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Comment by Luctct | Hacker News Reader

I have a bigger beef with other Fuck You patterns.

1. The increasingly high number of sites that will show a blank page when I disable Javascript.

2. The increasingly high number of sites that will show a blank page when I disable cookies even if I have no intention to login and often the site doesn't even involve any kind of membership.

3. Sites that refuse me their content because my browser "is no longer supported" but wil gladly open up to me as soon as I tell my browser to lie about its brand or version.

4. Oh, almost forgot! Cloudflare.

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I especially love the websites that tell me I need to be using the latest version of Firefox when.... I'm using the latest version of Firefox. I'm just on Ubuntu

1 and 2 I have noticed accelerate quite a bit over the past years. While annoying I've found it is a very good metric for deciding who will never get my money/data.

What's wrong with Cloudflare?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11404770

Among other possible criticisms, they hold too much power. So much of the web is behind their walls, if let's say you couldn't access them or decided you didn't want to communicate with CF, huge portions of the web would become off limits.

What's the alternative? As a basic website owner, should we just ditch CDNs and anti-DDOS protection?

Unfortunately, as in math, there are such things as unsolvable problems. Unless and until everyone's running a bunch of formally verified OSes that can't be converted to botnets you have to pick your poison. I won't pretend it's a solution though, it's trading one problem for another. Who can say which is worse.

How big is the threat, though? What can even happen if someone takes control over Cloudflare? What if Cloudflare is malicious, what could they even do before people catch on it?

I agree centralization is bad, but with Cloudflare (compared to Google), their main business model is this specific service (CDN, security, privacy, etc.). If they don't accomplish it, their business will die.

I wasn't even really thinking about the security issue on their side. My concern is they end up in cahoots with the government who gives them a list of political dissidents who then get blacklisted from half the web which people will jump to defend with "They're a private company, they can do what they want!"

That's a good point, I didn't even consider that side, I was thinking more about the security part for either the user or Cloudflare, not the political part that, as you mentioned, it gives too much power to control the internet.

That being said, if such accusations turn out to be true, then the reputation of Cloudflare should quickly degrade over time and people will stop using it.

they force you to enable javascript because they want to ensure that you are not bot. It's not for all sites, its for sites that have this feature enabled in cloudflare.

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