Fuck Cloudflare
I hate cloudflare so fucking much. In return for providing a few nice services, they fucked up the internet.
What Can they provide? They can provide a lot. Here are a few things.
- Content delivery networking
- Distributed denial of service protection
- Web application firewall
- SSL
- Load balancing
- Analytics
- Bot management
A lot of their services are provided for free. This naturally brings in many users. ~20% of the websites on the internet depend on them. So many websites depend heavily on their service’s infrastructure to serve websites. They therefore have great influence on the internet. They can get many sites to become inaccessible whether intential or not. They as a service do have outages. When they do, vast amount of the internet goes down.
They can and do log a lot of information. DNS queries, IP addresses, act as a man-in-the-middle on HTTPS communications between the user and the website and a lot more. They are a US company which MITM on communications for 20% of websites on the internet. Is everyone blind that this is an issue?
I now can’t access a great amount of the internet or at least in the methods I want to. When using a VPN / proxy to access many sites on the internet now, I get flagged by their bullshit captcha. Their captcha is some garbage JS crap. They don’t actually give me user tests like a puzzle or identifying words in audio like most captchas. They do some auto check shit. Without me having attempted to do some kind of heavy traffic or filling forms that could be used by an attacker for spam, I am automatically tested (usually on first visit) to the site by cloudflare. It slows down my browsing at best and blocks me at worst. Depending on the site, time and what proxy I’m using, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Trying over tor network for example is like russian roulette with a revolver with one missing round. Trying with highest security setting (which includes blocking JS) in the tor browser makes it impossible if the captcha prompt comes up (which it almost always does for sites protected with cloudflare). I am so fucking tired of it. Browsing before cloudflare was so prominent was so much easier. Attacking sites was easier too but damn it this is not a good trade.
So much centralisation creates one good place to hit to therefore attack so much of the internet. It is a hacker’s and the NSA’s wet dream except for the fact that it is real.