I would have liked to read that. Instead here's what I see:

> Checking if the site connection is secure

> Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue

> blog.cloudflare.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.

What does it mean to "review the security" of my connection?

Wouldn't that be my business? (Feel free to review the security of your connection by all means) :)

Why would that "need" running JavaScript here on my browser (which I don't for fairly obvious security reasons) Other websites seem to have no problem delivering basic content without that.

Also, no thank-you to cookies. We're not entering into a "session" relationship here, I merely wanted to read the document you advertised at the URL.

Explains why I start getting captchas due to using uBlock to disable JavaScript. How freaking annoying!

Cool. That is certainly your choice. It is also the choice of the website operators whose sites you try to visit to block your traffic since you won't opt in to their security precautions.

But I don't invite people to my house and then slam the door in their face.

No, but you do have undiscussed conditions to enter...

Your house isn't also accessible by anyone in the world, anywhere, at any time. People who complain about this stuff conveniently ignore that a massive amount of traffic to public websites is malicious and automated in nature. It's not crazy that website operators want to block that stuff. They would rather block the .0001% of people who choose to block javascript than expose their site to the junk. You can rage at Cloudflare all you want but if it wasn't a service people wanted then they wouldn't be offering it.

> .0001% of people who choose to block javascript

The measured number of browsers blocking JavaScript varies between about 0.7% and 4% with an estimated global average hovering around 1.5%. Here are some sources [1,2,3].

[1] https://www.cotsweb.com/blog/how-many-people-have-javascript...

[2] https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/stats-no-javascript....

[3] https://deliberatedigital.com/blockmetry/javascript-disabled

This is not specifically about Cloudflare’s “challenges“/etc, but —

The reality of operating a big site/service on the internet in 2022 is that it’s sometimes necessary to use methods that annoy a few people (with very non-standard browser settings) in order to protect the service as a whole from a million bots trying to attack it at any given time.

> operating a big site/service

This sounds like a very plausible argument. I've heard many of the arguments and don't dispute the threat model to something like Cloudflare.

And yet something about it still doesn't add up.

It turns power into a weakness.

How is it that much smaller sites - still able to serve something as simple as a plain-text blog to millions of users from a modest rack shack - operate perfectly well without any impediment?

Wouldn't an operation with all the power, might and money of Cloudflare be able to do a better job and still maintain the QoS (accessibility, interoperability etc) as Basement Bob with her Raspberry Pi?

Remember, all I want to do here is read a static web page of (I guess) less than 1000 words.

I'll take a punt: if "defending against millions of bots" is Cloudflare's business offering, then being able to serve a static site off a Raspberry Pi doesn't look good :)

Is your claim that Basement Bob’s raspberry pi could withstand the kind of attacks that companies like Cloudflare handle?

Eg - https://blog.cloudflare.com/26m-rps-ddos/

I think the parent comment's claim is that serving a CAPTCHA page to potential attackers may actually be more resource intensive than serving a lightweight page that has the actual content on it.

So, you posit, that Cloudflare has never thought of this before or weighed the pros/cons before building an entire business out of it? Sure.

Typically, the pages that Cloudflare protects are not especially lightweight or efficient.

No. It's that Basement Bob's Raspberry Pi doesn't need to.

I don’t think your line of reasoning was very coherent, and displayed a lack of understanding of reality.

I see a bunch of corporate talk about how they use captchas but now it is a different type that is less difficult?