Is cloudflare breaking the internet or fixing it?

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨gedaliyah@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.

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SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The short answer is: A bit of both, really.

The longer answer is pretty detailed and would include all the positive things they have done as well as the negative things they have done and the unintended consequences of having so much of the internet “behind” Cloudlfare.

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- erev@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  As a user of a small, privacy respecting VPN, Cloudflare is both great and awful. It’s great because Cloudflare captchas are single click usually while Google captchas go for infinity. It’s awful because just as often as I benefit from Cloudflare, I also get blocked by Cloudflare.
  
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Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Hard to answer your question because it’s a mixed bag.

As tech gets cheaper, it gets easier and easier to do malicious things.

On the small scale: I used to host my tech blog on a rinky dink raspberry pi.

I was getting hundreds of funny bot visits a hour, as they try to pen test and find any vulnerabilities. And that was after I set up some tools to block weird IPs. Two years ago, I was getting thousands, and the numbers kept growing. It didn’t hit a point where user experience was taking a hit, but at some point it will.

I could get a beefier system (more expensive), or I can just sign up for cloudflare. And now the management of that layer is handled by Cloudflare, so I can focus on coding.

At my work, same thing but hundreds of times more. We were actually getting DDos. We originally didn’t want to use Cloudflare, and instead use in-house solutions. But after a hefty trial and seeing our AWS expenses skyrocket, we swapped to Cloudflare.

Signed up, swapped over to Cloudflare, and instant uptake. We are also paying a fraction compared to our in-house solution.

It sounds like a freaking ad for cloudflare.

But one thing I don’t like is Cloudflare can easily monopolize the internet. As we all switch, Cloudflare now has a lot of power to tell sites to fuck off if they don’t like their content. Cloudflare hasn’t yet. They keep up White Power websites and racist shit. But they have taken down calls of violence and online gambling.

If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I’m going to either assume you run a bot network, you’re trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.

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- dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My day is regularly ruined by cloud flare. Because instead of doing their job they decided to declare my entire regional IP block a spam source. Now, no doubt there might have been one bad actor who used one IP in this IP block once. The entire block is for residential IPs though. But we all have to suffer degraded service because cloud flare can’t be bothered, and as a private user of the internet, I have no resource or place to complain. Not even my ISP has recourse because cloud flare answer is “we don’t care about your clients”.
  
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  - bobs_monkey@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah it gets sticky like that with VPNs as well. I run an always-on VPN (PIA), and depending on which server I’m connected through, it’s either a good day or a bad day. Sometimes switching servers works, others not so much.
    
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  - Bookmeat@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s not how it works.
    
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- quixotic120@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Cloudflare has absolutely told websites to fuck off because they don’t like their content. They haven’t done it a ton of times but they absolutely have. No one cares because the sites they’ve done it to are toxic cesspool shitholes that, to be fair, the world is probably better off without. But each time it showed that cloudflare can simply wield its power if it feels like it.
  
  If your site becomes controversial in the future and is protected/hosted by cloudflare don’t be surprised if they suddenly send a letter saying “fuck off”. They’ve become arbiters of internet censorship and we have accepted it because the daily stormer and kiwi farms and 8chan are bad.
  
  The ridiculous part is all of those sites are still accessible; daily stormer and kiwi farms both still accessible from clearnet (iirc 8chan is tor only) so cloudflare dropping wasn’t even all that effective. Well funded hate speech found a way. But for the next ones that don’t have major alt right cash behind them to fund cloudflare alternatives they’ll just simply disappear. And then we will have the internet where corporations like cloudflare, who should absolutely be content agnostic, decide what we can and cannot see. You may think it’s fine right now because they’re doing it against websites that are admittedly gross and terrible, but what happens when they overstep and the line blurs?
  
  They should act like a proper tier 1 provider: find evidence of crossing a legal threshold, get a court order, and terminate service if something that bad has occurred. Anything less and they suck it up and honor the contract they signed. They haven’t, so fuck cloudflare. The internet is an amazing place but it’s also a disgusting abhorrent cesspool. Don’t get involved in hosting it if you can’t deal with that.
  
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- AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I’m going to either assume you run a bot network, you’re trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.
  
  Or you are unfortunate enough to share a subnet with someone who got on Cloudflare’s bad side, in which case there is basically no recourse.
  
  There are a million legitimate reasons to use a VPN, for example, but Cloudflare doesn’t care.
  
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- Asudox@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just a few weeks ago, Primeagen read a blog about how Cloudflare threatened an online casino with taking their sites down if they didn’t pay them 120k$ in a day.
  
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  - BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    If you read about it instead of the headline you would have discovered that the casino was simply trying to take advantage of cloudflare in a similar fashion they had been doing to people gambling in their own casino, by leveraging the cheap tier cloudflare provided and slamming the network which was a detriment to other users with smaller bandwidth needs.
    
    Imagine a slow semi truck hogging a two lane road and getting mad at you for trying to go around him just to go home. Cloudflare said they had six months to pay for a higher bandwidth trunk or they can go fuck themselves. The casino did nothing for six months, so they got to go fuck themselves
    
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Regalia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Essentially, their entire schtick is being a middleman. By sitting between the server you want to visit, they can do helpful things like DDOS protection, being a CDN (basically store website assets closer to you), managing HTTPS for you and providing access to your website over IPv6 even if your server doesn’t have it.

By nature of that though, their position is quite sensitive since it has become a service that a good chunk of the Internet goes through. That causes concerns about centralization and pisses in a lot of people’s cereals politically.

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- SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It can also mean if you’re just an average Joe from some random country that is well-known for being the source of botnets or DDOS attacks, you’re fucked out of luck on accessing half the internet because Cloudflare assumes you’re part of the problem based on your source IP. Denied access because of someone else’s wrongdoing seems like a really bad side-effect.
  
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  - Regalia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah, it’s a technically difficult problem to deal with because you’re probably often sharing an IP address or a block of IPs with bad actors. You can’t really share details about it without giving them a hand.
    
    I guess cynically said, you could probably go through their VPN service to fix it, I’ve seen that from time to time.
    
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  - NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    average Joe from some random country that is well-known for being the source of botnets or DDOS attacks, you’re fucked out of luck on
    
    Like painpal blocking you and taking away your money forever if the person who lives in the flat above you is suspected of being a criminal.
    
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rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Mostly breaking it. They’re centralizing stuff and nowadays lots of services depend on that single service provider. And the original idea of the internet was to make everyone equal and have some resilience against single points of failure. That’s kind of detrimental to the whole idea.

Secondly, you unencrypt your traffic and send it to them plain so they can read everything. That may or may not be any issue in your use-case, but I like privacy and encryption and no third parties reading my messages.

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- You999@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  But the DDoS protection and attack prevention is mostly snake-oil for most people.
  
  I wouldn’t say it’s snake oil for most people because of how cheap it costs to execute a DDoS attack, all it takes is for you to piss off one person for it to be worth it. Although you do not have to use cloudflare there are plenty of other protection services out there.
  
  And a side note, I can’t believe how hard it is to find statistics on how many DDoS attacks have happened that’s not from someone with a vested interest in the matter. I’d figure the FBI/IC3 or CISA would have better statistics on the matter.
  
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  - rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think the correct way to handle this is to include a bad-bot blocker in your webserver. There are plenty scripts and addons available for the common software stacks.
    
    There are also local and privacy-respecting Web Application Firewalls like ModSecurity, Janusec, Vulture Project (I haven’t yet tested them) which could maybe do the same thing.
    
    We’re all subject to these crawlers, bots and vulnerability scanners. I also run 3 small websites including mail and a few other services. I rarely block some bot that downloads images over and over again. Other than that, the traffic they cause isn’t that much compared to a single other service like Matrix chat or some Fediverse software that causes lots of HTTP requests all day long. It runs without Cloudflare or ither third-party services for years on my slow home internet connection. Back then even on a single board computer (like the Raspberry Pi.)
    
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- WormFood@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt
  
  after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.
  
  I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable
  
  my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad
  
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  - rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think the correct way to handle this is to include a bad-bot blocker in your webserver. There are plenty scripts and addons available for the common software stacks.
    
    There are also local and privacy-respecting Web Application Firewalls like ModSecurity, Janusec, Vulture Project (I haven’t yet tested them) which could maybe do the same thing.
    
    We’re all subject to these crawlers, bots and vulnerability scanners. I also run 3 small websites including mail and a few other services. I rarely block some bot that downloads images over and over again. And fail2ban blocks a lot of brute-forcing attempts. Other than that, the traffic they cause isn’t that much compared to a single other service like Matrix chat or some Fediverse software that causes lots of HTTP requests all day long. It runs without Cloudflare or other third-party services for years on my slow home internet connection. Back then even on a single board computer (like the Raspberry Pi.)
    
    So my experience is a bit different. And that I can run 3 websites on a RasPi on a 15MBit connection just fine and other people need Cloudflare for a 1000MBit VPS makes me think it’s snake-oil. But yeah, I agree if you block the bots, they stop after some time. That’s also my experience. But the traffic isn’t that much in the first place and there are better ways to do it in my opinion.
    
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linearchaos@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Cloudflair provides a lot of network services that are during levels of difficult to achieve.

They provide really great services at a free level but doing so there make you the product.

They can be used to let you host a reasonably secure website at your house behind your ISP firewall that won’t let you host, with SSL that you don’t have to maintain. They handled dynamic DNS and host names and honestly dozens of other things that are all useful.

Essentially morally they’re like Google back in the early 2000s. Eventually they’ll need more money and force us to pay or get out.

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- IHawkMike@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  FYI, making you the product is only a tiny part of their stated reasoning:
  
  …stackexchange.com/…/how-can-cloudflare-offer-a-f…
  
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  - linearchaos@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Same concept with tailscale.
    
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BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m no expert either but as I understand it, the core service they are most well known for is protection against DDOS attacks. By routing traffic first to Cloudflare before sending it to the intended destination, it can try to check to make sure that whatever it’s routing isn’t coming from a botnet or whatever.

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mdd@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yes

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SomeGuy69@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There’s currently an AI war going on and this are just the waves.

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