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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

> Not to mention their free tier doesn’t cover the complex DDOS attacks that you really should be concerned about

This wasn't true in 2016 and isn't true in 2019 either.

Whilst the system was named and blogged about in Sep 2017 https://blog.cloudflare.com/meet-gatebot-a-bot-that-allows-u... the internal repo has the first working code drop in Feb 2015.

The (D)DoS protection systems and team, which I am the Engineering Manager for, treat all attacks equally according to the nature of the attack rather than the target of the attack.

To address other parts of the blog though, there is nothing in our system that defaults to "do X for IP/Country y"... what there is, is learned state about traffic, clients, and the many layers of customer expressed configuration.

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Yeah, that was my first thought when reading this.

It’s not that Cloudflare is ruining the internet for you. It’s the loads of illegitimate traffic and attacks that just so happen to originate in your country.

This parallels the conversation going on in the ML world right now.

"They just so happen to look like gorillas!"

This is not okay.

I know it's just a pile of linear algebra and there's no conspiracy to screw a particular country.

But once it's brought up that your system is causing harm by increasing inequality in the world, you can't just say "But that's what the algo is spitting out!".

At least try to fix it.

> 1+1=2, but I want it to be 3, why are you not attempting to fix it?

How do you fix that which is not broken?

I understand the problem you are trying to point out, but the problem is not in the technology, it’s in the application.

What learned state says it's okay to prompt for captchas every other click if you've never been a bad internet citizen, exactly?

Help me here.

You aren't being specific. You only restated that you leave a lot of visitors at the mercy of statistical algorithms.

> To address other parts of the blog though, there is nothing in our system that defaults to "do X for IP/Country y"... what there is, is learned state about traffic, clients, and the many layers of customer expressed configuration.

If it is not IP/country, then what would cause this user to be prompted for captcha repeatedly?

Shared ip address most likely. With which someone else is triggering the captcha. Or even a range of ips which are or have been allocated to someone else.

I imagine the solution should come about as follows.

Customers complain about captchas and seek alternative isps.

Someone else provides better connections without tainted ip addresses (without sketchy customers)

OR, the current isp decides to crack down on customers who are being labeled as abusive. Problem solved.

Someone is likely providing cheap internet to sketchy people, who taint the experience for other users. It is on them to crack down and stop selling to sketchy users. Ban their payment methods/identities, so cloudflare doesn't have to ban ips.

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