1337x.to was blocked for me today! Even though it doesn’t stream content. Feels like an “enshittification pincer” is happening right now.
I’ve always said. It’s not good that cloudfare (or any single entity) “owns” half the internet.
For my self hosted stuff I refuse to use their services. I prefer to invest a little more time securing it from my side instead of giving them more control over internet.
It’s not good that cloudfare (or any single entity) “owns” half the internet.
100% this^. Even if they aren’t actively doing anything terrible that we know of, it still totally undermines people’s privacy, even those of us who try to be careful about that sort of thing. Cloudflare is fingerprinting you when you visit sites that use their services for security, and like google, their sheer ubiquity across the web means they can effectively watch and track you wherever you go.
More and more I’ve been running into the full-page error “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” while just browsing around the web. A site is completely locked to any user who runs into this error; it’s not just a popup notification, its a blank page with nothing but the error message and the only way to “fix” it is to whitelist their fingerprinting scripts. I use extensions like uBlock Origin of course, but for more fine-tuned script blocking, also uMatrix, so it’s usually because of one of those that I get the cloudflare error. I could of course whitelist it, but I never do, I just decide that page is not worth my time. But it’s getting harder to stick with that principle as I run into it more all the time, even for sites that it never used to be an issue. It’s also part of why it keeps getting more difficult to browse the web with TOR browser.
Fuck cloudflare. They’ve wormed their way into most of the web now but they’ve managed to do it in a quiet way that usually goes unnoticed if you’re not a privacy nerd. Everyone knows google and amazon are evil and do all that they can to track anything and everything people do, but cloudflare is becoming just as insidious.
Time for pirate sites to use something other than cloudflare?
I2P
It looks like we are going that way. Frankly it’s for the best. Tor has become a risk and that’s just not acceptable under this regime.
I agree that it is for the best. But Tor is not and never was made with torrenting in mind while I2P is. Also torrenting Hurst the tor network.
Anubis
Just when cloudflare were starting to be the good guys by making AI crawlers pay…
This will cause piracy and AI companies to form alliances.
I never trust that move. I’m fairly sure that they only do that so they can crawl themselves and sell the data.
Oh, of course.
But that’ll help make AI more expensive to dev and lighten the load on smaller sites that are crumbling under the AI load.
I hope cloudflare’s competition makes that available too to make sure cloudflare doesn’t have all the data and the leverage that goes with it.
The only options when dealing with governments is comply or get out.
Humm… Who are telling this to?
If you’re talking to businesses, if this were true, all the tax optimization and fraud would disappear overnight, I almost wish it were true.
And if you’re talking to citizens, how about labor organization, revolts, resistance?
Either way, that looks awfully reductive
A guillotine is also an option.
That’ll show those pesky pirates.
Spoiler
It won’t.