Ensuring that the web is for everyone | Hacker News Reader

Ensuring that the web is for everyone

blog.cloudflare.com

46 pointsjgrahamc19 comments

As I've found with Cloudflare-backed sites: Tor and non-JavaScript tools equals no access.

This includes both console-mode browsers and shell-based tools such as curl or wget.

I find this surprising seeing as cloudflare blocked me on shared wifi while traveling internationally from accessing many sites, claiming it was to prevent email spam. They were blocking more sites than over zealous hotel and government internets. When I started a thread about how they were blocking from a significant percentage of hotel and coffeeshop wifi's in various countries their response was find other wifi. Really seems like you need to turn down the filtering.

Good. Please stop serving captchas to every tor user then.

We are working to fix that. It's not trivial because there are many bad Tor users and we don't want to just 'whitelist' Tor otherwise it'll make Tor more attractive for bad folks.

Then it's not "for everyone", is it?

Bad actors should have their rights taken away. That's just normal society and has been for thousands of years.

Now, pre-crime is what's going on here, and that's not going to end well.

I don't think it's particularly hyperbolic to say "everyone" even if you actually don't mean to include people who are trying to harm you. That's generally assumed.

"Supporting everyone means that all CloudFlare sites are accessible to everyone who uses the web"

Your goal is to support everyone from a technological perspective but also profile everyone to block anyone AI deems "bad". Somehow I don't think the creators of the web envisioned a single corporation acting as a gatekeeper and judge of moral character on such a pervasive scale in this way.

Not what I was expecting based on the title. But it is an important principle that should be more widely followed. Good on them.

Would it be possible to make options available to customers to select what type of compatibility they would like to strive for?

What if I am okay with not supporting Android 2.x which doesn't ciphersuite Y?

Is this in response to something?

Not to anything public. This is just an internal email I sent out to the team to make sure they think about this. You read an older email I sent out here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/courage-to-change-things/

Good reminder generally, but on our mind specifically as we think through browser makers' plans to deprecate SHA1 for HTTPS connections. We'll post more on that topic soon.

Nice, but what does this mean for CloudFlare specifically? It's usually not CF but their customers who make websites that are heavy to download or render.

Is it things like continue to support HTTP 1.0/1.1 and older ciphers when required?

couldn't help but look at that pic of the Berners-Lee Mosaic and think...this is for everyone, unless you're in places like...India...Eastern China...Australia..actually all of Asia-Pac...haha. ;-) ;-)

Here is that moment from the Olympic ceremony

https://youtu.be/4As0e4de-rI?t=1h17m25s

>..on a new Mac

really?

Most SV people are running Mac.

I was surprised when I realized this too, but it's true. e.g. PyCon Taiwan http://yyc.solvcon.net/writing/2013/after_pycontw_2013/ jQuery Conference http://blogs.splunk.com/2013/09/25/splunking-jquery-conferen...

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