Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

The annoying thing about cloudflare is that most of the time once you’re blocked: you’re blocked.

There’s literally no way for you to bypass the block if you’re affected.

Its incredibly scary, I once had a bad useragent (without knowing it) and half the internet went offline, I couldn’t even access documentation or my email providers site, and there was no contact information or debugging information to help me resolve it: just a big middle finger for half the internet.

I haven’t had issues with any sites using Anubis (yet), but I suspect there are ways to verify that you’re a human if your browser fails the automatic check at least.

View on HN

CloudFlare is dystopic. It centralizes even the part of the Internet that hadn't been centralized before. It is a perfect Trojan horse to bypass all encryption. And it chooses who accesses (a considerable chunk of) the Internet and who doesn't.

Anubis looks much better than this.

> It is a perfect Trojan horse to bypass all encryption

Isn't any hosting provider also this?

Not necessarily.

FaaS: Yes.

IaaS: Only if you do TLS termination at their gateway, otherwise not really, they'd need to get into your operating system to get the keys which might not always be easy. They could theoretically MITM the KVM terminal when you put in your disk decryption keys but that seems unlikely.

It's literally insane. After Snowden, how the fuck did we ended up with a single US company terminating almost every TLS connection?

They don't have to terminate every TLS connection. That's just the happy path.

It could be a lot worse. Soccer rights-holders effectively shut-down the Cloudflare facilitated Internet in Spain during soccer matches to 'curb piracy'.

The Soccer rightsholders - LaLiga - claim more than 50% of pirate IPs illegally distributing its content are protected by Cloudflare. Many were using an application called DuckVision to facilitate this streaming.

Telefónica, the ISP, upon realizing they couldn’t directly block DuckVision’s IP or identify its users, decided on a drastic solution: blocking entire IP ranges belonging to Cloudflare, which continues to affect a huge number of services that had nothing to do with soccer piracy.

https://pabloyglesias.medium.com/telef%C3%B3nicas-cloudflare...

https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-...

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/spain-providers-blocks-cl...

Now imagine your government provided internet agent gets blacklisted because your linked social media post was interpreted by an LLM to be anti-establishment, and we are painting a picture of our current trajectory.

I don't have to imagine

most of the people on this site work or worked for companies who enabled this or specifically sold it as a feature

we are all complicit

Anubis checks proof of work so as long as JavaScript runs you will pass it.

A "digital no-fly-list" is hella cyberpunk, though.

The question might become, what side of the black wall are you going to be on?

Seriously though I do think we are going to see increasing interest in alternative nets, especially as governments tighten their control over the internet or even break away into isolated nation nets.

Paradoxically, the problem with an "alternative net" (which could be tunneled over the regular one) is keeping it alternative. It has to be kept small and un-influential in order to stay under the radar. If you end up with an "alternative" which is used by journalists and politicians, you've just reinvented the mainstream, and you're no longer safe from being hit by a policy response.

Think private trackers. The opposite of 4chan, which is an "alternative" that got too influential in setting the tone of the rest of the internet.

Not necessarily, Yggdrasil flies under the radar because it's inherently hard to block.

Tor even more so, the power of Tor is that the more people use it: the stronger it becomes to centralised adversaries.

The main issue with Tor is the performance of it though.

The truth is the internet was never designed or intended to host private information. It was created for scientists by scientists to share research papers. Capitalists perverted it.

I thought that the main issue with tor was that so many of the exit nodes are actually the FBI.

You don't ever have to leave the Tor network.

I host IRC on a hidden service, and even Facebook (lol) offers a hidden service endpoint.

All that is needed is for a critical mass of people and a decent index: and we successfully have reinvented "the wired" from Serial Experiments: Lain

Reply on news.ycombinator.com