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.
A parasite leaches off it's host to the hosts harm. Maybe it's not a good analogy, but Im in china, and it's painful after paying money for a VPN to bypass censorship to find myself routinely blocked by CDNs because they decided I'm not human. I'm honestly feeling more opressed by these middlemen than the government sometimes. For example, maybe I can't log in to a game due to being blocked by the login API, and the game company just responds by telling me to run an antivirus scanner and try again since they are not personally developing that system that lack awareness. Such people with genuine need for VPNs and privacy tools are the sacrifice for this system.
Serious question: You put Cloudflare between all your domains and all your visitors without looking in to how this would affect your site's reachability? If so, that's interesting, considering that many people in this community are negatively affected by Cloudflare because they're using Linux and/or some less than mainstream browser.
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
Dude, stop putting words in my mouth. I never said they weren't bad.
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.
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.
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.
I thought Cloudflare overall was neutral - meaning as many haters as lovers. I know the CEO frequents here as well.
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
> I have dozens of domains I have used with Cloudflare at one point and I haven't paid them a dime.
Maybe you haven't, but your users (primarily those using "suspicious" operating systems and browsers) certainly have – with their time spent solving captchas.
Not sure if you're joking, but if you're not: Congratulations on using a very "normal/safe" OS/browser/IP.
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.
Using Linux is rare among the general public, but very normal among the kind of person who may find themselves working at Cloudflare or at a potential cloudflare partner/customer.
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.
It must depend on something else. Firefox & Linux have always worked fine for me, I cannot remember when I last got restricted by a Cloudflare captcha.
my residental ip of years (which is not shared or cgnat) was recently flagged by cloudflare for who knows why. if you are asking, you havent seen when cloudflare thinks you are something else.
cloudflare are not the good guys because they give people free cdn and ddos protection lol
Really? Because I'm on Debian, with Firefox, with a VPN active 24/7 and I almost never get Captchas. I do get those "checking your browser" pages often but they just stick around for maybe half a second then redirect.
It's not much consolation to me if I'm one of the 25% still being challenged.
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.
I use a VPN and firefox and I get some extra captchas but not enough to be annoying. And you don't have to do anything more than tap the checkbox.
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.
(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)
It's kind of an impossible problem though. They either save some tracking cookie to link your sessions between websites, or they have to re captcha check you on every website.
I already said in another post I am looking at Bunny, but they also don't seem to want to take my money. I've tried 3 cards. I am willing to pay for a good service, but I will be honest, I don't know many of cloudflare's competitors
They put themselves as a middle man for almost the whole Internet, collect huge usage data about everyone and block anybody who doesn't use mainstream tools:
You can add another one as a result of this article: The data you need to train AI and the data you need to build a search engine are the same data. So now they're inhibiting every new search engine that wants to compete with Google.
