Turns out half the internet has a Single-Point-of-Failure called “Cloudflare” 📦

103    21 Jul 2020 06:54 by u/mutageno

28 comments

23 u/sp00n 21 Jul 2020 08:59
I've had people move to the "cloud" because its the new thing like a Tamagotci or Pog from the 90's, then repeatedly rain down a shit storm because their internet packed up due to old hardware and they didn't know that no internet means no Cloud.
5 u/vwxyz 21 Jul 2020 12:38
![what's wrong with pogs?](https://media.giphy.com/media/l2Je733DgHfXIWEve/100w.gif)
19 u/None 21 Jul 2020 09:08
This is because everybody wants to outsource responsibility by buying everything as a service. Very few companies keep key expertise in house and build things under their control.
9 u/dubya_tp 21 Jul 2020 15:01
There is a valid reason for doing that if you're a startup that can't shell out $100k for a global CDN network, it makes sense. Once you're large enough to have an influence on the rest of the internet, you can then create your own CDN and get as far away from CloudFlare as possible. Netflix is an example of this, they used Amazon's CDN in the beginning and then created [it's own CDN](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/) once they were big enough to have a presence in every internet exchange and ISP
5 u/JadeMonkey 21 Jul 2020 16:10
> Once you're large enough to have an influence on the rest of the internet, you can then create your own CDN and get as far away from CloudFlare as possible. But that requires convincing upper management that it's worth the cost. And most of them are likely non-technical MBAs who will go, "it's already working, why should we spend more time and money to achieve the same result? Next!"
10 u/_Account_k6r 21 Jul 2020 15:21
Remember, "the cloud" is just someone else's computer.
8 u/fluffytux 21 Jul 2020 12:51
This site is also behind cloud flare, and it helps stop the ddos attacks, so it brings value as well...
1 u/mutageno [OP] 21 Jul 2020 13:26
And they got all our IPs and post/comment history.
5 u/Zoloft 21 Jul 2020 13:28
How do they have our post/comment history? We use HTTPS.
9 u/mutageno [OP] 21 Jul 2020 14:37
Browsers do HTTPS/SSL to Cloudflare CDN. From there Cloudflare connects into the actual Ruqqus servers. Click on the lock in your browser besides the URL and you'll see it's even a Cloudflare SSL certificate.
1 u/IGotAGoodUsername 21 Jul 2020 17:07
[Web view](https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=ruqqus.com)
4 u/None 21 Jul 2020 14:44
Someone doesnt know what encrypted means, lol
5 u/None 21 Jul 2020 15:12
That only encrypts in transit. Once it reaches cloudflare, it's no longer encrypted.
2 u/None 21 Jul 2020 15:19
We use HTTPS to talk to CloudFlare SSL terminators. CF sees everything from there. Check what cert you are getting for ruqqus.com. Yep, CF.
5 u/Aurora 21 Jul 2020 10:24
Cloudflare launched an IPO in September last year at $15, it’s now trading at $38. Being a cloud player is very lucrative...
5 u/None 21 Jul 2020 14:56
TL;DR: of the article - "don't put all eggs in the same basket, have an emergency plan when something stops working, that thing WILL stop working given enough time, here are some DNS hints regarding that." On Cloudflare - it's concerning how much of our internet nowadays depends on it. And I can't even say "stop using Cloudflare, dumbarses!" because the reasons people rely on it are often really legitimate. (Cue to Ruqqus - porpl potato would brrrrrrr way more without the DDoS protection.)
1 u/None 21 Jul 2020 18:15
There are Cloudflare alternatives, I think [Bitmitigate](https://bitmitigate.com/) is the choice among those who are more free speech oriented (as well as those who got cancelled by Cloudflare) I know it's still using a third party for these services, but as you've said the reasons for using such a service is very legitimate.
0 u/Imperator 07 Aug 2020 14:25
Cloudflare has cancelled people? Can you tell me more?
1 u/None 08 Aug 2020 00:36
Cloudflare officially dropped 8chan when that whole "shooter manifesto" scandal happened. I can't find the official Cloudflare post about it, but you can look up "Cloudflare drops 8chan" and similar keywords and you'll get a decent amount of coverage on it. I don't know of any other services they've done that to though, but I'm of the belief that if they've done it once there's nothing stopping them from doing it again.
4 u/IsaiahIsacc765 21 Jul 2020 13:56
That's why I prefer disks over digital for games
3 u/Pixtum 21 Jul 2020 16:18
But after you download it digital games don’t use the cloud? Most disk still download extra content anyway
3 u/None 21 Jul 2020 18:12
Yup, at this point most games on disk are just a glorified installer that grabs the actual game content from the internet. It's just there so collectors have something physical to put on their shelf.
1 u/None 21 Jul 2020 13:11
I was wondering about this myself. Between Cloudflare and AWS. sometimes our firewall likes to block some AWS stuff and sites go wacky. If most of or all of either of these fail.. the interwebs with shit a brick.
1 u/None 21 Jul 2020 13:48
Single point / few points of failure is nothing new. In the US, there are only a few fiber backbones, and every now and then, some one takes one out with a backhoe. There are only a few trans oceanic data links. It’s not desirable, but substantially greater route diversity is expensive.
-2 u/mutageno [OP] 21 Jul 2020 14:34
> In the US, there are only a few fiber backbones This is not true. But there's a lot of concentration on certain datacenters of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook.
1 u/Retrofire 21 Jul 2020 21:41
Why does Cloudflare effectively have a monopoly on this service?
1 u/Bradtastik 22 Jul 2020 00:10
OP has no idea what distributed computing is.
1 u/FuckThisShit 04 Aug 2020 17:42
Exploit it then. It would be interesting to see what would happen.