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Comment by eastdakota | Hacker News Reader

I am a lawyer and also the CEO of Cloudflare. I have no idea why that clause is in our ToS. It was a surprise to me when it was pointed out recently. Not sure when or why it got included. Best guess is it was when some “stress tester” services decided to “benchmark” us by performing DDoS attacks and we thought we needed another justification to shut them off. Has been a loooong time since we worried about such things. Regardless, we decided weeks ago we’re removing the clause during the next ToS refresh. That’s scheduled for the coming weeks. And, in the meantime, have no issue with anyone benchmarking our performance. And seems we should do a more thorough and unimpeachable set of comparisons ourselves. Stay tuned.

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I appreciate this reply, and hope the initial engineer gets no flak for his personal opinions attempting to defend your company. It's nice to see a tech company with employees defending it and leadership making such public statements as this.

Kenton is a star and they're lucky to have him. But I don't think he was defending the company, rather defending his own work.

They seem to be one in the same.

Yep. When you're the tech lead for a significant feature in a very significant company, indeed they are one and the same. Whether you want them to be or not.

Not quite at the level of a public figure (Pres. Biden can't go around making flippant comments) but more than being just a private citizen or "I just work here". No amount of disclaimer can remove that, and for better or worse it's part and parcel with the job.

It's not the same. The lead dev is not responsible for all marketing around his work. That responsibility lies with the author and any editors of the blog post. Ultimately the CEO can be held responsible for both dev and marketing and they already did own the TOS issue here.

I upvoted Kenton’s post. He’s the reason Workers exists. Surprised anyone worried about him commenting. I’d only be worried if I were a competitor who pissed him off by publishing BS stats. I’d imagine there’ll be an incredibly thorough and totally unimpeachable benchmarking study that comes out of this. And, anywhere we’re not the fastest, we soon will be. Game on.

> I’d only be worried if I were a competitor who pissed him off by publishing BS stats

An unusual and excellent CEO stance. Now I like Cloudflare even more.

Cloudlfare and other CDNs like it are a scourge on the Internet destroying privacy. At this point they have better tracking hooks than Google.

No JS required, just feed all web requests directly through them where they can see all first party cookies, encrypted contents, etc.

Why would you send a CDN any cookies?

What do you think a CDN is? How do you think CDNs like Cloudflare works? They act as a complete proxy to all web requests, including cookies.

Truuuue. I suppose I meant cookies are normally an encrypted ID with a user salt. So what would be the harm? But you're right; my actual question was something else.

CF as a CDN is for much more than just sending static assets. Folk put whole-ass huge applications behind that infrastructure.

At the same time can you change 2.2(a) and remove the "or sign up on behalf of a third party"? My clients are not technical, and when they do manage to sign up they then email me their login details in plain text...

Without this in your T&Cs I could create the account for them in a couple of minutes. And avoid doing a screenshare to walk those who fail through the sign up process.

If you're employed by your clients and do it in their name, doesn't that make you the first party? I'm no lawyer but I can imagine it's to legally be able to close off bots and other shady services.

> If you're employed by your clients and do it in their name, doesn't that make you the first party?

If you're an employee, yes. If you're a consultant, contractor, freelancer or similar then you are a third party doing as you do it on behalf of your client (the first party). This is for UK law, and the distinction of first/thrid party is important when it comes to tax (see IR35 for the mess created).

Perhaps you can have them provide an access key instead? I vaguely recall seeing a button on a 3rd party platform that let me configure my DNS in Cloudflare to route to the 3rd party. Not sure how that flow worked to be honest, but I believe there is some programmatic way to delegate.

Nice. It was a silly jab anyhow, seeing as you need to contact a rep at Fastly to even sign up for their product or get a quote on its cost.

Fastly made it sound like contacting Cloudflare is "impossible", yet here you and one of your top devs are.

I’m just reading, but I appreciate coming to the comment section of a post here and seeing I’m this interaction, the CEO of a company like CloudFlare posting and, to top it off, posting something like this.

> Regardless, we decided weeks ago we’re removing the clause during the next ToS refresh

I've seen you reply about ToS issues before (specifically over caching of non-html assets): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791605

You verbally allowed it in that thread but have you considered officially adding that into the next revision of your ToS too?

So you haven't read the agreement which you ask all the customers to agree to? Lame.

Good move.

As for "stand-up" with Fastly, I believe the whole situation brings only negative consequences on both parties. I always become wary towards any service that posts comparisons with its competitors (or simply with services of similar nature).

Good luck and wise decisions to you.

Love these direct founder responses. Makes me trust the service more than any amount of benchmarks

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