this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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There are thousands of reasons from centralizing internet, abusing their market power, implementing barriers on web automation that can only be bypassed by the priviledged to fingerprinting and tracking users across the whole internet. It's a major for-profit market capture corporation - it's evil by design.
What would the alternative be? DDOS protection inherently benefits from a centrally controlled network for defense, and also from a single entity handling as many of the defenses as possible so they can see them all being used.
I guess I could trivially see the need for a not-for-profit version of this, but that'd still be a central entity, just mandated by law and funded from taxpayer money or something.
But back to the question, what is the alternative? There's a good reason everyone goes with Cloudflare, it's about defending from DDOS attacks, and they do it better than others.
The real alternative is super simple. It requires just a little bit of knowledge. All we would need is to have someone who is an enterprise grade sysadmin with nothing but free time and a willingness to do something they will barely get paid for, if not lose money on. Then we also need to hire out a dedicated network and security engineer as well as a dedicated network traffic monitor. Then we would need to implement and setup our own hosting, as well as servers and configure our own databases. Of course all of this has to be done as cheaply as possible by people who are so good at multiple different sectors of IT and could easily be making more money doing work, but obviously out of the kindness of their hearts want to progress the fediverse and Lemmy rather than realizing they could be making 200k+ doing the same thing for a private company rather than a hobby.
In short: we need a network engineer, a security analyst, a sysadmin (or maybe 2?) all of whom work 24/7 for free and then purchase all of the physical hardware with the knowledge and capacity to set it up and maintain it to nearly break even just so we can shitpost rather than those people working and making 200k+ a year.
Ngl, you got me with the first sentence.
The problem is not the service is that Cloudflare is a mega corporation. Having anti-ddos service which does nothing else is perfectly fine. Having one that also fingerprints everyone and does who-knows-what with all that absurd amount of data and control is a different issue entirely.
Yeah, they're not someone I'd choose to give money or support to. Pretty disappointed it has come to this tbh.
Then you give them an effective DDoS protection measure instead of posting things without evidence.
Well, it's not without evidence, we have plenty of that through the years. Unfortunately, we also don't have any real alternatives either, so the choice is take the DDoS or get Cloudflare. Not much of a choice.
There are alternatives. Akamai has a similar product. It's not free, but it works. Also doesn't require all traffic to go through them all the time, you can repoint your traffic at them on the fly and have them mitigate by scrubbing the unwanted traffic until the attack ends and then switch back, and this can be automated. My ISP at work uses this as they have large swaths of public IP address space to protect for vulnerable members.
Honestly, if anything, Cloudflare uses their power too little. Where they allow just about anyone to use their services unless they get a complaint from the government. You can read here about how they don't shut down websites from their services unless they are breaking the law. I would assume that abusing market power is something like disallowing services because they criticize Cloudflare or some other arbitrary reason. I think that a good example of abusing your market share is Amazon where they forced merchants to keep their prices on other stores higher. But don't take my word for it, you can read all about it here.