CloudFlare check sucks

submitted by binaryblob from self.AskSaidIt

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]magnora7 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Given that the Internet infrastructure is being more and more bought by the usual monopolies (MS/Google/Amazon), Internet is becoming less distributed at its root, so less weak points but way more impactful.

Yes I agree in theory. But in practice, the internet backbones are already owned by a small handful of "Tier 1" Internet Network Service Providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#List_of_Tier_1_networks

L3 Technologies being the biggest, and has been for a long time. Every backbone cable is owned by these big companies, and they all have government connections and so on.

And it's known companies like AT&T basically have "black rooms" set up at the internet backbone connection points, where the three letter agencies have their own equipment set up to sniff and intercept traffic, and AT&T isn't allowed inside. Read about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Anyway, things are bad, but it's not futile. I wouldn't be running saidit if it was futile.

But in the short term, things will probably continue to consolidate (or remain consolidated) and it makes me honestly question the usefulness of the internet over the next few decades. It may eventually just turn in to TV, where you can't really interact with it in a serious way, it just pushes ideas at you all day. That seems to be the direction it's heading. And the AI bots now flooding every forum with garbage content isn't helping, so even websites that don't want to move in that direction are being forced to by malicious traffic.

But on the main point, I'm sure the current cloudflare thing will be fine over the next few weeks and months. Cloudflare seems competent and motivated. The long-term direction of the internet as a whole is concerning though, to say the least. Thanks for the chat. Have a good one!

[–]Maniak 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Fair point. A lot is happening under the radar for most people (myself included, I had even forgotten about L3 given how rarely it appears in any news), and it's all about governments and corporations making deals between themselves as to the control over what everybody else on the planet is now using as their most basic communication system (outside of actual speech). Control that and you control everything.

If there's one positive side to the whole profit motive thing, it's that those corporations are not tied to any specific government. They're buying them out, sure, but ultimately they're solely interested in their own profits, so there's still some wiggle-room for regular people to lean on that. For now.

I'm right there with you as to what Internet may very well become in the nearer future than we'd think. Tor may end up having to pick up the slack, but there's work to do on the engagement aspect, and then we get right back to the infrastructure issue because everything is going through that. You can add has many encryption layers as you want, you're still going through fiber connections that are owned by a couple of corporations who don't care about your freedom of expression.

There's constant nudging going on, it's always going in the same direction, and attacks such as today's on Cloudflare are an integral part of it.

Oh well, we'll keep on doing our thing whenever and wherever we're able to, and when we can't anymore, we'll find other ways to keep doing it anyway. As of right now, count this as one grateful for what you've done here.

Good weekend-end, and hopefully tomorrow (or soon after) Cloudflare will have taken control back, until next time :)