sites continue self-hosting but using CloudFlare for scaling, is also more decentralized than the realistic alternatives. I'd ALSO prefer a world where everyone can get 10G to the home/office, great power, and global anycast with a bunch of sites around the world, from an infinity of vendors without strong content controls. Unfortunately, the alternatives to CloudFlare-like services seem to be: 1) Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. -- if you're popular or controversial, this isn't great. 2) Hosting with large global entities (AWS, Google, etc.) with much more restrictive content policies, and with greater control over the technical stack you use. 3) Setting a pretty high floor for cost or technical competence to host a site (you're a clear outlier on the technical competence side in 2014, with colo'd boxes. sadly) I love being able to spin up a random VM on my personal colo'd hardware, behind CloudFlare, and know it can deal with attacks or load; it would cost me a lot to build every random thing entirely on its own. There are some potential issues with using CloudFlare for certain kinds of sites (turning over SSL keys, for instance, if you want us to handle your https traffic), but we have technical solutions to those, some of which we've presented over the past year, such as "keyless ssl", where you continue to retain custody of the private key and we just ask you every time we need to open a session to a new user. It's not a perfect solution, but I think using CloudFlare is actually the best available choice for a lot of sites, and we're trying to make it better all the time. And yes -- the end of Net Neutrality probably wouldn't hurt CloudFlare very much; it would arguably make it harder to run a site without it, or without going to some kind of provider who has also negotiated with the access networks. This isn't really a commercial decision so much as a "we like the free Internet and support it" decision.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. I heard a rumour[1] that you guys drop users on smaller plans when they get hit. Supposedly people get an e-mail WHY WAS MY SITE TEMPORARILY DEACTIVATED? CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network serving millions of websites. Sometimes a large DDOS attack to one of our Free or Pro customers may degrade network performance. In these cases, we may temporarily remove the website under attack to avoid network degradation. and they're on their own. Is it true? [1] http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-odpowiednik/page-2#entry421175 http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-o...
mhurron 12y ago
This has to be one of the most useless campaigns. Yet another slactivist 'don't really do anything but damnit feel like you did.' It doesn't 'raise awareness' (more slactivism). People have heard of Net Neutrality. This does nothing to educate about it. There is no information here, just Oggie Boogie scary shit might happen (but don't worry we won't risk clicks to show you). And that's even if you see it. I've been to reddit off and on all morning, I happened to finally notice the very small black box in the corner with the stupid vague message. No idea when it showed up. I was starting to think reddit wasn't even going to bother with a banner. I'm willing to bet most people will be the same way since, again, no one is willing to risk some ad impressions to actually put anyone out. When your solution to a problem is 'don't really do anything about it' don't be surprised when shit happens.
- rdl 12y ago
  I agree CISPA/PIPA were better, but that's because it was a much more clear message, and a more clear threat to all big companies. The sad truth is ending net neutrality actually helps enough big companies (access networks for sure; large content sites who can pay, to reduce the threat from smaller sites...) that it's not going to face the same kind of opposition from tech.
  - mhurron 12y ago
    A lot of the same companies that would win with anti net neutrality legislation being passed also supported SOPA/PIPA so I don't see the big tech divided don't do anything angle being applicable. No one is willing to do anything that would give up ad revenue or clicks. Shit like this makes donating to the EFF feel like a giant waste of money. "September 10: The day like every other day we won't inconvenience you, please click our ads."
- untog 12y ago
  "People have heard of Net Neutrality." "People" have, but most of the internet-using population haven't. Not saying this is the best method, but don't be fooled into thinking that everyone is aware of what's going on.
userbinator 12y ago
I bet a huge number of users that see this popup are just going to react with "Oh, another bloody advert... piss off" and click the X. It has too much similarity to the "Speed up your PC now! Make Internet faster!" sort of ads, so I think it'll get ignored in the same way. Then again, those ads wouldn't exist if they weren't effective...
flavor8 12y ago
This doesn't work on my site. Perhaps a javascript issue. Tried it temporarily, disabled.
NicoJuicy 12y ago
I'd rather see some popular websites participate with editing their webserver to throttle the FCC : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 for more information (If you have Nginx, Apache, MaxCDN) Currently, it throttles to model (28,8 kb/s) speeds when someone connects with an FCC IP. If you are throttling the FCC, add your list to the new HN post on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 - Update your servers, do something!
- khc 12y ago
  Why just the FCC? Why not the Congress and the Whitehouse as well?
ianstallings 12y ago
Nah.
dfc 12y ago
> As we’ve seen that bandwidth pricing is not reflective of the > underlying fair market value when Internet service providers have > monopolistic control, Where was the fair market value of bandwidth presented/derived? I did not see it on the page submitted or the page linked to in the excerpt.
- rdl 12y ago
  It's a reference to http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-ar... i.e. telstra extracting monopoly rents by being a monopoly, vs. the otherwise prevailing price. I agree it's difficult to treat bandwidth as a true commodity, especially when there's a monopoly, but I think it's clear that if Australia weren't Telstra's victim, bandwidth prices would be far lower.
skrebbel 12y ago
Why would any global app show an American national political campaign to all their users? In reality I'm mostly sad that the campaign is purely USA ("contact your rep" - I don't have a "rep", it doesn't work that way here), but if I see it on any app that knows where I'm located, I'll know that the owners' world ends at their country borders and that I'm a second class user.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > Why would any global app show an American national political campaign to all their users? Because it affects them, too, and they have a right to know what the risks are, even if they can't do anything to help very directly.
doctorfoo 12y ago
I'm going to repost what I commented on CloudFlare's blog, since they don't appear to have published it (yes, I was a little angry. I've had to put up with these CAPTCHAs for the last week): Ha, so much irony, CloudFlare. The company that is determinedly CAPTCHA-walling as much of the internet as it can get its hands on supports Network Neutrality...? Reeaally? You support network neutrality, as long as your users don't use Tor. And don't use a VPN. Or any other kind of shared IP. Or have cookies disabled. No, your support of network neutrality is utterly, utterly shallow. You might pragmatically support it, as it pertains to you not having to pay any more for your data pipes, but you share none of the principles behind it - that all people should have the same access to content. Oh look - I try to access BattleForTheNet.com: "Please complete the security check. Please enable cookies". An IP address is not a person. Somehow Twitter, Facebook, Google, can figure this out... Why can't you? Edit: Also, is anybody else affected by these CAPTCHAs? I can't believe it's just me. Literally half of all news articles and such I try to read, I'm getting CAPTCHA-walled by CloudFlare. It's quite scary to suddenly realise how much control this single company has. (Not to mention incredibly annoying. I've taken to simply avoiding several news sites I used to browse.)
- jamespo 12y ago
  Presumably you are getting CAPTCHA-walled because your shared anonymous IP has a history of abuse? How do you suggest that is tackled?
  - doctorfoo 12y ago
    I can understand not allowing me to post anonymously - but to go as far as refusing me read access? Really? Actually tackling the problem, hmm. Storing a single cookie on the cloudflare domain so I only have to auth with CloudFlare once, would be better than nothing. I don't like the tracking aspect of that though. Maybe there's some kind of advanced crypto which will solve this in a privacy conscious manner one day. Unless IPv6 takes off fast more IP addresses are going to be shared. It's simply a terribly crude measure to assume IP address = person.
    - 12y ago
MyDogHasFleas 12y ago
re Internet Slowdown: I'm stuck on a dissonance between the status as presented vs. the reality as I understand it. I may well be wrong/uninformed and I'm happy to be educated if so. Here's the status as presented: "Battleforthenet.com (a project of Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, Fight for the Future, and Free Press) has organized a day of protest against the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online. Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible." Here's my 2 points of dissonance: 1. "...FCC proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online." a) the FCC proposal is about allowing Internet providers to optionally provide higher speed/quality access for a fee, not about "charging" fees "to provide access". b) There's nothing stopping Internet providers from doing this right now, since the original FCC net neutrality regs were shot down by the courts. So saying the FCC proposal would "allow" them to do it is not accurate, as they are "allowed" to do it right now. So, as far as I know, the correct statement would be: "... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the companies' content online." 2. "Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible." From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a company's content.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > "... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the companies' content online." In the context of government regulation "allow" and "not disallow" mean the same thing. But "allow" implies letting monopoly ISPs get away with doing something wrong while "not disallow" implies avoiding unwarranted government interference. You can hardly fault them for their language choice there. And there is very little practical difference between "access" and the lack of "higher quality/speed" necessary for the service to be used. Netflix at four frames per second is hardly "access to Netflix." > From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a company's content. Again, these things are equivalent. There is no difference between "slow down" and "not speed up" in practice. It has the identical result, you're just using different words.
okasaki 12y ago
I wish these were hidden for non-US ips. I don't care about US issues and even if I did there's nothing I could do.

108 points by rdl 12y ago

aw3c2 12y ago

Right after telling Cloudflare all about who visits your websites. Please only show this to US americans, it would be weird to slap this in the face of the majority of the world population.

rdl 12y ago
If you're a current customer, you already trust us with your logs. We've got a good track record of fighting for user privacy, and IMO if you wanted to get records of a site's visitors, you'd probably go directly to the site if at all possible -- smaller sites generally aren't in a position to fight subpoenas and letters, whereas we do. (disclaimer: I work at CloudFlare after selling my crypto startup to them earlier in the year, and work on security/privacy products) I agree it's kind of unfair to non-USA people to suffer website slowdowns over US politics. It's also unfair for non-USA people to get spied on by NSA or droned by CIA. Unfortunately they don't ask me :)

idlewords 12y ago

There's something baffling about making a strong stand for net neutrality while promoting the heavily centralized web. Cloudflare seems like a neat company, and I enjoy their technical posts here and elsewhere very much, but the phenomenon they represent is just as harmful to the web as the object of this protest.

hitchhiker999 12y ago
Unfair! They are providing a damn good service in the current paradigm. They are standing up for something important in a reasonable way. Decentralisation will be the next great hurdle, I'm sure we've all been thinking about it for a while now - no need to dismiss those trying to get something done before then.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Google provides damned good email services in the "current paradigm" while operating essentially as the vanguard of the centralized Internet.
- idlewords 12y ago
  The whole net neutrality debate is an artifact of centralization. It wouldn't exist without near-monopoly ISPs and very large companies that dominate online traffic. From that perspective, fighting for net neutrality is papering over a more fundamental problem.
rdl 12y ago
You could make an argument that CloudFlare is centralization, but you could ALSO make an argument that CloudFlare, by letting smaller sites continue self-hosting but using CloudFlare for scaling, is also more decentralized than the realistic alternatives. I'd ALSO prefer a world where everyone can get 10G to the home/office, great power, and global anycast with a bunch of sites around the world, from an infinity of vendors without strong content controls. Unfortunately, the alternatives to CloudFlare-like services seem to be: 1) Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. -- if you're popular or controversial, this isn't great. 2) Hosting with large global entities (AWS, Google, etc.) with much more restrictive content policies, and with greater control over the technical stack you use. 3) Setting a pretty high floor for cost or technical competence to host a site (you're a clear outlier on the technical competence side in 2014, with colo'd boxes. sadly) I love being able to spin up a random VM on my personal colo'd hardware, behind CloudFlare, and know it can deal with attacks or load; it would cost me a lot to build every random thing entirely on its own. There are some potential issues with using CloudFlare for certain kinds of sites (turning over SSL keys, for instance, if you want us to handle your https traffic), but we have technical solutions to those, some of which we've presented over the past year, such as "keyless ssl", where you continue to retain custody of the private key and we just ask you every time we need to open a session to a new user. It's not a perfect solution, but I think using CloudFlare is actually the best available choice for a lot of sites, and we're trying to make it better all the time. And yes -- the end of Net Neutrality probably wouldn't hurt CloudFlare very much; it would arguably make it harder to run a site without it, or without going to some kind of provider who has also negotiated with the access networks. This isn't really a commercial decision so much as a "we like the free Internet and support it" decision.
- spindritf 12y ago
  Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. I heard a rumour[1] that you guys drop users on smaller plans when they get hit. Supposedly people get an e-mail WHY WAS MY SITE TEMPORARILY DEACTIVATED? CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network serving millions of websites. Sometimes a large DDOS attack to one of our Free or Pro customers may degrade network performance. In these cases, we may temporarily remove the website under attack to avoid network degradation. and they're on their own. Is it true? [1] http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-odpowiednik/page-2#entry421175 http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-o...

mhurron 12y ago

This has to be one of the most useless campaigns. Yet another slactivist 'don't really do anything but damnit feel like you did.' It doesn't 'raise awareness' (more slactivism). People have heard of Net Neutrality. This does nothing to educate about it. There is no information here, just Oggie Boogie scary shit might happen (but don't worry we won't risk clicks to show you). And that's even if you see it. I've been to reddit off and on all morning, I happened to finally notice the very small black box in the corner with the stupid vague message. No idea when it showed up. I was starting to think reddit wasn't even going to bother with a banner. I'm willing to bet most people will be the same way since, again, no one is willing to risk some ad impressions to actually put anyone out. When your solution to a problem is 'don't really do anything about it' don't be surprised when shit happens.

rdl 12y ago
I agree CISPA/PIPA were better, but that's because it was a much more clear message, and a more clear threat to all big companies. The sad truth is ending net neutrality actually helps enough big companies (access networks for sure; large content sites who can pay, to reduce the threat from smaller sites...) that it's not going to face the same kind of opposition from tech.
- mhurron 12y ago
  A lot of the same companies that would win with anti net neutrality legislation being passed also supported SOPA/PIPA so I don't see the big tech divided don't do anything angle being applicable. No one is willing to do anything that would give up ad revenue or clicks. Shit like this makes donating to the EFF feel like a giant waste of money. "September 10: The day like every other day we won't inconvenience you, please click our ads."
untog 12y ago
"People have heard of Net Neutrality." "People" have, but most of the internet-using population haven't. Not saying this is the best method, but don't be fooled into thinking that everyone is aware of what's going on.

userbinator 12y ago

I bet a huge number of users that see this popup are just going to react with "Oh, another bloody advert... piss off" and click the X. It has too much similarity to the "Speed up your PC now! Make Internet faster!" sort of ads, so I think it'll get ignored in the same way. Then again, those ads wouldn't exist if they weren't effective...

flavor8 12y ago

This doesn't work on my site. Perhaps a javascript issue. Tried it temporarily, disabled.

NicoJuicy 12y ago

I'd rather see some popular websites participate with editing their webserver to throttle the FCC : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 for more information (If you have Nginx, Apache, MaxCDN) Currently, it throttles to model (28,8 kb/s) speeds when someone connects with an FCC IP. If you are throttling the FCC, add your list to the new HN post on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 - Update your servers, do something!

khc 12y ago
Why just the FCC? Why not the Congress and the Whitehouse as well?

ianstallings 12y ago

Nah.

dfc 12y ago

> As we’ve seen that bandwidth pricing is not reflective of the > underlying fair market value when Internet service providers have > monopolistic control, Where was the fair market value of bandwidth presented/derived? I did not see it on the page submitted or the page linked to in the excerpt.

rdl 12y ago
It's a reference to http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-ar... i.e. telstra extracting monopoly rents by being a monopoly, vs. the otherwise prevailing price. I agree it's difficult to treat bandwidth as a true commodity, especially when there's a monopoly, but I think it's clear that if Australia weren't Telstra's victim, bandwidth prices would be far lower.

skrebbel 12y ago

Why would any global app show an American national political campaign to all their users? In reality I'm mostly sad that the campaign is purely USA ("contact your rep" - I don't have a "rep", it doesn't work that way here), but if I see it on any app that knows where I'm located, I'll know that the owners' world ends at their country borders and that I'm a second class user.

cbd1984 12y ago
> Why would any global app show an American national political campaign to all their users? Because it affects them, too, and they have a right to know what the risks are, even if they can't do anything to help very directly.

doctorfoo 12y ago

I'm going to repost what I commented on CloudFlare's blog, since they don't appear to have published it (yes, I was a little angry. I've had to put up with these CAPTCHAs for the last week): Ha, so much irony, CloudFlare. The company that is determinedly CAPTCHA-walling as much of the internet as it can get its hands on supports Network Neutrality...? Reeaally? You support network neutrality, as long as your users don't use Tor. And don't use a VPN. Or any other kind of shared IP. Or have cookies disabled. No, your support of network neutrality is utterly, utterly shallow. You might pragmatically support it, as it pertains to you not having to pay any more for your data pipes, but you share none of the principles behind it - that all people should have the same access to content. Oh look - I try to access BattleForTheNet.com: "Please complete the security check. Please enable cookies". An IP address is not a person. Somehow Twitter, Facebook, Google, can figure this out... Why can't you? Edit: Also, is anybody else affected by these CAPTCHAs? I can't believe it's just me. Literally half of all news articles and such I try to read, I'm getting CAPTCHA-walled by CloudFlare. It's quite scary to suddenly realise how much control this single company has. (Not to mention incredibly annoying. I've taken to simply avoiding several news sites I used to browse.)

jamespo 12y ago
Presumably you are getting CAPTCHA-walled because your shared anonymous IP has a history of abuse? How do you suggest that is tackled?
- doctorfoo 12y ago
  I can understand not allowing me to post anonymously - but to go as far as refusing me read access? Really? Actually tackling the problem, hmm. Storing a single cookie on the cloudflare domain so I only have to auth with CloudFlare once, would be better than nothing. I don't like the tracking aspect of that though. Maybe there's some kind of advanced crypto which will solve this in a privacy conscious manner one day. Unless IPv6 takes off fast more IP addresses are going to be shared. It's simply a terribly crude measure to assume IP address = person.
  - 12y ago

MyDogHasFleas 12y ago

re Internet Slowdown: I'm stuck on a dissonance between the status as presented vs. the reality as I understand it. I may well be wrong/uninformed and I'm happy to be educated if so. Here's the status as presented: "Battleforthenet.com (a project of Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, Fight for the Future, and Free Press) has organized a day of protest against the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online. Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible." Here's my 2 points of dissonance: 1. "...FCC proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online." a) the FCC proposal is about allowing Internet providers to optionally provide higher speed/quality access for a fee, not about "charging" fees "to provide access". b) There's nothing stopping Internet providers from doing this right now, since the original FCC net neutrality regs were shot down by the courts. So saying the FCC proposal would "allow" them to do it is not accurate, as they are "allowed" to do it right now. So, as far as I know, the correct statement would be: "... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the companies' content online." 2. "Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible." From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a company's content.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> "... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the companies' content online." In the context of government regulation "allow" and "not disallow" mean the same thing. But "allow" implies letting monopoly ISPs get away with doing something wrong while "not disallow" implies avoiding unwarranted government interference. You can hardly fault them for their language choice there. And there is very little practical difference between "access" and the lack of "higher quality/speed" necessary for the service to be used. Netflix at four frames per second is hardly "access to Netflix." > From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a company's content. Again, these things are equivalent. There is no difference between "slow down" and "not speed up" in practice. It has the identical result, you're just using different words.

okasaki 12y ago

I wish these were hidden for non-US ips. I don't care about US issues and even if I did there's nothing I could do.