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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

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graemep

Not accurate.

It has nsa.gov on the leaderboard as having no US dependencies.

It wrongly says one of my sites is using Cloudflare.

It says that one of my sites that is hosted in the US (no CDN, US IP address) has no US dependencies.

it treats social media links the same way was embeds.

it gives gov.uk a perfect score. Maybe by design because it is hosted in Europe, but if so it should not say its EU sovereignty.

I do not think that is the case because it also gives a perfect score to https://english.www.gov.cn/

I do not know how it got to the HN front page - people presumably vote it up without checking it actually works.

Its just not anywhere near accurate.

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Fair points, all of them.

The nsa.gov thing: :)

The reals: 1. Hosting detection: I'm matching links TO GitHub as hosting ON GitHub. That's wrong. Fix incoming.

2. US-hosted sites getting 100%: My ASN lookup isn't catching everything. I opted against GeoIP services (privacy reasons), but clearly the ASN-only approach has to much gaps.

3. Social links vs embeds: You're right. A link to Twitter isn't a dependency. An embed is. Will differentiate.

4. gov.uk/gov.cn perfect scores: The tool checks infrastructure, not jurisdiction. gov.uk probably serves from EU edge nodes. That said, the name. Also tried to mention this in the Methodology-Modal. But iterating on all legalese and features same time as a single dev did not land well with my sleeping patterns for v0.1. Will fix that too.

"EU sovereignty" is misleading for non-EU countries - point taken. Will think about better framings.

Update on the Cloudflare point: I now detect Vercel and Netlify hosting via response headers (catches custom domains). Cloudflare as CDN/DNS proxy is intentionally not flagged as US hosting — the origin server behind it could be EU. This is documented in the methodology popup.

The other issues you raised (social links vs embeds, US-hosted sites not detected) were fixed in earlier updates.

It's HN catnip: Google PageSpeed Insights for /r/BuyFromEU slacktivism.

Yeah it's a neat idea. Unfortunately the execution is pretty poor.

I think it's more of a "how self-contained is the website?" test, which is a valid but a completely different question.

I have two under my full control, one scored a 92, the other one scored a zero. They're both hosted the exact same way.

This is more of an attempt at a political stunt. The CCP's website gets a perfect score, admin.ch also gets a perfect score while Switzerland is most-definitely not in the EU.. non-US is more accurate than EU but you only see that when stars start flying.

IMHO: Just scrap the politics and show what regional deps a site has - that'd actually increase value quite a bit.

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