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Cloudflare is cancer. And the tumor is now too big.
by mathfailure 5mo ago
Cloudflare is cancer. And the tumor is now too big.
- ufocia 5mo agoHow so?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Cpoll 5mo agoYou've got it backwards. Spain's ISPs are blocking Cloudflare and other CDNs because of LaLiga/football piracy. CloudFlare isn't doing anything here.
- sph 5mo agoYou are correct, but Cloudflare is still a cancer on the Internet.
- petcat 5mo agoRampant bot traffic and scrapers are the real cancer. Until that goes away everyone is going to need cloudflare or some other bot firewall service.
- Duwensatzaj 5mo agoIt won’t. Some people are perfectly happy to destroy and destroy as long as they get some small portion as profit for themselves.
- sph 5mo agoThat, ironically, includes Cloudflare. Without rampant bots making the internet worse for everybody, they wouldn't have as much work. And their portion of profit is anything but small.
- adrian_b 5mo agoPerhaps that is true, but the Cloudflare anti-bot protection is too stupid and annoying. They should have used a cookie or something else that does not require asking me every few minutes to prove once more that I am not a bot. There was a time when Cloudflare had become less intrusive, but for the last months it has begun again to intervene almost each time when opening some pages. There is no doubt that anti-bot protection can be implemented in a better way than Cloudflare does, but presumably the alternatives would consume more resources on their servers, so probably they choose whatever minimizes their costs, regardless if that ensures maximum discomfort for Internet users.
- post-it 5mo agoYou're getting frequent verification requests because you're behaving like a bot. Are you modifying your user agent string or using a VPN?
- encom 5mo agoWho knows what upsets ClownFlare? I'm using Vivaldi on Linux on IPv6 in Denmark with every uBlock filter enabled and Cookie Auto-delete. That seems to confuse and anger CloudFlare and I get CAPTCHA tarpitted constantly.
- bethekidyouwant 5mo agoSo you know why.
- encom 5mo agoNo, it could be any, or other, totally normal and reasonable factors. Or maybe I posted too much Cloudflare hate on HN and they singled me out. They're in the walls! NO CARRIER +CREG: 0,0
- post-it 5mo ago> They should have used a cookie or something else that does not require asking me every few minutes to prove once more that I am not a bot. > every uBlock filter enabled and Cookie Auto-delete Hmm
- fc417fc802 5mo agoThose are easy enough to dissuade with readily available PoW solutions. People use CF & co. out of convenience, the exact same reason that most websites load resources from at least half a dozen third parties instead of self hosting.
- jbxntuehineoh 5mo agocf is failing to comply with Spanish law and as a result is being blocked in Spain
- otterley 5mo agoI know this is an unpopular opinion among freedom maximalists, but: It’s precisely because CloudFlare isn’t responding like other CDNs to reasonable demands to cut off pirate origin sites that this mess exists. If they reacted quickly to remove configurations that are obviously facilitating copyright infringement, Spain wouldn’t resort to full scale ASN blocking. How do we know it’s CloudFlare? Because other CDNs like CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, etc. respond to takedown demands and aren’t being blocked. (Those also cost money and require customer identification.) In an escalating war between the state and a corporation, the state will always prevail if they have the public’s backing. In Spain it’s clear that most people are happy to watch the match through legitimate channels even at the cost of blocking CloudFlare.
- FireBeyond 5mo ago> It’s precisely because CloudFlare isn’t responding like other CDNs to reasonable demands to cut off pirate origin sites that this mess exists. If they reacted quickly to remove configurations that are obviously facilitating copyright infringement, Spain wouldn’t resort to full scale ASN blocking. Apropos of anything else, CF is (reasonably) requiring a court order to remove offending material rather than just "well, company said so, so eh, just do as they say". La Liga complains that "oh, that's too slow for what we want" and just got a blanket ruling. I am not a fan of CF but your argument seems to be "CF should just roll over any time someone says "hey, delete this", because, obviously, everyone knows it's problematic, right? Right?".
- otterley 5mo agoAt least the DMCA in the U.S. has guardrails: not just anyone can send a takedown demand for everything. The requester has identify the works and declare under penalty of perjury that they are operating on the behalf of the owner. I imagine the equivalent EU law has similar requirements. CloudFlare uses legal chicanery to try to subvert the DMCA by claiming that because they’re not the origin server, they’re not subject to takedown demands. So far no court has told them to knock it off. I expect that day will eventually come. Every lawsuit against them to date has ended in a settlement because CloudFlare would rather pay up than get an unfavorable ruling on the books. CloudFlare has consistently treated loss of DMCA safe harbor protection as a material business risk; it’s been cited in every SEC filing from the 2019 IPO S-1 through the FY2025 10-K.
- hiccuphippo 5mo agoPor que no los dos? Both blanked IP blocking and creating single points of failure are bad.
- petcat 5mo agoSpain is mandating their ISPs block cloudflare to stop people from illegally streaming soccer games. Cloudflare isn't the one doing the blocking.
- imcritic 5mo agoIsn't the ONLY one doing blocking. I'm not from Spain and instead of Spanish ISP I get a block from CloudFlare. Now take a wild guess: which one is bigger - some Spanish ISP or CF?
- StrLght 5mo agoYou made a few typos in "LaLiga"
- skgsergio 5mo agoI can agree on how much power on the global traffic they have, but this blocks affect many other CDNs like Fastly, Akamai, CDN77, BunnyCDN, Alibaba...