2025-07-02 Cloudflare? No.
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@babelcarp@social.tchncs.de asked me about Cloudflare. I think their
efforts to block bots and other forms of distributed denial of service
(DDOS) attacks are commendable and interesting. But at the same time,
I don't want to use them.

Whatever tech they are using to identify bots is proprietary. Is it
the list of user agents? The behaviour of certain IP numbers or
networks? I mean, I try to do the same thing, right? But using their
solution costs money and puts me at their mercy. This is problematic
even if they give me their protection for free. If I can no longer
defend myself, I'll be happy to accept their help. But until then, I'm
going to look for other ways.

As a society, handing over control over vast swaths of the web to a
single US company is problematic, too. Sure, this gives them great
power to find bots and analyse their behaviour across a gazillion
websites. But when Cloudflare is down, a large part of the public
Internet is down, too. If they censor a country, a company, or an
individual, everybody using their service automatically partakes in
the action.

Those problems remain even if Cloudflare decided to share their
blocklists. Everybody would have an auto-update on short notice, like
every 15min at least. And therefore, we'd all accept their decisions.
If the US president decides that Canada or Greenland or Ukraine or
Iran or Palestine needs to be blocked, Cloudflare will have to comply.
And without human oversight, everybody using their services will be an
accomplice.

What I think would be best is more people experimenting and
documenting approaches to the problem. We need to find solutions,
collectively. Anubis relies on proof-of-work and JavaScript. This is
not ideal for the environment and it's not ideal for browsers without
JavaScript. Iocaine uses various ways of identifying bots and feeds
them auto-generated drivel in order to poison their data sources.
Nephentes is a similar tarpit. These solutions are also not ideal for
the environment. But process is exactly what we need: More people
researching ways to keep the web free.

I wish Cloudflare would share their techniques of keeping the web
free. But that, of course, is a bad idea under capitalism.

People using Cloudflare need to weigh the costs and benefits. The ease
of use and the ubiquity is a boon. You will never walk alone. It might
cost money and a little bit of independence, but it keeps the websites
up, so the primary goal is achieved.

Luckily, I'm not there, yet. I've had a few days of downtime but my
websites are also not very important. So I can keep on experimenting
and documenting approaches to keeping the web free.

#Butlerian_Jihad