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Comment by Ayesh | Hacker News Reader

> made it worse.

I'd say this too. I'm giving LetsEncrypt 100% credit for making HTTPS so ubiquitous and free.

But CloudFlare certainly made things worse for "webmaster" era of the Internet, with everything centralized to CloudFlare. I live in Vietnam, and CloudFlare has made things super annoying with their captcha challenges everywhere.

Credit where it's due, CloudFlare pushed HTTP/2 and 3 adoption. More websites are available over IPv6, and their 1.1.1.1 DNS is actually quite nice.

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I'm in the USA, but run Linux. I am getting tired of proving I'm not a bot. I'm on a static IP and they still can't figure out that I'm not a bot.

I don't think they have a CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs make the users work, Google does this with their reCAPTCHA. The user has to to free work to help Google with their training of machine learning models. I absolutely hate to do work to increase Google's already outrageous profits and leave the page immediately unless it is very important for me to visit it.

Cloudflare has something called Turnstyle where the browser needs to do work. It's a bit of energy waste, but smooth for the user. Unless their algorithm comes to an incorrect decision and doesn't let you in. Then it's infuriating. For me in Europe that seems to be rare, but I have no idea how well it works in Vietnam.

This can be a slippery slop into censorship! Or a corporate feudal divide up the Internet segments by geo-locations.

Of course in general I do feel better about Cloudflare than Google making money.

> I don't think they have a CAPTCHA … Cloudflare has something called Turnstyle

I believe CF Turnstyle was only released in 2024. I believe they used reCAPTCHA up to 2020, and then switched to hCaptcha. I believe hCaptcha continues to be offered.

Right, 1.0 might have been last year. But it was available (maybe called beta?) probably since 2018 at least. I have used Gitlab since 2018 and IIRC it had Turnstyle from the beginning. Gitlab have configured(?) it such that it comes at every login, but because it works automatically it has never been a problem for me. It wouldn't have worked on some phones, but I don't use phones for Gitlab.

I wasn't aware that they have (had) alternative solutions. Probably because I've rarely seen them. Or if they used reCAPTCHA I got mad on Google, not noticing that Cloudflare had injected it.

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