Cloudflare has always weirded me out. Back before everyone was using it, a lot of sites would be running just fine for years, then they'd suddenly be shut down for a few days due to DDoS attacks. Then they'd proudly announce they were on cloudflare when they came back. Funny thing was I noticed sites having more frequent downtime after using moving to cloudflare.

I don't see those cloudflare pages much these days, but something about it in those early days always gave me protection money vibes. Cloudflare seemed to come out of nowhere during a wave of DDoS attacks across the internet in the late 2000s and found their way into every site. They had some incredible timing.

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verisimi 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Just one of many protection rackets

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sph 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve always said that if the NSA doesn’t have its hands on Cloudflare I wonder WTF they’re even doing.

How do you track people on the internet? Make them go through a single gateway that ‘protects’ 90% of websites. Would explain why they’re always so reluctant to block unsavoury websites.

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Buge 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you saying that cloudflare conducts or promotes DDoS?

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gruez 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The accusation is that cloudflare also refuses to take down ddos for hire sites, which some interpret as them at least condoning such sites, and they benefit from those sites being up because it makes their services necessary. The counterargument to this is that cloudflare doesn't host any content and therefore shouldn't be subject to takedown requests, similar to how you wouldn't send takedown requests to Lumen Technologies (a tier 1 transit provider) because they provide transit to some VPS provider that ultimately hosts the ddos for hire site.

	▲	pcthrowaway 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> cloudflare doesn't host any content They do, they've been a CDN as long as they've been DDoS protection. But they definitely do DDoS protection for a much greater portion of the internet than they host.

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pigggg 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most of the ddos as a service booter/stresser websites and front doors are on cloudflare.