Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by morrbo on Monday July 20, 2020 @11:42AM (#23898908)

II love cloudflare. It has really helped out with several sites/projects that I have worked on and the service is top notch. I am also an investor. I tend to invest in stuff which I use a lot or trust/respect the employees. Weirdly what made me really invest is the level of geekiness on the company. I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome". I just wanted to say don't change. Your lz4 implementation, aes gcm golang optimizations have directly benefitted me. Coupled with really high quality post mortem articles, articles on interesting things like compression, encryption, networking, a few random articles (the privacy focussed file system recently comes to mind, written at the same time I was making my own distributed fs) just leave me with a lot of respect for the culture there.

I was worried a bit when I saw the initial IPO that the free tier would leave (despite promises it wouldn't) but that doesn't seem to be the case. Literally the only bad thing I've seen on the site is recently you switched from recaptcha to a new one that I had a real tough time with logging in today - it was a bit glitchy on my pc. The only suggestion I thought of as well would be a simple "maintenance mode" similar to the "I'm under attack mode" which would allow those of us without super-ha to quickly toggle on something to pop up a "sorry server"/site is down form maintenance page without having to mess with our proxies/web servers.

Anyway I know this comes across as totally kissing-ass but I just wanted to say thanks to someone who actually works there. Everyone fat fingers stuff every now and again,don't sweat it.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by renewiltord on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:58PM (#23900270)

It's a bit of a sad story, but maybe you'll like this read about one of the guys who laid the foundation for their tech and his sad decline: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...

I really liked the stories of his skill when he was in his prime. Very inspiring.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by ksec on Monday July 20, 2020 @08:18PM (#23903225)

I dont know how I missed the Cloudflare IPO and this Story. So thanks for posting it. Extremely good writing, though the story was very sad.

I wonder if there are any relationship between FTD and how clever a person or how much brain a person uses.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by thereticent on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @06:53PM (#23911823)

Nothing beyond the normal "cognitive reserve" findings that high education and broad cognitive engagement makes the brain pathology take longer to reduce your functioning to a dementia state.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by janee on Monday July 20, 2020 @04:35PM (#23901628)

Sounds lame but this story really touched me. I recently visited a family member who's nearing the end and it broke my heart to see them in that condition.

I'm not sure what to take from this. But thank you for sharing it

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by mayankkaizen on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @01:58AM (#23904630)

Never heard of him but I read this article in one sitting (extremely hard thing for me) and I felt some unexplained connections with this story. A Beautiful Mind is another book which I very often go back to and go through similar emotions.

In all, it was a captivating read.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by h0l0cube on Monday July 20, 2020 @08:58PM (#23903429)

Reminds me of this part of Robert Sapolsky's Human Behavioural Biology lecture series:

Robert Sapolsky - Phineas Gage and frontal damage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wKDXzk8Wm4

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by eigenvalue on Monday July 20, 2020 @06:51PM (#23902728)

Wow, thanks for linking to the article. What an awful story. Makes you think about the wisdom of undertaking major elective surgery if it's not absolutely required in the short term.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by xref on Monday July 20, 2020 @07:59PM (#23903129)

His wife saw it as a turning point, but the doctors and neurologists don’t seem to think FTD is linked to surgery in any way

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by rhizome on Monday July 20, 2020 @04:11PM (#23901398)

> I remember seeing you guys using a lava lamp wall to generate entropy and just thought "that's awesome".

To be sure (and for the sake of internet rando completenessism), it does look like CF waited until the original SGI patent on the technique ran out. :)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5732138

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by WarOnPrivacy on Monday July 20, 2020 @07:37PM (#23903013)

> it does look like CF waited until the original SGI patent on the technique ran out.

As ever, innovation was brick-walled until IP got out of the way.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by mavelikara on Monday July 20, 2020 @07:46PM (#23903064)

> To be sure (and for the sake of internet rando completenessism), it does look like CF waited until the original SGI patent on the technique ran out. :)

That's right. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860658

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by DrJosiah on Monday July 20, 2020 @05:21PM (#23902045)

I work at hCaptcha, we run CF's captcha. If you're having problems in the future, popping open a debugger and capturing the results can help us figure out what's going on. But also: browser, OS, site, ...?

Right now: there is an issue with Safari users on the most recent iOS and OS X, where 3rd party cookies have now been disabled by default. We're working on a solution.

If that's your issue, you can fix on your side in the short-term by not using Safari, or by enabling 3rd party cookies.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by Kudos on Monday July 20, 2020 @06:48PM (#23902697)

I'd love to see your reply to the blind person commenting on your product here.

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by DrJosiah on Monday July 20, 2020 @08:56PM (#23903418)

Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23903405

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by virtue3 on Monday July 20, 2020 @10:25PM (#23903812)

I cannot believe apple decided to roll that out in the middle of COVID. I got hit pretty hard with it and am finally rolling out a fix for my own stuff.

(posted in case others are hit by this) using `requestStorageAccess()` on a user click event seems to work and that's what we're rolling out :/ https://gist.github.com/iansltx/18caf551baaa60b79206

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Re:Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure... by benmanns on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:29PM (#23900006)

If you use Cloudflare workers, you could put together a maintenance page with a simple script + Cloudflare Workers KV as a toggle switch. It would cost $5/mo if you're not already using workers.

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