Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. It is akin to a disease.
The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort?
With bots that break through cloudflare captchas. As a human, I immediately close the browser tab when I see one. If you make your site inaccessible for humans, only the bots remain.
The internet is for whoever wants to send bits to each other and is willing to pay for transit to do it. The WWW might be for end users, though that seems less obvious by the day.
Unless you own your hardware, you aren't the end user. When your phone, tv, camera, or even laptop on a non-free OS is on your network, you can get some semblance of control by controlling what network services it uses.
Things like DoH are part of the removal of my control as a home user and give it to Sony, or Apple, or TPLink
The most obvious thing is it becomes harder to block adverts.
Throw in internet-centralisation through HN darlings like cloudflare and you're screwed. You have no idea what anything is talking to, as it's the same destination IPs, so the choice is either block it completely, or allow it with no control.
I do share your actual concern, but I think the term 'end user' applies to any human sitting in front of a computer, trying to achieve something, independently of whether the effective sysadmin works against his interests or not.
Right, it's not about property, it's just about whether the computer is helpful to the immediately available human or whether it serves some remote one.
Inevitably the internet will have two types of users:
andWhy would anyone ever want to solve 99 Cloudflare captchas a day if you can get a bot to do it instead?
Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree".
Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it.
Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. It is akin to a disease.
The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort?
> Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things.
How about an internet where we don't need CloudFlare?
One without zillions of AI crawlers and script kiddies with Terabit DDoS capability… (the latter being the harder problem)
Cloudflare just started blocking Googlebot, so maybe we'll see an exodus away from Cloudflare by people who want their sites indexed? Hopefully?
I thought Google Search is dead, everyone is using ChatGPT now to find information.
but how does chatGPT find information?
With bots that break through cloudflare captchas. As a human, I immediately close the browser tab when I see one. If you make your site inaccessible for humans, only the bots remain.
I was more so asking how does it know where to look to find information, if things are no longer being indexed.
> but HN loves it
There is popular sentiment on HN that CF is making internet worse by being a core infrastructure element most websites use.
It’s not the core infrastructure part that makes the internet worse.
The internet is for whoever wants to send bits to each other and is willing to pay for transit to do it. The WWW might be for end users, though that seems less obvious by the day.
Right. The RFC is attempting to clarify the IETF's official position. The IETF is not the internet police, and can't make other actors obey.
We can make our own internet though - with blackhack and jookers.
Honestly, I feel like your draft could dispense with the internet part of the proposal.
what you write is excactly the problem the RFC tries to address. And not only for http but for the whole internet protocol family.
sorry but that ship has sailed.
This is why ideology is so important.
Is the end user viewed as an ISPs client? a consumer of tech companies?
The idealistic language is fine but isnt based on any scientific approach to society. Its neutral at best.
The internet is for end users, but how if its not "by end users"?
If most protocols and standard implementations depend on adoption by ISPs and tech companies what does it mean to be "for the end user"?
Is prison architecture "for the prisoners"?
So how do we solve the "by end users" dilemma?
Who's an end user.
Unless you own your hardware, you aren't the end user. When your phone, tv, camera, or even laptop on a non-free OS is on your network, you can get some semblance of control by controlling what network services it uses.
Things like DoH are part of the removal of my control as a home user and give it to Sony, or Apple, or TPLink
The most obvious thing is it becomes harder to block adverts.
Throw in internet-centralisation through HN darlings like cloudflare and you're screwed. You have no idea what anything is talking to, as it's the same destination IPs, so the choice is either block it completely, or allow it with no control.
I do share your actual concern, but I think the term 'end user' applies to any human sitting in front of a computer, trying to achieve something, independently of whether the effective sysadmin works against his interests or not.
Right, it's not about property, it's just about whether the computer is helpful to the immediately available human or whether it serves some remote one.
> Who's an end user.
I think in this context it'd be any netizen who does not hold a significant amount of power to influence other [unrelated to them] netizens?
So me. The only influence I have over what "my" phone does is monitoring and blocking what it connects to when it's connected to my network.
DoH works against that
This is an awkward read, the result of trying to convey an idea while couched in other language.
That idea being that AI is less important than humans.