Cloudflare launches app development platform, announces $100M investment fund

The challenges are probably pretty obvious, you have to take this codebase and application which were meant to live on its own and conform it to the way another system works. In the process you have to adapt your deployment, auth, style, etc. to work in this alternative reality. At times it can seem like you spend months working just to get back to the feature set you started with. At others you get to see the vision of an integration you sketched on a whiteboard six months ago become reality and you're blown away that this crazy idea could ever actually work. The definition of 'you' also changed a lot in that process, we went from being a small team to getting support and assistance from dozens of passionate people. It's a very different world where your resources can scale to your vision, instead of having to compromise what you want to build at every turn.

Particularly when you work at a company with as sweeping a vision as Cloudflare, you also get a chance to expand your vision itself. At Eager it was a romantic dream to think we would get on a hundred thousand sites. With our launch today we reach six million. The idea of a $100mm apps fund, or having 60 apps in the store before we even launched, were not things which startup-Eager could have pulled off.

My biggest surprise is gonna be a little silly but it's it's when someone builds a really great app without any help or guidance. As much work as you put into the API or docs it's always a little shocking when someone builds something from scratch on the platform you work on every day, and it works well, out of the box.

Interesting idea. jgc AT cloudflare to tell me more.

Cloudflare will need to hire a sandboxing expert for that.

Wait...

What if a booter site advertises itself and says "you must confirm you have legal authority to run an attack test against this site"? What if it's legal in <some jurisdiction>?

CF should only take down sites after getting a direct court order to stop services (even then jurisdiction is an issue).

I would have been happy to give him the benefit of the doubt and still would. To me it seems to me he continually repeated these claims over the whole incident and ignored people who pointed out that what he was saying was obviously false. I only pointed to the most egregious example.

To be clear, I'm not super worried about companies just screwing up, shit happens. However, I have a personal bias against dealing with people who are dishonest when that happens.

When Anonymous ran some anti-ISIS operation, they accused CloudFlare of "hosting" dozens of pro-ISIS sites[1]. It turns out Anonymous was entirely wrong about the CloudFlare customer sites (confirmed by DHS) and hypocritical (because CloudFlare tried to remain content-indifferent and, as such, protects lots of Anonymous sites). But their image took a spanking for it in the news, despite (1) investigating the claims, (2) contacting DHS to confirm they were in the right, (3) having a rational counterargument (even if it wasn't as simply as "TERRORISTS!!!!1!!1one").

Remaining quiet isn't the solution either. @eastdakota was actively corresponding with the HN community while his security+product teams were actively mitigating the "CloudBleed" damage.

Sometimes you will lose the news cycle, even if you are in the right and did everything right as a company should.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...

Your "code" looks VERY similar to the code you would write for a chrome web extension. The delivery mechanism for the code is the MITM capability...looks very much like edge-side-includes.

They have a sample app here: https://github.com/CloudflareApps/CornerRibbon

The reality is, you can inject advertisements into content at the proxy level that are better for peoples' privacy, keep pages fast, and are less disruptive for readers.

The thing is, publishers have a ton of unsellable inventory that you can blame on ad blockers, but it's really the end result of shitty advertising and privacy overreaches. Doing better ads will get them around ad blockers, but doing better ads from the beginning may have prevented the rise of ad blockers at all.

Only a select few news sources will survive. Local news in non-metropolitan areas will be even worse than it is now. People will start consuming news exclusively from the one or two (maximum) sources they pay for, whereas now they probably read at least one article from 50+ sources every month.

Elections will happen, but very few people will actually have enough information. All political oversight will seize, because actual behaviour is no longer tied to re-election. But, at least, most politicians will have very nice names.

Alternative scenario: smart blocking: start with allowing all, then blacklist individual ads based on the publisher, content/behaviour of the ad, and reputation of the ad network. That would incentive ads to actually get better.

This seems analogous to when FB neutered FP Games from NewsFeed, Zynga took a nosedive and Zynga didn't seem to thrive outside of the FB App ecosystem.

Maybe it's not a bad idea to invest in cloudflare :)

I guess my main confusion is that I don't understand the audience who would benefit from these apps. I imagine one member of the audience is someone who runs a popular blog and want to add a widget but don't want to copy and paste code.

A quick search on Google would solve my problem, or I'd hire someone on eLance to make the change for me instead of paying a monthly subscription for an app.