They get shit on a lot here. Why? What do they do and how is that different from other companies that offer similar services?
What I know of them: they offer DDS brute force/spam protection for websites.
I wouldn’t call it hate, just concern.
Cloudflare acts as a front door to many sites and as such your TLS session is terminated at Cloudflare, then CF makes a additional session from themselves to the target site.
This is concerning as that means CF can see all of your data.It’s worth mentioning the advantage of why they do this. There are several reasons, but the two most common are:
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Seeing the data means they can do a better job at detecting attacks and fending them off.
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They can issue certificates with longer lives from their private CA which simplifies certificate management for their customers.
considering they are a US company they are bound by US warrantless wiretapping laws.
Plus other capabilities like injecting banners, caching, etc
you say, “caching,” CF says, “ca-ching!”
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There is https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/keyless-ssl/
If you don’t own your private keys, wtf are you doing anyway? People are fucking lazy and they are paying for it.
Keyless SSL is only available to Enterprise customers
If you’re not paying money for a service, you’re paying another way
Let me tell my personal grievance with Cloudfare. One of the services that Cloudfare dispenses to websites, whether they like it or not, is bandwidth throttling, in the name of safety, of course. If an IP has been flagged by their system to have created spam, sent spam, being part of a DDOS attack and other various offenses, afterwards the Cloudfare service will throttle that IP requests to the sites that use Cloudfare. That’s on paper what it should do, and it sounds reasonable on a surface level. However, this includes wide swaths of residential dynamic IPs, which means that a lot of people get slow internet for the actions committed by a person with whom they have no relation with whatsoever.
Furthermore, Cloudfare has decided to mass impose this status to the entire regional IP block for my country. So, my entire country is deemed as a threat, and doomed to slow AF speeds almost everywhere on the internet. Unless, of course, you own a datacenter and specifically pay Cloudfare to reclassify your static IP addresses to be trusted. This means that in order to use 100% of the bandwidth I pay for to my ISP, use of a VPN is mandatory. Else Cloudfare determines that I don’t deserve anything but dial-up speeds.
Fuck Cloudfare.
That’s kinda funny that an entire country has been deemed more trouble than it’s worth.
I used to work with a fraud detection system for a payment gateway. The system will automatically flag payments from any Russian and some countries as fraud automatically. This was 4-5 years ago
That’s brilliant. And probably justified.
It’s partly just their sheer size. The internet continues to become a worse place as it gets more and more centralized, and Cloudflare is part of that.
They get hated on because :
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they inspect packets. They terminate the TLS sessions at their servers and reencrypt to forward to the backend. This allows them to analyze the data to spot spam, optimize compression and such
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they are used everywhere. If they go down, 30% of the internet goes with them.
They terminate the TLS sessions at their servers and reencrypt to forward to the backend. This allows them to analyze the data to spot spam, optimize compression and such
And any organization that utilizes a CDN/security provider, like Akamai, AWS, Fastly, etc. knows that they all do this. They need access to the unencrypted content in order for services like CDN and WAF to work properly.
First point, fair enough.
Second point isn’t really a valid reason to hate them for…
Both points are bad. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The Internet was created to be run by millions of servers and works best that way. Funneling everything through one company is just a bad idea in general.
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It sucks to go through “prove you are human” screens that seem to time out half the time. Even worse when they put RSS feeds behind this Cloudflare wall
Cloudflare seems to incorrectly classify my Internet connection, which is a residential Internet connection going to my house, as a datacenter connection or VPN or something.
Many websites that use Cloudflare give me endless captcha forms. As soon as I solve one, it demands another, and never lets me access the website.
Sometimes I solve one captcha, and then it says I’m blocked forever for sending automated queries, even though I filled it out correctly. The error message is: “You are blocked.”
Sometimes it lets me in after one captcha, but I still resent having to enable Javascript for these assholes just to access a site that doesn’t otherwise require Javascript.
Sometimes Cloudflare adds extra security to certain pages, just for me. The developers of the website didn’t program it to handle this extra security, so the site fails for just me, and the site developers don’t believe me, telling me I have a browser problem (in three different browsers, which I can fix by using a proxy). For example, when the site’s javascript has my browser to do a CORS operation, the first step is the browser sending an OPTIONS request. However, the extra security of the proxy introduced by Cloudflare responds slightly differently from the actual website, so the site breaks.
Cloudflare uses a holistic approach to deciding whether you are a legitimate user or a bot. In other words, they use every single possible piece of data they can get on you, including tracking your visits across other Cloudflare sites. They do discriminate against certain user-agent strings.
Cloudflare completely blocks many Tor users, even from having read-only access to a site.
When you ask Cloudflare why your IP address is blocked, they falsely claim that it’s a setting created by the website admins. I strongly suspect that this setting is something like “use Cloudflare™ Adaptive Security™” and probably doesn’t explain to the site admin that they’re blocking large quantities of innocent users.
Cloudflare has previously used Google Recaptcha, which has a ton of problems (tracking, accessibility, training AIs that will make my life worse).
Most people enjoy bandwagon jumping onto hating the status-quo. If Cloudflare goes down, the majority of the internet goes with it, because they are the most prolific private entity that owns most of the hardware running the entire internet.
They are the biggest because they provide the overall best and essentially fastest level of DDoS, geoIP block, and packet-inspection malware protection of any provider on commercial hardware short of utilising spooky predictive DARPA machine learning algorithms that ride the razors edge of sapience on government funded terawatt supercomputer clusters. They are expensive and you get what you pay for.
That’s exactly why many of us dislike cloudfare. They’ve maneuvered themselves into a “too big to fail” position. Seems to be the goal of big corps these days.
Preemptive hate, that’s smart!
To be fair, they’ve also earned that hatred. Several times over.
This reads to me like:
Cloudflare is consistent in their refusal to censor legal free expression by refusing service to those sites. As a result, they serve sites containing offensive, but legal free expression, as well as expression that should be illegal (and may already be - specifically when it comes to). People are mad about this.
To emphasize their refusal to police the content of sites they host, Cloudflare used to simply forward complaints about their customers to those customers. They thought they were making it clear that they were doing this, and maybe they were, but sometimes people miss those sorts of disclaimers and given the subject matter of these complaints, that was a bad process on their part. They haven’t apologized but they have amended their process in the years since.
Did I miss anything?
Now, I get that “free speech absolutist” is a dog whistle for “I’m a white supremacist” thanks to the ex-CEO of a particular social media company, but there’s a difference between
- saying it and not doing it, and
- actually doing it
And unlike the aforementioned anti-semitic billionaire, Cloudflare is pretty consistent about this. They refuse to block torrent sites as well, and I’ve never heard of them blocking a site that was legal and should have been kept around. (As opposed to immediately blocking the account of the guy who was tracking his personal jet.)
That all said, Cloudflare did eventually cancel the accounts of The Daily Stormer, 8chan, and Kiwi Farms.
I wouldn’t feel as strongly about this if the examples of corporations that do censor speech didn’t show that they’re consistently bad at it. I’m talking social media sites, payment processors, hosts, etc… If Cloudflare were more willing to censor sites, that would be a bad thing. And they agree:
After terminating services for 8chan and the Daily Stormer, “we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us,” write Prince and Starzak in their August 31 blog post.
These past experiences led Cloudflare executives to conclude “that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold,” write Prince and Starzak. “Not because the content of those sites wasn’t abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities.”
To be clear, I’m not saying that social media sites should stop censoring nazis. I’m saying that social media sites are bad at censoring nazis and just as often they censor activists, anti-fascists, and minorities who are literally just venting about oppression, and I see no reason why that would be different at a site level instead.
When you have a site that’s encouraging harassment, hate speech, cyber-bullying, defamation, etc., or engaging in those things directly, that should be a legal issue for the site’s owners. And on that note, my understanding is that there’s a warrant out for Anglin’s arrest and he owes $14 million to one of the women whose harassment he encouraged.
Cloudflare said they’re trying to basically behave like they’re a public utility. They’re strong proponents of net neutrality, which is in line with their actions here. There are reasons to be suspicious of or concerned about Cloudflare, but this isn’t a great example of one.
Side note: It’s funny to me that the comment immediately below yours says that one of the reasons to distrust Cloudflare is because of a concern that they may have been abusing their power (due to effectively being a mitm) and censoring particular kinds of content.
A measured response to be sure. Thanks for writing it up. I’m definitely not the one who’s going to tell you for sure what CloudFlare should or should not do in this case or any other cases. It’s a tricky business to be in in terms of making those decisions. That said, I do think there is a line to be drawn SOMEWHERE, and because of this they would eventually need to deplatform something. If that signals to the regimes of the world that Cloudflare can be influenced than so be it, but to me (and I think a lot of the people who were going after Cloudflare during this time), Nazi’s (and those sites you mentioned, e.g. Kiwi Farms) are easy to draw lines for. Good thing I’m just a dude on Lemmy and not a high powered CF exec hah!
You’re welcome, and thanks for the reply!
I think drawing the line at nazis is a good idea in theory, but a very difficult one to implement in practice. For example:
- If someone doesn’t self ID as a nazi, how do you determine that they are one?
- What if the site’s owner self IDs as a nazi but this particular website is just a bunch of cooking recipes?
- Suppose the site owner probably isn’t a nazi, but the site has a bunch of users and a subset of them are creating content that crosses the line, and the site has a hands off approach to content moderation. If the site is 1% nazi content and 99% fine, do you block them entirely unless they agree to remove nazi content? If not, at what threshold does that change? 10%? 51%?
- Once you’ve done that and they’ve agreed, do you have to establish minimum response times for them to remove nazi content? If the nazi content isn’t taken down until half the site’s daily visitors have seen it, the content moderation isn’t very effective. But if you require them to act too fast, that could result in many people being refused service because of other bad actors.
- The bad actors aren’t even necessarily nazis. If it’s known that Cloudflare refuses service to sites that leaves nazi content up for more than X amount of time, then it becomes feasible to take down a site that allows comments by registering a bunch of accounts and filling it with so much nazi content that the site’s moderation team can’t handle it in time. How do you prevent this?
- Do you require them to ban nazis?
- If they do, but the nazis just register new accounts, do you require them to detect that somehow? Do you have to build that capability and offer it yourself? Now you’re policing individual users. You’re inevitably going to end up stopping Grannie from registering for an account because of someone else - they jumped on her wifi, compromised a device on her network, or something along those lines.
This is all pretty complicated, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.
The revised line they drew with Kiwi Farms (as well as the “we follow US law” line they already had) is a much simpler one that’s still morally defensible:
“We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up.”
One word you used stuck out to me: “deplatform.” I wouldn’t call this deplatforming. I’m used to seeing that word used to refer to someone being removed from social media, having their YouTube channel shut down, having their podcast removed from Spotify, etc… I mentioned this in another comment on this post, but those situations are fundamentally different, and it follows that the criteria for doing so should be different. In that other comment I also talked a bit about why I think free speech is infringed if you can’t publish a website, but isn’t infringed if you can’t create a Facebook account.
You also might find this Wired article interesting - it has quotes from and background about the CEO of Cloudflare related to the TDS’s removal, some insight into the internal company dialogue when that was all ongoing, etc…
I’m taking a bit more literal interpretation of “de-platform”, which I agree is not the way it has been traditionally used. In my case, if a platform takes you down, you were just de-platformed =). As for the question of “what is a nazi?”, 100% agree in terms of “where is the line”. Yes, there are some very obvious cases that I think 100% of people would identify in the same way, but there is undoubtedly that pesky ol’ gray area (which as your bulleted list makes clear is a non-trivially large area) where things start to get a little more subjective. Sure, it’d be great if companies (like CloudFlare) smell-tested things in the same way I do haha but outside of that, it is no doubt difficult to define.
For me, it’s the blog posts, written with a level of arrogance and condescension that they are “fixing” the limitations of TCP\IP and if you aren’t using them, you’re making the Web worse for everyone
You won’t see it much in the wild, but there have been a few sporadic cases of suspicion where cloudflare may have removed or modified attachment files.
Of course, there’s a chance those files were malware or that cloudflare didn’t do anything, but for now, there is a theory being formed that all the websites managed by cloudflare can have any of its data modified at will by cloudflare, making it a potential hub for tyranny, censorship and oppression.For the better part of a decade, I’ve used Cloudflare’s DNS servers, 1.1.1.1 & 1.0.0.1, mostly because they claimed it was more secure and slightly faster than say, Google’s 8.8.8.8.
What are the secure-minded folks using these days?
9.9.9.9
Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.2 blocks known malware domains, so that’s better than 1.1.1.1 unless you want nothing blocked.
If you want to block ads and trackers in addition to malware, try ControlD’s 76.76.2.2 .
Better still is to use encrypted DNS if your device supports it. I like NextDNS or ControlD for that, as DNS-Over-TLS or -HTTPS.
From what I could tell it’s mostly because they didn’t participate in the immediate removal of deplorable, but legal sites from their service.
The most recent case being Kiwi Farms https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cloudflare-abuse-policy-kiwi-farms-harassment-clara-sorrenti-keffals/
They quickly reversed course and dropped kiwi farms within a few days of that article dropping https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/03/cloudflare-drops-kiwifarms/
Despite being a paying customer, my biggest gripe with them is their lack of concern for freedom of speech. They decided they can “de-platform” sites that they are not aligned with, which is shitty when A) they’ve basically cornered the SMB CDN/DDoS-protection space B) they are fine with these sites in their customer base until a pressure campaign they don’t feel like battling surfaces.
This is referring to the KiwiFarms vs Keffles situation, where Keffles made false claims to Cloudflare about KiwiFarms endorsing/promoting suicide in an attempt to prevent her leaked discord convos from spreading. Cloudflare caved without question and suspended KiwiFarms’ account without warning.
Otherwise, I have personally never had an issue with Cloudflare. But I am still going to look for alternatives because I don’t think it’s cool for companies with that kind of responsibility to bend a knee to bad actors out of fucking convenience.
Kiwifarms was actively carrying out doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns that led to the suicides of multiple people. Whatever your opinion is on Keffals, this is a fact, and it’s what got Kiwifarms taken down, Keffals was just the loudest voice pointing it out.
Yep. A company distancing themselves from targeted harassment is absolutely a lawsuit powder keg.
I don’t know if I agree with your statement.
Cloudflare is absolutely fine with providing services to websites that host incredibly dangerous misinformation or violent material.
Because unless it’s multiple legal threats or can hurt Cloudflare directly, Cloudflare won’t act.
