This is a good reminder for everyone to reconsider making all of their websites depend on a single centralized point of failure. There are many alternatives to the different services which Cloudflare offers.
But the nature of a CDN and most other products CF offers, is central by nature.
If you switch from CF to the next CF competitor, you've not improved this dependency.
The alternative here, is complex or even non-existing. Complex would be some system that allows you to hotswap a CDN, or to have fallback DDOS protection services, or to build you own in-house. Which, IMO, is the worst to do if your business is elsewhere. If you sell, say, petfood online, the dependency-risk that comes with a vendor like CF, quite certainly is less than the investment needed- and risk associted with- building a DDOS protection or CDN on your own; all investment that's not directed to selling more pet-food or get higher margins at doing so.
yeah there is no incentive to do a CDN in house, esp for businesses that are not tech-oriented. And the costs of the occasional outage has not really been higher than the cost of doing it in-house. And I'm sure other CDNs gets outages as well, just CF is so huge everyone gets to know about it and it makes the news
With what? The only (sensible) way is DNS, but then your DNS provider is your SPOF. Amazon used to run 2 DNS providers (separate NS from 2 vendors for all of AWS), but when one failed, there was still a massive outage.
no one loves the need for CDNs other than maybe video streaming services.
the problem is, below a certain scale you can't operate anything on the internet these days without hiding behind a WAF/CDN combo... with the cut-off mark being "we can afford a 24/7 ops team". even if you run a small niche forum no one cares about, all it takes is one disgruntled donghead that you ban to ruin the fun - ddos attacks are cheap and easy to get these days.
and on top of that comes the shodan skiddie crowd. some 0day pops up, chances are high someone WILL try it out in less than 60 minutes. hell, look into any web server log, the amount of blind guessing attacks (e.g. /wp-admin/..., /system/login, /user/login) or path traversal attempts is insane.
CDN/WAFs are a natural and inevitable outcome of our governments and regulatory agencies not giving a shit about internet security and punishing bad actors.
This is just how free markets work, on the internet with no "physical" limitations it is simply accelerated.
Left alone corporations to rival governments emerge, which are completely unaccountable. At least there is some accountability of governments to the people, depending on your flavour of government.
Of varying quality depending on the service. Most of the anti-bot/catpcha crap seems to be equivalently obnoxious, but the handful of sites that use PerimeterX… I've basically sworn off DigiKey as a vendor since I keep getting their bullshit "press and hold" nonsense even while logged in.
I don't like that we're trending towards a centralized internet, but that's where we are.
> Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches.
There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches.
Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to illegal streams of a live event. My understanding is that CloudFlare is largely out of the picture when this decision is happening, and CloudFlare is only taking the blame since that's what Twitch uses, which also can't react as quickly as La Liga wants.
That being said there is a solution to this that helps protect from collateral as well as the decentralized open nature of the internet: moving away from those large CDNs
I think moving away from cloudflare is not a solution because:
1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof.
2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs.
3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.
I totally agree with point number 2. Even point number 1 is reasonable. But there are many CDNs you could use, perhaps smaller ones, perhaps some that do not offer their services to streaming websites, which is arguably the reason for the blocking.
Ultimately point number 3 is a prediction. I could see that happening, but I am not convinced it's set in stone that the blocking would just increase. And even if that happens, and even bigger ranges are blocked, and even more stuff breaks, perhaps more people will start to notice and put an end to this, to CloudFlare's delight.
I've been waiting on that game since 2010, and it seems to have no release date, so it just might! I wish they would just break it into smaller pieces to have something to ship and iterate on.
> The game has been in development since 2009 and, as of April 2024, does not have a release date.
A "better" design is one where the consumer can service the battery without having to use special tools and a heat gun. It is explicitly _not_ one which looks "sleeker" in the marketing materials.
You can do it with a hair drier and the suction cap that usually comes with the battery. Or you can take it to a store at any mall and they do it on the spot for you.
It's one of the easier things to fix. I could swap a phone battery easier than I could replace my door handle or repair clothing.
This is the thing that annoys me about these discussions. Be against arbitrary barriers to consumer repairs that have no benefits to the consumer? Totally on board.
But that doesn't mean that repairs/replacements need to be limited to something a random user can do without tools or at least with tools they're likely to have laying around their house. I've replaced batteries and had batteries replaced in my MacBooks a few times and it hasn't been an unreasonably difficult or expensive process.
I've had laptops with batteries you could pop out but they were relatively heavy compared to today's norms.
So basically there's an entire industry needed to support people (and mechanics/shops) who work on cars--including vehicles that pre-date modern computer controls and which are considered user-repairable. But somehow repairing a smartphone or a laptop shouldn't require any knowledge or equipment beyond what the average user possesses.
I'm sure it's technically possible to build a phone where the battery is easily replaceable and is highly water resistant. Difficult? Sure, but possible. If this regulation really does lead phone manufacturers to go back to the days of hand-removable backs or slide-out batteries then I'm sure they'll be investigating in R&D to get their IPwhatever ratings back.
Example: many GPSr units have replaceable AA batteries and support IPX7. It's not exactly rocket science -- a good locking mechanism and a rubber seal.
The GPSr crowd tend to be less obsessed by their devices being a fraction of a millimeter thinner than last year's model, though.
(Much as I love a good locking mechanism and a rubber seal, I can see it making the phone a little thicker than it would be was the battery non-removable.)
You can buy a Casio watch for about 20 USD that claims to resist water to 100 meters. The battery replacement requires a small screwdriver, does that count as user-replaceable?
Having a number of portable V/UHF radios, GPS receivers and assorted other bits of outdoor electronic gear, I have had a tiny bit of acid-free vaseline on any gasket or O-ring I could find annually. Has worked a charm so far.
(With today's rubber being what it is, I guess I could safely at least double that interval - but it only takes a few minutes, and the vaseline is effectively free, so...
My father's underwater flashlights from the 1970s had replaceable batteries and were quite water resistant, I mean from sea water, not just rain. Of course a phone makes it more difficult both for its shape and size, but hey, technology progressed a bit in 50 years.
Underwater flashlights sooner than not suffer from outgassing and tend to have pressure relief valves and multiple o-rings to keep the water out. O-rings do need a bit of maintenance but it's not a huge burden.
