nicholasjarnold 3 days ago

I was assuming that it's a loss-leader sort of business strategy at play before reading your comment. Do you care to share any insights/references to support this claim?

  • hipadev23 3 days ago

    Nah that’d be a national security crisis.

    But the presence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM well over 10 years ago should be sufficient.

    • nicholasjarnold 3 days ago

      Gotcha. Yeah, I mean all of these platforms are certainly juicy targets for room 641A [0] shenanigans. I just wondered if there had been some public leaks or something which we might not all be aware of yet.

      [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

      • hipadev23 3 days ago

        I'd also point out the following from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's wiki page [1]:

        > "Prince co-founded Unspam Technologies, which supported the development of Project Honey Pot [2], an open source data collection software created by Prince and Lee Holloway designed to gather information on IP addresses used by email-address harvesting services."

        > In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contacted Unspam Technologies, asking, "Do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is?" The DHS' email served as the impetus for Cloudflare, a technology company Prince co-founded with Holloway and fellow Harvard Business School graduate Michelle Zatlyn the following year

        > The DHS' email served as the impetus for Cloudflare

        Emphasis mine. I love Cloudflare, their tech is amazing, but to bury our heads in the sand that it wasn't started from day one to be a government spying program would be extremely naive.

        [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Prince

        [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Honey_Pot

      • ceejayoz 3 days ago

        Post Snowden, I think the assumption has to be any large US hosting/service provider is compromised in a similar fashion.

  • ForHackernews 3 days ago

    One half of the NSA's mission is defensive, dedicated to improving the security of US systems and infrastructure: https://www.nsa.gov/Cybersecurity/

    • nosioptar 3 days ago

      SELinux is a great example of that end.

      Of course, I know an embarrassing number of people that won't touch it because they're convinced it's an NSA backdoor into your system.

edm0nd 3 days ago

They have the nickname "Crimeflare" for a reason and there is a reason so many threat actors, phishers, and malware people use CF on their landing pages and c2s.

When you file an abuse ticket with CF, CF takes the route of "oh we are only routing the data and content, not hosting it" and will refuse to terminate the CF accounts of someone being malicious. Threat actors know this which is why so many use em.

  • gruez 3 days ago

    >When you file an abuse ticket with CF, CF takes the route of "oh we are only routing the data and content, not hosting it" and will refuse to terminate the CF accounts of someone being malicious. Threat actors know this which is why so many use em.

    Their abuse page says they forward abuse tickets to the origin hosting provider. The origin hosting provider could ignore your tickets, but I don't see how that's any different than if they didn't use cloudflare to begin with.

    • edm0nd 3 days ago

      They still have the ability to terminate the accounts of the threat actors using their platform (which would fuck up their scam/spam/malicious campaigns) yet seem to not want to under their guise of "oh its not us".

      • sophacles 3 days ago

        If they're willing to go to those lengths for scum, imagine how far they'd go for legit customers that pay.

    • jazzyjackson 3 days ago

      Ok but why can’t they take responsibility for the abuse and terminate the accounts themselves, forcing the malicious actors back to being in a position of not being protected by cloudflare?

      • michaelt 3 days ago

        Before CF, there were no DDOS for hire services, because they all DDOSed each other offline.

        Keeping them online generates more DDOSes, driving demand for CF’s DDOS protection product. Protecting such sites is a sound business strategy.

  • BoingBoomTschak 3 days ago

    They didn't hesitate with 8chan, even when it was known that fedposting was a thing here and that the straw that broke the camel's back they pointed to could have well been a false flag.

gosub100 3 days ago

So the deep state is smart enough to take over the corporation and inject all this secret squirrel tech, but didn't think to cook the books to make it look like a marginally-profitable (but boring) business?

It reminds me of the counterargument to UFOs where they say "so the UFO flew here from 100 light-years away, through extreme cold, deep space, intense radiation, dodged space rocks, but as soon as it came into a lukewarm atmosphere with a modest gravity and tame weather, it crashed into a field in New Mexico?"

  • zimpenfish 3 days ago

    To be fair, you could see how a vehicle designed rigidly for extreme cold, extreme vacuum, zero gravity, etc. might fail catastrophically when introduced to modest temperatures, a modest atmosphere, and a modest gravity.[1]

    It wouldn't say much for the foresight of the alien designers, mind.

    [1] "100 KILOpascals? KILO? I thought you said milli, you blithering nixflorp!"

    • throwaway92853 3 days ago

      > [1] "100 KILOpascals? KILO? I thought you said milli, you blithering nixflorp!"

      The numbers were given in Universal Standard Units, but the manufacturer assumed Galactic Imperial Units

  • hipadev23 3 days ago

    What? What does business profitability or viability have to do with anything? Cloudflare can serve both customers at the same time. They still make amazing products, have incredibly talented engineers, and provide extremely valuable commercial services.

    PRISM worked with numerous participants from well-oiled tech startups to aging why-wont-you-just-die companies.

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MarkuC 3 days ago

PRISM revealed secrets. It also revealed that some companies fought back as much as possible. It's also possible to design core tech so that even when forced to participate, you reveal as little or no information.

CloudFlare, PRISM, and Securing SSL Ciphers, 2013-06-12 Matthew Prince https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-prism-secure-ciphers/

fiatjaf 3 days ago

Honestly this is the most likely hypothesis, but would be nice to have some more evidence.

  • sophacles 3 days ago

    If a cdn didn't intercept requests, how else could it work? Literally every cdn is an mitm.

    • ycombinatrix 2 days ago

      I'm sure you've heard this before but Cloudflare isn't really a CDN. CDNs don't have to intercept requests to be useful.

      I think what you describe is closer to "TLS terminating reverse proxy", which does need to intercept every request.

jjordan 3 days ago

What are some alternatives? Preferably the more open source the better.

  • dingnuts 3 days ago

    what is an "open source" network infrastructure provider?

    • ramon156 3 days ago

      Cloudflare is mostly open-sourced, alternatives are more often than not closed-sourced

      • dewey 3 days ago

        I don't think putting up a few libraries on GitHub and writing great post-mortems makes something "Mostly open-sourced".

      • jazzyjackson 3 days ago

        I believe the implication is that cloudflares usefulness is not in her source code but rather her physical infra, there is not some free as in freedom alternative to that.

  • Strongbad536 3 days ago

    Idk if they're open source, but netlify was the company that I thought sort of made this feature free and easy to use. Github pages is also a free alternative.

    • mhitza 3 days ago

      Someone was (incidentally?) ddos'ed on Netlify last year and was served a 104k bill. The fees were waved in the end, but the caveat remains on all these free services that you pay by bandwidth.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776

      • wahnfrieden 3 days ago

        That's why I like Bunny, the only such service I could find with prepaid pricing. I would rather have service shut off than to have to pay $104k for a day or two of service.

  • pc86 3 days ago

    This is one of those things where the act of trying to evade state-level actors by definition puts you on their radar big time.

  • overstay8930 3 days ago

    Alternatives to what? Five Eyes? Good luck with that.

    • HWR_14 3 days ago

      China is happy to offer an alternative. It has pretty high costs, and I don't think it's worth it, but it exists.