Cloudflare Beta (2009)
projecthoneypot.org
projecthoneypot.org
> A registry of individual e-mail addresses also suffers from severe security/privacy risks that would likely result in registered addresses receiving more spam because spammers would use such a registry as a directory of valid e-mail addresses. It ultimately would become the National Do Spam List. Furthermore, a registry of domains would have no impact on spam and a third-party forwarding service model could have a devastating impact on the e-mail system.
Also, the laws Unspam pushed for were intentionally tailored to make them the only suitable vendor. Leveraging personal connections and paid lobbying to compel taxpayers to fund a counterproductive, privacy-violating and monopolistic service is not what I'd call "doing good" but YMMV.
Disclosure: I worked there with Lee Holloway, Matthew Prince, and others.
But I think these “HNers would appreciate it!” community spokesman kinds of comments are kinda lame. I don’t think HNers need to be spoon fed “I’m Cloudlfare’s CTO btw! :^D” every time the guy rears his head. Especially just to say he never read TFA before…
Like I said, pointed this out 100s of times over years and my experience says otherwise; not my first account, nor will it be my last. Also, not dang, not trying to be dang, but also firmly believe HN is a community and important for the community to express themselves, but also would be more than happy to respect dang’s wishes.
No, appending something like "(disclaimer: CF employee)" is absolutely the norm anytime it could even remotely be construed as a conflict of interest. It might be fine here, but this is an edge case.
That is just annoying. Nor do I think it’s a convincing point coming from someone who suggests they aren’t new here.
imo people new to a community could slow their roll esp in a debate.
I think it's circumstantial. For instance, I don't really think it's necessary for the CTO to have said, "disclaimer: CF employee/CTO/whatever" in this thread. But in this thread[1] from yesterday, I think it would've been helpful.
Do you feel you have been mislead by his post?
To me, fair to assume everyone does not know everyone else, though they might be familiar with a subset of the information, for example, knowing who Cloudflare is. If a user appending affiliation to a comment adds context, to me it makes sense to add it - and not assume or expect users to click your profile, other users point out who you are, etc.
For example, if jgrahamc said "I never knew that. Cloudflare is such an amazing company, everyone should apply for a job there!", then okay, request a disclaimer. But if someone just says "I didn't know that", then the comment goes from mildly interesting (if you know who they are) to boring (if you don't know who they are). The failure mode here for lack of disclaimer is the post just becomes a boring, low-effort comment.
I think jgrahamc adding "I'm the CTO of cloudflare, and I didn't know that!" might have been reasonable context, but no disclaimer is required, because the reader didn't need to be protected from the post. There was no conflict of interest in the post.
Do agree there appears to be degree of simp like behavior going on, which is interesting.
I remember Matt always talking about how Cloudflare was his ultimate vision for the honeypot project -- a way to block bad actors on the internet by aggregating information.
Matthew Prince: CloudFlare Was Inspired by Project Honeypot and the DHS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071978 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
Project HoneyPot: The Web's Largest Community Tracking Online Fraud and Abuse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614182 - April 2014 (1 comment)
1 Billion Spammers Served - Deep Insights into Spam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996698 - Dec 2009 (13 comments)
The original way you signed up for Cloudflare was to give us your GoDaddy username and password and we’d login, slurp the DNS records, then update the name servers. It was magic when it worked. But it was almost too easy so if something broke people didn’t know how to undo what we’d done. Worse: sometimes we’d miss a DNS record like an MX record and be unable to even contact the user.
The crazy thing is we emailed people basically with the content on this page and asking Project Honey Pot users to give us their user names and password. A scary number of people just did without asking any questions.
We put this page up to prove this was a legitimate project after a (scary) few people asked us: “How do I know this isn’t phishing??”
Fun to find it still kicking around 12+ years later.
Was that a lie?
https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/ says "Contact Sales"
And DDoS mitigation is part of the free feature set. Im guessing some of their largest customers may be kicked off the free tier if they are too much of a resource burden.
Cloudflare has also taken investments from the intelligence agencies (at least in the US).
Servicing different content based on different visitors is a feature of any web server. If you are insinuating that CloudFlare does this without the domain/website owner’s permission/knowledge, cite your sources. That is the kind of insinuation/rumor that can destroy/erode the reputation of a cybersecurity company.