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Comment by eastdakota | Hacker News Reader

We’ve applied protection for all Cloudflare customers, including those on our free plan: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-customers-are-protect...

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It's funny how over the years I've come to both love and hate (insert Michael Kiwanuka joke here) Cloudflare more and more. The number of use cases where there is substantial benefit is now much larger than I ever foresaw when you guys launched, at the same time Cloudflare now has so much power that any mistakes or changes in direction that bother me have far more impact than before.

Best of luck in navigating this, it's a very fine line.

(For the record, Cloudflare, Stripe and a limited set of other companies are in my opinion some of the few that 'made it big' and that didn't turn into disasters or abusers of their position, in contrast with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and many many others)

This is the paradox of centralization, isn't it -- we can't run our own email servers anymore, because we can't send email to the major providers. We can't run our websites without engaging with CAs because HTTPS is a requirement. We won't be able to run our own platforms, because without the protection of a well-resourced middleman like Cloudflare to stay up 24/7 mitigating our issues, the overcomplexified and permanently insecure state of modern software would be intolerable.

To expand on the irony: All of the things you mentioned are deemed necessary, because the Internet is inherently open and decentralized. Email needs protection against spam and phishing, HTTPS protects against man in the middle attacks and eavesdropping, Cloudflare have services that protect against DDoS attacks and to provide read scale among other things.

I don't think the Internet was envisioned as a cyber war zone.

> I don't think the Internet was envisioned as a cyber war zone.

It was seen as a communications tool during a war, not as the battleground itself...

Indeed it is. And I think this is the reason the centralization/decentralization pendulum is there in the first place. But in the past the return (decentralization) of that pendulum was driven by major advances in technology, this time around that won't be happening and absent another driver we may be more or less stuck.

>we can't run our own email servers anymore, because we can't send email to the major providers. We can't run our websites without engaging with CAs because HTTPS is a

I call it BS, i made many many emailservers, and my customers have no problem's with sending to gmail/hotmail etc.

You either got incredibly lucky, or are talking about experiences in the (relatively distant) past. I say this as someone who also used to run email servers, and long since gave up on it.

Or maybe you don't do it right. SPF (with p=reject), DMARK, DKIM, correct reverse DNS entry, Certs. And for google and hotmail a site-verification code <- This is what you have NOT done right?

Or maybe it's really just luck for the +50 Email-Servers, who knows right?

In response to your final paragraph, I would note that reversion to the mean is a painful, painful thing. It's only a matter of time.

In response to that I would like to note that fish rots from the head. Have a look at the kind of people that run each of these companies and you'll find some remarkable differences.

Today, yes. At some point those people will rotate out.

Well, given that eventually the Himalayas will be flat ground again, yes, sure. But for now those stand out and that sort of reasoning can be used to negate anything in the present. If anything I'd hope that it would inspire them to try really hard not to revert to the mean.

I don't think it negates the present, really. More a matter of making sure we recognise what we've got while we've got it.

If I look at those other companies roughly the same time after they were funded then I think that the only one that deserved the benefit of the doubt was Apple, and only because of Woz's influence. Which gives me some hope.

I completely agree. It's one of those fantastic things that can turn into a nightmare in the blink of an eye.

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