@mjgardner
Indeed. I never read molly white’s blog because it’s not open.. #Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes me.
#CitationNeeded has the same problem as #substack so nothing changes for me. It’s still in the portion of web that’s dark to proponents of an open free web. @ben@molly0xfff
@ben@molly0xfff@mjgardner@deflarerOfClouds#Cloudflare is not like AWS because CF is an access-restricted service that blocks various groups of people. It’s exclusive. If you can access CF’s websites then it means you are not in any of the excluded groups. They designed the garden walls to be invisible to people who are included, so to you it just looks like any other website.
I don’t see Mark’s screenshot in my textual environment, but I suspect he posted what it looks like when you are in one of Cloudflare’s excluded groups of people.
I think this is silly. There are plenty of arguments against CF because of their former policy on far-right sites, but technically they're pretty much on the money. It's a pretty good product for filtering out bots and bad actors while letting end-users through. There are lots of products like it, and if you can't see sites that use CF, you probably can't see 90% of the web.
@ben@deflarerOfClouds@mjgardner@molly0xfff Because of this; dozens of times a day, on half of the websites I try to open. A wall that I sometimes can pass on my first attempt, other times it keeps redirecting to itself. I can't open articles in background tabs because apparently it marks me as a probable bot and prevents me from passing the captcha. I can't lock my screen or switch to another app (trying to do something useful instead with my time) while waiting for the captcha to load because then it won't load.
@cashew@deflarerOfClouds@mjgardner I'm particularly curious because I use CF-like services at work, in part to prevent DDOS attacks (which are frequent in my line of work). The intention is never to prevent access to a real user.
@ben@deflarerOfClouds@mjgardner LineageOS with Tor Browser, official builds, no mods such as Magisk. I understand blocking POST requests or adding cooldowns during load spikes, and that's what CloudFlare initially seemed to be doing. But since 2022, it looks like it defaults to a wall against read-only Tor access as well. It also "helps" admins blanket-ban Ukrainian IP addresses; I remember mstdn.jp and some other fedi servers doing that, though I haven't checked if they're still doing it.
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