How is Cloudflare a parasite? I can use Cloudflare, and get their AI protection, for free. I have dozens of domains I have used with Cloudflare at one point and I haven't paid them a dime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953508
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897705
...but OTOH it's their customers who want all of that and pay to get that, because the alternative is worse.
rock and a hard place.
Besides CloudFront, which still costs money, what other option is there for semi-privacy and caching for free?
Lots of nuance, but generally: pay for things you use. Servers, engineers, and research and development are not free, so someone has to pay.
Or I pay and am still the product. Just with less in-my-face ads.
Yes, this is enshittification. You pay for Amazon something or other, and they STILL show you ads. Horrible.
Though why should it be for free?
Although bunny.net won't take ANY of my credit or debit cards
You might want to read some threads on here about Cloudflare.
Most of the time I don't use them for their network, usually just DNS records for mail because their interface is nicer than namecheap and gives me basic stats.
To my understanding, they aren't blocking MX records behind captchas
Some nicer people here tried the educative approach and it worked much better. I learned about Bunny. And I keep forgetting I have a few in deSec but that has a limit.
I do not understand the hostility
Unfortunately I don’t think they were participating in the conversation in good faith. People can have an extreme view on _anything_…even internet / tech. They buy into a dream of 100% open source, or “open internet”, or 100% decentralized, whatever.
When this happens they may be convinced that “others” are crazy for not sharing their utopian vision. And once this point is reached, they struggle to communicate with their peers or normal people effectively. They share their strong opinions without sharing important context (how they reached those opinions), they think the topic is black and white (because they feel so strongly about the topic), or they become hostile to others that are not sharing that vision.
You are their latest victim lol. Ignore them, and carry on.
Learning how to spot this, and ignore such-minded people who argue in bad faith, has made me a lot happier and more chill in general.
>I never said they weren't bad.
>I don't understand the hostility.
It's known the community here doesn't like Cloudflare, and anyone who's been on the customer end of Cloudflare would tend to agree. In that context, if you truly are blind to seeing this, when you said, "how is Cloudflare a parasite" to a group not liking of cloudflare... ... it may land as saying something like "How is Hitler a bad guy?", which I hope is self-evident is saying he's a good guy contextually, of course you could troll it out and devil's advocate yourself that you were merely asking an innocent question.
When I ask how is Cloudflare a "parasite" I was being genuine. I know it was a problem for some users, but I don't think I realized how prevalent it was
You said one response up that they weren't parasites by asking how they were parasites and then proceeded to claim you have no experience with their parasitic services.
I'm just pointing out your anecdote wasn't valid.
So if I wrote, "You would put" instead of "You put", then what? Would you be comfortable using their "AI protection" simply because it's free?
Maybe you haven't, but your users (primarily those using "suspicious" operating systems and browsers) certainly have – with their time spent solving captchas.
I get captchas daily, without using any VPN and on several different IPs (work, home, mobile). The only crime I can think of is that I'm using Firefox instead of Chrome.
It's probably because I use Firefox on Linux with an ad blocker.
For my part, I've ensured we don't use Cloudflare at work.
I don't really buy the argument that they're pushing more captchas to you just because of using Firefox on Linux with an ad blocker.
The world really has more than enough heuristic fraud detection systems that most people aren't even aware exist, but make life miserable for those that somehow don't fit the typical user profile. In fact, the lower the false positive rate gets, the more painful these systems usually become for each false positive.
I'm so tired of it. Sure, use ML (or "AI") to classify good and evil users for initial triaging all day long, but make sure you have a non-painful fallback.
cloudflare are not the good guys because they give people free cdn and ddos protection lol
Meanwhile a bunch of "security" products other websites use just flat out block you if you're on a VPN. Other sites like youtube or reddit are in between where they block you unless you are logged in.
Cloudflare is the least obtrusive of the options.
(the people not getting the joke, yes the new system don't make you train any image recognition dataset, but they profile the hell out anything they can get their hand on just like google captcha and then if you smell like a bot you're denied access. goodbye)
Turn on Tor and browse for a week.
Now you know what “undesirables” feel like, where “undesirables” can be from a poor country, a bad IP block, outdated browsers, etc.
It sucks.
Just use the Tor browser