What else is important to note that the client is being abused and not the client abusing the service. That should be taken into consideration, when deciding if someone is breaking the ToS.
> What else is important to note that the client is being abused and not the client abusing the service. That should be taken into consideration, when deciding if someone is breaking the ToS.
My understanding has this as moot. The issue from Cloudflare's perspective is only that the content is non-HTML and doesn't have anything to do with the rate of traffic (the abuse).
The key is "as viewed through a web browser" imo, this is not really an API and it's not a webpage; it's a datafile and would fall into R2 or similar things.
Cloudflare is balancing on a razer for this TOS technicality.
To oversimplify, they’re saying Cloudflare’s service is to be used for serving websites to browsers.
Serving a static text file that is primarily used by applications is not in line with their terms of service.
Cloudflare provides a significant service to the free and open web by subsidizing the hosting costs of static content for websites. They give that away for free under what appears to be reasonable terms. I’m not sure why you’re trying to “gotcha” through their ToS.
It would be great if Cloudflare would donate resources to EasyList - it would do a lot to help the free and open internet by giving users more power over what gets delivered to their browser. But call that what it is: a donation.
People are doing the opposite, pointing out the hole and asking them to get a better rule. Surely they don't just want the list merely converted into html.
> They give that away for free [...]
So they should specify things that influence cost such as total bytes served, number of files, etc. Currently all you can do it bypass the rule because you don't know how to cooperate.
Imagine you do that and I DDoS the URL. CF will then mitigate this DDoS by, in part, replacing your html with their Browser Integrity Check html.
If you're serving 'web pages and websites' everything continues to work. What would happen if this list suddenly became an actual webpage.
If your site is serving 'a disproportionate percentage' of non-html you decrease the ability of CF to tell good traffic from bad.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>a</title>
So it's not that crazy an argument that a plain text file is a html document
They serve websites to browsers for people to view. This file (be it properly formatted .html or .txt) is not a website people go to in their browser - its used internally by an application. This is the key point.