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Comment by sltr | Hacker News Reader

> a racketeer like CloudFlare

Could anyone teach me what makes this a fair characterization of Cloudflare?

Not sure exactly what it is referring to, but I could make a guess that it's because Cloudflare sells LLM inference as a service, but also a service that blocks LLMs. A bit like a Anti-DDOS company also selling DDOS services.

For example, https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/guides/demos-ar... has examples visit websites, then for the people on the other side (who want to protect themselves against those visits) there is https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/detections/firewall-fo...

Just a guess though, I don't know for sure the authors intentions/meanings.

> A bit like a Anti-DDOS company also selling DDOS services.

That's not far off from what Cloudflare does either, the majority of DDoS-for-hire outfits are hidden behind and protected by Cloudflare.

Whenever this comes up I do a quick survey of the top DDG results for "stresser" to see if anything's changed, and sure enough:

  mrstresser.com.         21600   IN      NS      sterling.ns.cloudflare.com.
  silentstress.cc.        21472   IN      NS      ernest.ns.cloudflare.com.
  maxstresser.com.        21600   IN      NS      edna.ns.cloudflare.com.
  darkvr.su.              21600   IN      NS      paige.ns.cloudflare.com.
  stresser.sh.            21600   IN      NS      luke.ns.cloudflare.com.
  stresserhub.org.        21600   IN      NS      fay.ns.cloudflare.com.

"Just a guess though, I don't know for sure the authors intentions/meanings."

I am reminded of this posting from years past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496499

"A lot of hacking groups, terror organizations and other malicious actors have been using cloud flare for a while without them doing shit about it. ... It's their business model. More DDoS means more cloudflare customers, yaaay."

I've not spent much time on this topic but I am very interested in the notion that a well-meaning third party established some kind of looking glass that surveyed cloudflare behavior and that third party was sued ?

I'd like to learn more about that situation ...

I remember that when the first influxes of LLM crawlers have hit Sourcehut, they had some talks with Cloudflare which ended when CF demanded an outrageous amount of money from a company the size of Sourcehut. If I find the source for this, I'll update.

[edit] Here's the source: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2024-01-19-outage-post-mortem/#:~...

Cloudflare has been accused of playing both sides--they host services for known/associated DDoS providers while conveniently offering services to protect DDoS.

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