Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

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I really hate this framing. The title is an old meme, but to me it always feels like a false way to present your case by making it feel more "official" than it really is. I'd rather it be titled something like "Here's why you should be careful when using Cloudflare" or "Cloudflare runs into issues when using Tor or disabling JavaScript". The framing shuts down all debate, and ignores that it's mostly just considered harmful by the author. (more: https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html)

I personally love Cloudflare. It's made a ton of stuff a lot easier for me as a developer. Sure, there's some downsides... but that's true with any service. (And a lot of the complaints are opt-in features that the web developer enabled)

It seems the author only has problems with Cloudflare almost completely because he uses Tor. Unfortunately, most Tor traffic is malicious (94%, by Cloudflare's count), and the whole point of Cloudflare is to prevent malicious attacks.

Anytime you do something for privacy (block ads, disable JS, use Tor), unfortunately things won't always work exactly how you expect.

Lastly, it ends with a weird conspiracy theory... "It is probably a US Government-attached intelligence agency". Okay.

He may be biased for using Tor but it does come with a lot of problems even for non-Tor users, the 5 seconds wait it forces on a vast amount of users[0] have cumulatively wasted thousands of man-hours world-wide, sometimes I even close the site before the 5 seconds and click the next google search result because that is a bit faster (or at least less annoying).

In the same vein there are thousands of users complaining on Twitter[1] -and everywhere else- every day about the captcha CloudFare forced upon them

[0] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/154975/what-is-...

[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=Captcha%20cloudflare&src=typed_...

I worry about Cloudflare, but for different reasons. They are supposedly 10% of Internet traffic now, and probably much higher if you net out video and other things they aren't currently trying to gain marketshare in. Just the general monoculture worry around security, reliability, etc. Especially since they seem to front a lot of the smaller, independent web sites that I like.

If there was a competitor I'd switch immediately. But (as far as I know) no one else offers a comparable feature set with a free Basic plan. I'm a paying Cloudflare customer but only for those projects that are worth it.

And I wouldn't even need any of the newer features (even though I love Access). WAF, CDN and DDOS protection on a free plan for hobby projects would already be enough.

Makes for a great investment though, and the stock is currently below IPO price with earnings coming up Nov 7.

I’d probably buy now.

CloudFlare up today almost 8% after my recommendation.

He also fails to mention some details about Tor itself:

- The bulk of the funding for Tor's development has come from the federal government of the United States, initially through the Office of Naval Research and DARPA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

- Using Tor gets attention to you

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nsa-use-linux-or-tor-you...

> It seems the author only has problems with Cloudflare almost completely because he uses Tor.

Partly because they use Tor, partly because they use a browser which supports neither Javascript, frames, nor images (i.e, Lynx). What both of these things have in common is that they are problems of the writer's own creation.

Also, Cloudflare's email address munging is optional. Web site operators can (and usually should) disable it.

> Partly because they use Tor, partly because they use a browser which supports neither Javascript, frames, nor images (i.e, Lynx). What both of these things have in common is that they are problems of the writer's own creation.

Technically it the developers whose sites don't degrade gracefully who created the problem for users. JS, images, frames, and trackability are not required to deliver much of what people want out of the web.

But then these devs look at the market consuming their site and see that about 0.5% of the users need graceful degrading and decide there are more important issues to work on. Can we blame them?

For cases where those features add little or no value, yes we can blame the producers.

That's a bit ironic given that we are browsing a website that degrades gracefully without JavaScript, frames or images.

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