Hacker News Reader

Comment by malikNF | Hacker News Reader

Update 2:

-----------------------------

Helo,

To clarify the issue, this account was identified in a recent fraud review, however it appears to have been a false positive. We have left a note in this account for future reference.

Kind Regards, Cloudflare Trust & Safety

View on HN

That's really quite worrying. You'd have been screwed without HN, but not everyone has that recourse. How many other domains have been affected by "false positives" announced with a "we've banned you and we aren't telling you why; now fuck off" type email.

Not to mention the "don't worry, we've put a sticky note on this account so it won't happen again (to you)" instead of an "oh shit, we need to immediately stop and fix this automated process that is catching legitimate customers and banning them with no recourse."

Very worrying. One of the reasons I'd choose a non-huge company like Cloudflare would be I'm less likely to encounter one of these "our automation banned you, we won't tell you why, fuck off" episodes. Looks like more and more companies are cargo-culting this horrible practice.

Waiting for my utility company to turn off my heat: "Your house is fraud. We won't tell you how we know. Fuck off and freeze."

Cloudflare is by no means a "non-huge company" - don't they route/cdn like 1/4 of the entire internet?

going with cloudflare is a choice towards centralization.

I read it as

> non-(huge company like Cloudflare)

not

> (non-huge company) like Cloudflare

> one of these "our automation banned you, we won't tell you why, fuck off" episodes

More like "We can't tell you because it's AI and the (AI) won't tell us why it made that decision".

I agree 100%. And yes, without HN I will be really screwed.

I am really curious about this. How screwed is this? Can you move your domain out, if you want to?

Cloudflare marked my domain as PENDING DELETE. So from what I have read in the past few mins my only option was to buy the domain the moment it gets released through another registrar and hope no one else snatches it. So yeh, VERY screwed.

WOW. This sounds extremely bad.

I started using a personal domain just for email to avoid Google AI kind of screwups, I didn’t know a domain name can have this kind of screwups. I am using a traditional domain hosting company now, definitely not going to use this kind of new tech company to handle the most critical thing.

"fraud review". That's intentionally vague, especially considering how often they simply ignore complaints about clear and unambiguous phishing sites they host.

》it appears to have been a false positive

That's a scary answer. Guess I'll put only mirror/backup domains behind CF in the future.

'behind CF' isn't the problem, if I understand you correctly, it's that in OP's case CF was the registrar.

When I reported fraudulent activity (attacks on enterprise accounts) from CF IPs they told me to f*ck off, their customers know what they're doing. Wondering what it takes to ban someone on CF.

Denying abuse and aggressively policing for it are both ways of achieving the same thing, that is, minimising liability

Reply on news.ycombinator.com