FYI, we also fully block users from the US (due to regulations).
My problem here is mainly the unprofessional communication and huge mess of mixing "compliance" with sales, without giving any clear information or options. And then the removal of our account without warning while we were still talking to them.
Generally, low-reputation IP addresses are associated with scams, spammers, and other similar things. Gaming somehow gets lumped into this bucket in some jurisdictions, but that hurts you worldwide (similar with other "sin businesses" like porn). These blacklists get published (I think there's some parts of BGP that make this happen, but I'm not quite sure what the mechanism is), and being on any one of them hurts your traffic everywhere because it becomes suspect.
I agree with you that this mix of compliance, engineering, and sales is gross. If this was the issue, they should have just told the OP.
I guess I'll see in a while if this was also just a sales tactic from Cloudflare or not.
The most (in)famous case is China's GFW which banes IPs all the time. Yes, other websites often get accidentally blocked, but they don't care. Moreover, you can't even communicate with them because there are no official legal regulations. This is something what any CDN or cloud providers have to deal all the time.
BYOIP isn’t just expensive—if your content is bad for IP reputation the time-to-flagging of your IPs is going to be way shorter on BYOIP than on shared IPs due to there being less dilution. And that’s without getting into the challenges around rotating/renting IPs on a continual basis.
I do agree that CF did not communicate that well or professionally—if the sales emails are the only comms that happened here.
Many gambling companies are fine just doing BYOIP or running dedicated hosting infrastructure that is on providers who are explicitly running hosting for that industry (although they are moving to cloud). There is a good reason this separate infrastructure exists. In general, I would not assume they are rotating IPs: this is not a scam, it's a business, and they are largely fine with being blocked in places where they can't legally operate.
Is there much of a market for that? I thought random.org had it all sewn up.
There are seals on the hardware, any modification must be approved, you must certify that the payout is the expected one, ...
Gambling however, you constantly have government auditors and the tax office crawling up your literal arse to make sure you don't cheat the gamblers, or worse, the government out of their money. And in some cases, add the mob or other criminals on top who also want their cut.
For components in the path of money flow (payment processors, RNGs, hosting, etc.), it's similar.
I think we are only one of ~3 TRNG suppliers who have been audited. Many games don't use a TRNG, though.
Since it uses atmospheric noise, you can also influence the numbers from random.org by transmitting radio waves in the area nearby - the operator of random.org has mentioned that there's so much RF activity that he is concerned about whether the bits are still random. A final issue is that they are also so low-volume that they probably can't get enough test data for the required audits (which can be a lot of data).
To underscore the volume question: Random.org used to have a running count of bits generated. The counter wasn't monotonic (before it broke in ~2015-2019), but the peak value I saw when I checked archive.org was about 250 GiB total since 1998 (that was in 2015). That is one quarter of the size of our "light" qualification test ("heavy" is 16 TiB). The RNG auditors also take O(100) megabytes for each audit, which would be a significant fraction of random.org's output.
I was just curious to see what a landing page of a RNG supplier looked like, how do you even do sales for such a thing? With 3 players I guess it's just something you know in the industry and those partnerships are likely long-lived, right?
niches like this fascinate me for some reason!
I don't think it's a huge market, but state-run lotteries around the world need good random number generators for games without physical balls (like Keno for example).
I've talked with people that have created RNGs (rather than buying off-the-shelf solutions) and it sounds like soul-crushing work - mostly due to dealing with the government regulators that need to give final approval before the RNG can actually be put into production.
A demand for 120k upfront or else bad stuff happens is by no reasonable definition "selling", aggressive or otherwise
That is just a story they have made up. They don't know why Cloudflare shut their account down. I reckon the Fastly "reason" is likey a red herring.
I think the lesson here is to be as provider agnostic as possible and have a backup plan in case your current provider decides they don’t like you anymore or they just delete all your data just because they can.
One thing I've learned to be wary of on the job is "do you need help?" That phrase is often code for "You are not performing up to our expectations. This is your first and only warning. Get in shape or get out."
OP runs a casino/gambling site. Gambling is a regulatory mess (I have spent far too long dealing with this as an RNG supplier), and so it's very hard to comply with every jurisdiction, and each one needs you to prove compliance to operate in that jurisdiction.* Gaming companies spend a lot on compliance and tracking, but since the internet is the internet, it's pretty hard to enforce perfectly, so some countries and ISPs take this into their own hands.
Due to that, IPs hosting gambling and gaming sites often get regionally blocked by internet providers or otherwise flagged as hosting illegal content. Those regional blocks consequently affect the reputation score of the IP, and if you are a traffic aggregator like Cloudflare, can cause other customers to have issues. One of the most aggressive and annoying regulatory environments for gambling companies is the US, so it's very possible Cloudflare has had some trouble due to gambling use of their IPs in states in the USA.
Cloudflare wanted them to use the BYOIP features of the enterprise plan, and did not want them on Cloudflare's IPs. The solution was to aggressively sell the Enterprise plan, and in a stunning failure of corporate communication, not tell the customer what the problem was at all. The message from Cloudflare should have been "Enterprise plan + BYOIP or ban, and maybe we'll work with you on price" but it was instead "you would really like the Enterprise plan."
*As an aside - we're lucky in that respect being a tech supplier with relatively uniform rules, but our customers (the gaming companies) get the short end of the stick here.