cloudfare bad

Only if you don’t know what Cloudlfare does. It protects against all kinds of attacks.

Yeah this post is nearly upsettingly ignorant.

Cloudflare is just about the only big internet company out there objectively doing good things for the Internet.

This seems like saying road construction makes driving objectively worse or security guards make a stadium venue objectively worse.

BACK IN MY DAY WE BROUGHT RIFLES TO GAME DAY TO TAUNT THE PLAYERS

Maybe their point is just privatisation or something.

For example a dns provider like cloudfare just could artificially make latency costs for servers that don’t agree with something cloudfare does bigger, which would result in them being less likely to be displayed in a search result because a search engine would have IP adresses faster from other servers. This obviously depends on if a search engine makes dns requests or just provides hostnames for the end user.

And then you could change your 1.1.1.1 to 8.8.8.8 and be free 🫢

Right now.

But everybody is also moving into their castle. Many for free.

They are not allowed to let people do that unless they have an argument that, somehow, this makes money for the owners of Cloudflare. Maybe that’s in the form of good publicity. Maybe they’re hoping to set up some tollbooths at the castle gate, once enough people are inside and the other options have withered for lack of customers.

They have existed for over a decade wtf are you on about. They’re publicly traded and doing very well.

This is more nonsense in a thread full of nonsense.

I dont like monopolies, but a world without cloud flare would go down constantly just because a few script kiddies decided to ddos something

Also made my company I worked for saved ton of money, instead of using other usage-based CDN since we got some ddos for the past year.

The CF Pages and their video encoding platform also ok and easy to use.

My negative experiences as an end user take priority over any positive experience told to me by a third party in a usage case that doesn’t apply to me.

Most of the time that a site is using Cloudflare you’ve likely not noticed and it has improved your experience.

You’re all circle jerking around the problem. Proxy DNS and CDN’s should be decentralised into standard protocols and not centralised into one company, for what should be obvious reasons (privacy being one of them).

I use CloudFlare on my websites and I feel like I don’t have a choice. The fact that it’s free to use proxy DNS is the kicker here, and the big selling point behind the DDoS protections. But the milliseconds CF DNS and page caching shave off page loads is also dangerous, because now it becomes mandatory if your websites are actually competing against someone else.

Again: this is a single entity, a single point of failure and in effect a monopoly. We don’t just get to use it, we have to use it.

Of course one can’t complain unless one has made an effort to do something about it, like I dunno, make a national version of CloudFlare?

Mwahahahaha! Didn’t like that one, did you?!? Soon that will be mandatory and departments that investigate will honeypot your ass when they need a some justification for taking your in for a little private interrogation… wait, no, GO BACK!!

Okay, so protocols. Hard as fuck, static as hell. Yes? But, decentralised. Si? DNS proxying and content caches are staples of the modern internet. Content go quick, content go real quick ya. All we need to do is figure out a way to facilitate those things without having to rely on a single company, government body or even access to the many nodes that comprise the internet.

We used to write spec, damnit! We must return to the source. I have been some schmuck on the internet and this was my TL;DR.

If cloudflare wasn’t a thing your negative experiences as an end user would be worse

Your experience as an end user is only available because cloudflare exists. That’s why your end user opinion doesn’t matter, because bad actors are constantly trying to ruin the internet and cloudflare is the gatekeeper. As a server owner I need security at the door to keep our illegal activity. Your opinion of “I don’t like security at the door” is dually noted and immediately thrown away.

“You only know about the bad thing because the bad thing exists” what a compelling argument. Did you know water makes things wet because it’s wet?

Yes, speed limits are dumb it affect me personally idc how it benefits the rest of us. Great philosophy.

What?? I thought cloudflare is good. Free Ddos protection, etc.

Single point of failure for the whole internet.

Only because no one does what they do as well as they do it.

If they had competition, that wouldn’t be the case. Sadly, there are very few other good guys out there…

What about akamai? Other CDNs and the like.

I wouldn’t call clourflare a single point.

Their management control plane absolutely is a single point of failure.

If cloudflare goes down you can just update DNS to not use it …

Agreed, and I would say what cloudflare does for the internet (their work on the IETF, generally letting small sites stay alive without needing an SRE to worry about DDoS attacks, etc) outweighs the general negative possibility of them being a potential single point of failure

Well the admin of a site could opt out of using cloudflare for the time being, a user could do literally nothing. Errors in Cloudflare can easily take down their servers and therefore the CDN and access to like 20% of websites. And Bugs in Cloudflare can even leak user data.

So cloudflare can grant DDOS Protection, CDNs and other exploiting protection, but can take down large parts of everything, temporarily or permanently.

Shhhh you can’t just be reasonable here. This guy watched a YouTube video, he knows what he’s talking about

If cloudflare decided not to host my server I would have a bit of downtime, a couple of hours, but I’d be up again on someone else’s CDN tomorrow. I don’t think OP understands the role of cloudflare at all.

We use their CDN, and they do our load balancing for work and they’re great at it.

There are benefits and costs. Cloudflare makes it easy to maintain high uptime as a small site sysadmin at the cost of free DDoS protection isn’t actually free. Cloudflare turns all users of websites that employ it into the products of surveillance capitalism

O.o Do you understand what Cloudflare actually does?

Provides a single point of failure for a large portion of the internet that nobody else has any control over?

Using cloudflare is more reliable than using your own stuff which is still an option that nobody chooses anymore because it’s better to choose cloudflare or something similar.

I’m going to go ahead and assume you don’t work with internet security in any way, have no experience in web development, and have never attempted to provide web application services to more people than you can count on your fingers, but if you had, cloudflare is mana from heaven.

This persons main connection to the internet is hentai.

Just… save your braincells.

Well no but I heard other people say it’s bad and give some half reasons why. Why do I need to understand the tech if I just want to be mad about it? /s

Fr though cloudflare is a giant, but they give some hardcore protections to little guys like me. If they ever were bad to me I’d switch to akamai or something. Plus if we’re going to talk about monopolizing the web let’s talk about Google, Azure, and AWS.

Oh no, centralising DNS and CDN traffic which are critical for the web and the internet into a single company is a bad idea?! Who knew!?!

While that can indeed be considered an issue, the idea that this somehow makes the internet objectively worse is debatable.

there is no debate i am always correct :)

Honestly, I don’t know how any end user who doesn’t understand IT and wasn’t around before services like Cloudflare were available can say this. They objectively don’t have the information or experience to make the claim.

Cloudflare is solving some really big problems, right? Like DDOS?

I’ve been using the intermet since 2003 and have seen no difference except when cloudfare breaks.

Yes, the internet is much bigger than it was in 2003, and it needs more complex protective tools. The fact that you haven’t noticed cloudflare when it is working is a sign that it is, well, working.

And the fact that your favorite sites aren’t down more often is yet another sign. Downtime due to DDOS attacks alone would be so much greater without cloudflare than downtime due to cloudflare currently is. Your perspective is a pure lack of knowledge and an excess of confirmation bias.

It’s the eternal IT conundrum. Something goes wrong: “What are we paying you for?!” Everything goes right: “What are we paying you for?!”

It’s best to ignore the users as much as possible and just keep working.

In before they start hating on aws.

Have you ever self hosted a website? Was that a modern website, or just a bunch of text? Are you experienced with uptime SLAs on multiple services? Have you ever had to deal with a DDOS attack?

There are lots of things that Cloudflare does that requires experience and knowledge to notice or understand. And it isn’t even the biggest single point of failure when it comes to the Internet. When AWS has an outage for instance there is a huge chunk of the Internet that goes down.

There are problems with the centralization of the Internet. But this happened for a reason, and it has been so long and these services have been so reliable that people don’t even realize what it was like before.

I can answer that for you! No. They have never self hosted a website. In fact, I doubt they have ever connected to a website via any protocol beyond http/https. I’d bet a paycheck on it.