However, being on both sides of this, both operating a bot for my search engine, and operating a web service that is aggressively targeted by bots. They're not actually bad to deal with.
The big unanswered question is how they'll manage to stay good given the obvious incentive of abusing this setup. Maybe this CEO has a moral backbone, but will the next, and when they're acquired by the Meta-Amazon-Alphabet group in 15 years, will they still stick to these principles?
Exactly what you do _not_ want protecting the neutral internet. They've done better being neutral than some might have, but that's in reality more insidious because clearly there are points they will bend on and those points will change over time and almost certainly continue to erode.
It was true twenty years ago too, the only difference I can see between then and now is that you can outsource that task for a (relatively) small amount of money if you want to.
Then again, the last time I dealt with a site under DDoS, something in their stack was leaking the underlying IP (never did figure out what) but it turned out that "finding a provider who'd sell them a decent sized server and charge them for the bandwidth" was perfectly economical for their use case because their haters' firepower was insufficient compared to their revenue.
(I'd love to be less vague here but I'm sure readers can see the obvious professional ethics issues with doing so)
And if you run that in a cloud, the NAT isn't your problem -> your attacker will have to DoS that cloud as a whole.
Part of the art of consultancy is, sometimes to my great annoyance, optimising for "within the customer's budget" and "within the customer's capacity to maintain it after I'm no longer involved" over "best possible solution."
Plus in this particular case I was working pro bono because (a) I quite liked the site in question continuing to exist (b) a Shadowcat alumnus asked me nicely (c) I take great pleasure in ruining a griefer's entire week. So lightest possible touch was strongly indicated.
The end result was not remotely clever, but it's been in production for a while now and has not to my knowledge caused financial or uptime issues, so I'm going to call it a win even if the inelegance of -how- I won continues to irritate me ;)
Fortunately, while said quantity was indeed aggravating, it was low enough that the cost was financially and logistically less than trying to do something more elegant.
Sometimes brute force and ignorance is, in fact, the right answer, and I don't have to -like- that being true for it to be true.
Why do you think they're still "good"? CloudFlare has chosen to abandon sites that held free speech (abhorrent speech, but still free speech) while still protecting forums upon which credit cards and methamphetamine were listed for sale on the front page.
To me, that's not a sign of a "good" actor.
So many people find them abhorrent because they represent different values.
Legally no one has any obligations here.
RE bots: TikTok has incredible bot protection that comes from engineering (webmssdk) instead of network-based filtering. I'm not even sure if they use Cloudflare.
We take every reported false negative as an opportunity to improve our DDoS mitigations, and these reports are very helpful.
As of a few weeks ago, you can now report FNs/FPs for Bot Mitigation directly in the dashboard, and we'll be expanding this pattern for use with DDoS Mitigation as well.
But from some basic calculations I get that R2, Workers and egress bandwidth beyond a few terabytes costs just as much as Oracle cloud / Alibaba.
But what I dislike the most is how little control you have over what's going on there. Like: If you haven't setup TLS on your webserver, why do they allow unencrypted traffic to flow between the server <-> Cloudflare and encrypt it to the end users and pretend that is secure?
Why can't they forward all my server's headers? Why <XYZ> ?????????
Read some horror stories on Hackernews and you'll quickly find out what their "unmetered bandwidth" really means. You get very little if any transparency about the pricing, which I would except from tiny cloud companies, but this is supposed to be a major one!
I Really Can't Think of Any Reason
Some competition exists, but it's both more expensive and less reliable and convenient.
1. It's probably better than nothing. 2. It's a legacy thing.
A company like Cloudflare has to make a choice - how frequently do we break users who've set up their site in a way that is no longer in line with security best practices? It looks like the decision they've made is to break infrequently. Certainly the site I set up in 2014 when their free TLS was new still runs, and I haven't made changes.
I believe that you can set up strict TLS between Cloudflare and the end host if you choose, but it's up to you. I think in that instance, your 'little control you get' is actually more control, no?
And, if you look back even a few years, TLS was both uncommon and expensive. Cloudflare was a pioneer by offering free TLS certificates in I think 2014 (only 8 years ago!). LetsEncrypt started in 2015 and was niche for quite some time. I think even now you can find Linux distros preferring to ship their data over HTTP with GPG-keys recommended for the security. Of course in 2022 even simple sites should be TLS'd, but Cloudflare's existed for a while.
And, TLS to the client but plaintext from CDN to site is still better than cleartext the whole way, because it (generally) stops the ISP from snooping on its customers.
I think even now you can find Linux distros preferring to ship their data over HTTP with GPG-keys recommended for the security.
Sorry if I am missing something here. Cloudflare gives flexibility to their customers. That seems right.
Cloudflare enterprise is pretty transparent if you've gone through the sales process. They tell you exactly what the limits are. For average person, on free plan, they are not obligated to provide details of where the limits are. That's no different than BackBlaze unlimited storage plan.
I don’t get the issue here. The traffic between client and Cloudflare is secure. SSL is terminated at Cloudflare. You can choose to have end to end security if you want.
If you set up your own frontend that terminates SSL, but choose not to secure the traffic to your backend, the end client will still see the connection as secure.
One problem was that if the code was TOO aggressive in protecting from a denial of service attack, you could actually help an attack or be the culprit yourself by denying legitimate traffic.
I think this is what cloudflare is doing. They are imprecise and they are denying legitimate traffic.
Years back their DNS service also stopped honouring ns_t_any requests (for reasons of DDOS amplification apparently).
I do tend to agree with you about centralisation, gatekeepers particularly.
In the end for any scraping they're just raising the barrier of entry. Automated browsers, residential proxies, captcha services just make it more involved for those determined to hit a URL successfully.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but the line and grey area and the definition of a 'legitimate' request varies, and one entity as a middle-man deciding that is less than ideal.
For legitimate interests today including search engines and services for price comparison that data is often provided for free.
There are design patterns used today that does among other things provide incorrect prices to scrapers.
Scraping is illegal in most western countries btw.
Can you explain that further in the context of search engines, new or existing, need to crawl websites and Cloudflare are a barrier to entry? You seem to contradict yourself.
>There are design patterns used today that does among other things provide incorrect prices to scrapers.
If you say so, and hopefully they do it 100% correctly.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest...
while they are main reason (in my browsing at least) the "verification pages" happen.
I think they probably realized that maybe they don't want to be known as the reason these pages are showing up everywhere and inconveniencing legitimate traffic.
It's probably true that some VPNs are used for nefarious stuff, but it's also lame that Cloudflare is such an anti-privacy warrior.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of bots are actually nefarious.
The "checking your browser" isn't a default CF thing btw, that's up to the site owner and how paranoid they are (with or without reason). It's annoying me too, but we have sites on CF and practically nobody sees any checks when they access our sites.
(I did write a support request message to Gitlab, but their support clearly sucks. What do I know what kind of subscription my employer has? I don't care! They are paying for me, so Gitlab should offer a modicum of support, if I cannot even log in on their shitty site any longer, because of their changes. But they stonewalled with something like: "We need to know your subscription level blablabla before we can continue the process." kinda automated e-mail. Well, duh! Check your friggin database for my subscription level. Oh but then you would actually have to work. Ah that's a problem of course. Better stonewall a paying (paid for) customer.)