>But they will harass your visitors with captchas for no good reason.

The other fun part about those captchas is they also gatekeep blind people in a way. They're using a service called HCaptcha which doesn't offer an audio alternative like ReCaptcha does. Instead they give you an "accessibility cookie" delivered to your e-mail address, which you can then use to automatically pass the captcha. (Very useful for everyone btw; give it a try.) The problem is that this cookie--and the e-mail address it's attached to--allow CF and potentially HCaptcha to track you around the internet. There's no way to anonymously browse the net through TOR or a VPN unless you create a throwaway e-mail address for that session.

HCaptcha recently expressed interest in creating a text-based alternative, but I wonder how this will stack up against modern AI. For now, it doens't bother me because I don't encounter it often and I have throwaway e-mail addresses, but it's just one more step I have to go through to remain anonymous where any sighted person could just click the traffic lights.

People use Cloudflare to limit traffic from particular countries and Cloudflare exposes Tor as a country that can be blocked.

The Internet wasn’t meant be decentralized. The ARPANET was meant to be able to function in the event of a war.

> People use Cloudflare to limit traffic from particular countries

Why would a website care where I'm from?

Depending on the service you're offering, it can make a ton of operation sense to simply blanket-ban a whole bunch of IP blocks, including some that correspond to certain countries. China and Russia, for instance, will provide nearly-zero income but a substantial percentage of exploit attempts, stolen credit card use/validation attempts, et c., for some companies. Just banning them might make a lot of sense.

They only sell products in some countries and the vast majority of abuse comes from other countries is the one use case I’ve seen for it.

What if I want to just look at a product with no intention to buy it? What if I do want to buy it and use a parcel forwarding service to get it to me?

I do some backend work for a small company that sells a downloadable software product.

As far as we can tell no one in China has ever bought our product in the ~15 years it has been available. None of our pages are localized for China. If someone in China wanted a product that does what ours does there are Chinese companies whose products are cheaper and probably better for Chinese users.

Yet last time I checked something like 95% of downloads of our product came from China. I took a bunch of IP addresses from the download logs and looked to see if I could figure out something about these downloaders.

All of them seemed to be at hosting companies, not end user machines. Looking at nearby IP addresses to see what else is hosted at the same hosting company they were mostly scam or borderline scam sites or porn sites. The later was a bit unexpected because at least according to Wikipedia porn and any involvement with it is prohibited in China.

I don't see any good reason I should not block Chinese downloads. We have to pay for the bandwidth they use, they are extremely unlikely to generate any revenue for us even indirectly, and they are coming from sketchy commercial IP neighborhoods rather than end users.

As a wise man once said, "You don't always get what you want "

>What if I want to just look at a product with no intention to buy it?

Then they want you even less.

In any case, if a company doesn't want to do business with your country, that's it. What matters whether you want to buy it or not? (Not to mention a lot of the abuse towards developers comes from no buying customers as well - people who want some feature added "before they buy", who just use the trial or free version, etc.).

You can always find a competitor company that does serve you.

International customers are more trouble than it's worth when you're a small company and you as a seller are the one who absorbs the loss in cases of delayed, defective, lost or damaged items.

I find it deeply ironic and a little sad that you cite the intentions of the original designers of ARPANET and the Internet, then describe about how you've commercialized the Internet.

I'm talking about one use case of Cloudflare I've seen. I don't think I can be held responsible for the commercialization of the Internet when I make and freely distribute monkey movies.

Companies use geo-ipv4 a lot and it's inaccurate and a giant, giant pain in the arse.

If 99% of spam/abuse came from one location, and it wasn't a place I offered a service to at all, I could use something like Cloudflare to restrict their access.

Europe has GDPR, and a bunch of american news sites (even articles posted here) just block you, some even without giving a reason ("this site not available in your country").

> But they will harass your visitors with captchas for no good reason.

It is up to you to harass your visitors or not. CloudFlare does not enforce it. You can disable the firewall if you don't want that kind of protection.

Cloudflare enables this behaviour. They are not guiltfree in this regard.

They enable what exactly? It's a useful tool and should definitely be activated in some use cases.

We might argue about whether it should come turned on by default or not, but as far as I remember the default setting is not a strict but a moderate protection level anyway.

From parent:

> But they will harass your visitors with captchas for no good reason.

Not sure what point we're trying to make here. Any other firewall/CDN/WAF enable you to do the same thing, to the point of many also providing ready-made protection profiles... what makes this specific member of that group special? Can you clarify?

This is so true. In general, enablers do have a moral obligation over whatever they enable. People shouldn't ignore that.

The Internet wasn't meant to be used for outrageous amounts of fraud and abuse. Sometimes you have to put a captcha on ASNs or CCs because many of them simply don't care about keeping the bad guys off their networks.

I get "checking your browser" screen from cloudlare for a few seconds every time I go to gitlab ppag, and some other sites.