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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

At least this warrants a good review of anyone's dependency on cloudflare.

If it turns out that this was really just random bad luck, it shouldn't affect their reputation (if humans were rational, that is...)

But if it is what many people seem to imply, that this is the outcome of internal problems/cuttings/restructuring/profit-increase etc, then I truly very much hope it affects their reputation.

But I'm afraid it won't. Just like Microsoft continues to push out software, that, compared to competitors, is unstable, insecure, frustrating to use, lacks features, etc, without it harming their reputation or even bottomlines too much. I'm afraid Cloudflare has a de-facto monopoly (technically: big moat) and can get away with offering poorer quality, for increasing pricing by now.

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Microsoft's reputation couldn't be much lower at this point, that's their trick.

The issue is the uninformed masses being led to use Windows when they buy a computer. They don't even know how much better a system could work, and so they accept whatever is shoved down their throats.

Vibe infrastructure

So that is what the best case definition of what "Vibe Engineering" is.

> Just like Microsoft continues to push out software, that, compared to competitors, is unstable, insecure, frustrating to use, lacks features, etc, without it harming their reputation or even bottomlines too much.

Eh.... This is _kind_ of a counterfactual, tho. Like, we are not living in the world where MS did not do that. You could argue that MS was in a good place to be the dominant server and mobile OS vendor, and simply screwed both up through poor planning, poor execution, and (particularly in the case of server stuff) a complete disregard for quality as a concept.

I think someone who'd been in a coma since 1999 waking up today would be baffled at how diminished MS is, tbh. In the late 90s, Microsoft practically _was_ computers, with only a bunch of mostly-dying UNIX vendors for competition. And one reasonable lens through which to interpret its current position is that it's basically due to incompetence on Microsoft's part.

well that's the thing, such a huge number of companies route all their traffic through Cloudflare. This is at least partially because for a long time, there was no other company that could really do what Cloudflare does, especially not at the scales they do. As much as I despise Cloudflare as a company, their blog posts about stopping attacks and such are extremely interesting. The amount of bandwidth their network can absorb is jaw-dropping.

I've said to many people/friends that use Cloudflare to look elsewhere. When such a huge percentage of the internet flows through a single provider, and when that provider offers a service that allows them to decrypt all your traffic (if you let them install HTTPS certs for you), not only is that a hugely juicy target for nation-states but the company itself has too much power.

But again, what other companies can offer the insane amount of protection they can?

The crowdstrike incident taught us that no one is going to review any dependency whatsoever.

Yep, that's what late stage capitalism leaves you with: consolidation, abuse, helplessness and complacency/widespread incompetence as a result

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