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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare gets so much undeserved hate on HN. You guys do amazing work, provide an incredible service and your writeups are awesome. Thank you.

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I think their work is fantastic, but I really don't like that every site I visit meets me with CF's captcha page. It's not only annoying per se, but the privacy implications are unsettling. I welcome the competition.

This was never the intention. Part of the problem is inertion - cf operates large and complex application that was designed back when we had only a handful of customers. Part of the problem is technical - the privacy-centric anti-abuse technologies don't exist yet.

Please do help us fix this. Report issues, help us understand when we have incorrect IP reputation. Help us find captcha accessibility problems. And maybe - join the team to actually code the fix.

Problem is, your "incorrect IP reputation" concept is fundamentally flawed. As an example, I noticed that most VPN exit nodes have "incorrect IP reputation", which means if I want to browse the internet without my government spying on me, I have to wade through all your CAPTCHAs.

Keep in mind, unless you're using your own personal VPN off a self-hosted machine, you're likely to be sharing your IP address with other (potentially) malicious actors trying to hide their tracks

Same as if being on an ISP though.

ISPs have a much larger pool of addresses, so less or no sharing.

“fundamentally flawed” is not synonymous with “not supporting the style of anonymity which I prefer”. There's no evidence supporting the assumption that those VPN exit nodes’ IP reputation is actually incorrect rather than earned by the behaviour of other customers.

We went through this in the 90s where a few people were upset that they couldn't send email directly from their dialup connection, because they were still thinking of the world as it was in 1993 before spam became so prevalent and anyone who ran a mail server was constantly trying to deal with thousands of dialup IPs trying to deliver spam. What actually worked was that people changed the way they worked to use things like authenticated SMTP relays so you could simply block entire dialup ranges rather than try to come up with a spam-blocking AI.

The browsing system could be improved by something like a CloudFlare login system or long-term persistent authentication storage so you'd only see a CAPTCHA once a week. Unfortunately, most of the complaints come from very pro-anonymity users – which is a legitimate position but also means that it's a community which is going to be significantly more likely than average to have things like cookie & JavaScript blocking, so the complaints would simply shift to “I shouldn't have to create an account!” or “Why can't I disable JavaScript and cookies for your site!?!”

I stand by my assertion — the idea that an IP address can have "reputation" is fundamentally flawed. The SMTP example that you cite is actually a good one: the whole reason why we started assigning "reputation" to IP addresses is because we could not be bothered to improve SMTP over the last 40 years or so and it still assumes we live in a world of trust.

CloudFlare (and everyone else for that matter) should stop assigning "reputation" to IP addresses. An IP address is a network location, think of it as a temporary storage box which could be occupied by anyone and anything. We should move beyond coloring boxes.

So what's your alternative? People use addresses because they're a strong signal with relatively low false-positives (not many people are tor/VPN users with cookie blocking). How do we do better short of deploying a login system or a unique client identifier which cannot be disabled?

This is an inherent problem with numerous different people using the same IP addresses (VPN, Tor, etc). And might be a bigger problem than Cloudflare can resolve on their own. Cloudflare has to protect its network and its customers like a normal business, so VPN and Tor IP addresses will naturally be viewed with suspicion.

Also, I think the captcha solution is better than what most administrators do, which is to block those IPs outright.

There is probably no solution to this problem. Criminals regularly use those same services you're using.

Cloudflare's job is to block potential attacks, and blocking or CAPTCHA-restricting a subnet tied to a large number of attacks against their infrastructure seems reasonable.

Either switch VPN providers, or deal with the CAPTCHAs.

I love CloudFlare, but understand the concern some people have.

With the amount of sites they have behind them, and the amount of visibility and data they can extract, it is actually a bit scary to think what will happen if they get compromised or "do evil".

But so far, they seem to take the open and ethical approach and actually follow the "do no evil" mantra. CloudFlare is another Google in the making and I hope they keep like that.

thanks,

Yeah, but they've also the "Wifi Captive Portal" of the internet, which frequently creates trouble (if you're using Tor for example).

Tor is used for abuse. If you want the privacy* you get with Tor the price you pay is that sites and services will check that you're not one of the abusers. At least it's not a flat-out ban. Any other large network on such a small IP space (as an example maybe a NAT-using mobile ISP) would be checked just as harshly.

* Or any other reason you're using it.

Edit: If I'm wrong can you please reply explaining why? I'm having an emotional rollercoaster of up and downvotes here! Please do feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, we all need learnin'

that's a pretty poor excuse. why is privacy only available by submitting to a poor experience? privacy should be default, not a punishment

You're looking at it purely from the user side. Look at it from the admin side. Tor is basically a massive open proxy, and by blocking it or throwing up human checks like captchas, you eliminate a significant source of spam and abuse.

There's not much to be done about this otherwise - a Tor user is sharing a network with a significantly higher than usual amount of the bad elements of the internet.

You can put captchas where they belong—on comments etc. Instead, Cloudflare punishes people simply browsing; they nuke the 99.99999% of visitors that have zero intention of interacting with the page beyond doing few GETs.

Oh and don’t forget they’ll even put the captchas on subdomains, like img.domain.tld. Go visit stackoverflow via VPN/TOR and watch how the site has no styling/images even if you do their stupid captcha on stackoverflow.com. They’ll still serve you another one on static{1-50}.stackoverflow.com. Fun.

A few GETs spread out the right way and repeated often enough is a DDOS.

There's a very good reason why Cloudflare does this. Cloudflare isn't "punishing" anybody, their job is to protect the people that use their service. Tor (or any other open proxy) is a massive source of bogus and/or abusive traffic.

Of course they’re punishing legitimate visitors. If there weren’t any humans getting captchas there wouldn’t be any need for captchas in the first place.

It wouldn’t be so bad, except Cloudflare doesn’t have any idea what they’re doing. Like the static.domain.tld issue I’ve mentioned—not even documented. This breaks websites in a very, very, bad way.

Next we have the lovely security setting called “Essentially-off.” Which does absolutely nothing to the captcha system. Apparently “essentially” means “not really,” according to Cloudflare.

Also forget VPN/Tor. I’m getting consistently captchad by Cloudflare just visiting mostly american-only websites from residential networks in Europe.

They’re either incompetent or just plain malicious. Right now I’m swaying towards the latter :/

I run a site (not behind CF), and Tor is used heavily to scrape our uncacheable and extremely heavy to render pages for abusive/content theft purposes.

All you just said is that your site is broken.

Using a massively shared IP space of any kind is only available by submitting to a poor experience.

Nobody is saying "hey this guy has privacy, lets make this experience a pain in the arse". They're saying "Man this set of specific IPs are really hammering my system looking for WordPress exploits and we're not even running that".

To treat Tor better than regular traffic would be to discriminate against Tor, which would invite more abuse of Tor.

So carrier-grade NATs should also be captchad to hell. Somehow, they aren’t. Very mysterious, indeed.

Do many malicious entities have easy access to carrier-grade NATs?

Man just read up I'm essentially just summarising this anyway: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/

Sure they do. They’re called ‘botnets.’[1]

[1] https://luminati.io/

Pure rough estimates, but consumer ISP subnets are probably ~1-3% malicious, while with Tor's rotating IPs, if you look over the past 5 years odds are at least 40% of exit node IPs have been associated with malicious activity at least once.

It makes perfect sense to add additional verification challenges for Tor users.

Also, anecdotal, but I work in infosec for a large US company and see a lot of traffic and read a lot of logs every day. The majority of all spam, fraud, and scan activity comes from Tor, or consumer-advertised VPN services, or various European VPSs. Residential ISPs (excluding Chinese and Russian ones) make up almost no part of it, relative to those others.

I'm pretty sure Cloudflare's challenge criteria is sourced from real data they've generated from traffic they've seen. They aren't trying to single out Tor users.

> It makes perfect sense to add additional verification challenges for Tor users.

I’m actually perfectly fine with that. The issue is how Cloudflare does it. They should just offer something like X-Cloudflare-Fraud-Score header or even <x-cloudflare-protected-frame /> tag (they’re already doing SSI), but instead they just nuke the hell out of everything.

The way they do ‘protection’ is openly hostile to open web, or even neutral web. Whether this affects Tor disproportionately or not is a minor point.

As a site operator you basically must use Cloudflare and highly aggressive policies regarding Tor.

I like Tor as a concept, the problem is that there is no way to stop people massively abusing Tor.

Whatever you want - nazi/hate speech, swatting, trolling, DDoS (by hitting expensive render paths or by forcing cache bypasses) - operate any kind of site with user interactions and you will get messed around with by mostly Tor-using scum, since trolls have understood by now that exposing their real IP will lead to them being v&d.

I don't like Cloudflare as a SPOF for half the internet, but for now they seem to be the only one able to reduce the impact of crap you have to deal with as a site op to a manageable level.

Trolls are destroying the Internet.

As a site operator, I have Tor (T1) whitelisted on all of my CloudFlare websites and have no additional spam problems or anything else. CloudFlare doesn't even catch all of my malicious traffic (spammers, mostly) -- even StopForumSpam doesn't do a 100% perfect job.

Counter-anecdote: I run a fairly small community and deal with an absurd amount of problems (spam, child pornography, threats, attempted attacks) sourcing from Tor and VPNs like PrivateInternetAccess.

I'm very glad CF exists. It certainly doesn't catch all bad traffic in my case either, but it helps. I don't think any cloud security service can ever stop all spam or bot activity.

> Trolls are destroying the Internet.

{blinking text|viruses|spam|IE6|blackouts|myspace|visual basic|2400bps|java|javascript|EMP}

rumors of its imminent demise might be exaggerated.. ;)

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