The 16‑kilobyte curtain. How Russia’s new data‑capping censorship is throttling Cloudflare
(zona.media)
from Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 19 Jun 12:06
https://programming.dev/post/32494035
from Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 19 Jun 12:06
https://programming.dev/post/32494035
A new form of state-level internet filtering that restricts data flow is disrupting access to large portions of the global web for Russian citizens. Cloudflare, the world leader in DDoS protection and high-traffic load management, is being targeted by these new data caps, which appear designed to push users toward Russian-controlled services. Meanwhile, the move leaves Russian businesses dangerously exposed.
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16 KB per website? What part of the normal internet is that small? What part of the indie web is that small?
e.g. look at the smallest sites on 512kb.club
Or is this just 16kb per request, which would make more sense with the following explanation:
AFAIK, VPNs maintain a long-standing connection that would definitely use more than 16kb at a time.
Its an endless arms race. Next will be chunking vpns that chunk requests down to 16kb packets and reassemble on the other end. There is nothing stopping a custom protocol from working around this limitation, in a safe secure manner.
Just a matter of time.
You could probably do it with http if the server properly supports the content range headers.
Cloudflare and Russia are both bad, take each other down pls
Why is cloudflare bad?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/9d8c3017-2406-4185-aa1e-5802dce9352b.webp">
Why is this bad
Wasting time on useless obstacles is bad
They’re meant to prevent bot traffic to sites and protect from DDOS attacks
they also often prevent legitimate traffic from poorer countries, and aggressively so
Well thems the breaks!
I do not believe they limit it themselves, they just follow setting set by others. You can choose to block all traffic from certain counties of you want. Or not.
i meant other types of captchas as well, but yes, cloudflare is fairly configurable. I also know other captchas can be more aggressive. And of course captchas can also block or harass “high privacy” configuration browsers and clients, and there’s also the strategy of infinite delay, where a captcha is never quite sure you’re really a human, so you have to work through 12 phases of it only to have to do the exact same thing again the next time you’re on the site. Recaptcha V3 with its “automatic” background captcha is also in a surprising amount of places you’d never know about unless you’re infected with some kind of The-Mainstream-Internet-Hates-You disease. Captchas discriminating against poor countries isn’t some big secret though, as far as I’m aware it’s fairly well known.
What the other commenter said and also accessibility issues, aand overall this is a problem which shouldn’t face the end user at all. Just browsing has become just a nuisance after a nuisance nowadays. Just like cookie modals not adhering to browser settings or hiding the reject all behind extra steps.
Yeah would be sick if LLMs and bots just disappeared overnight
Captchas ain’t stopping them anyway
Except that bots already have a higher pass rate than humans, so the captcha isn’t even good at preventing bots.
The obstacles serve a specific purpose though. Do you believe this purpose is unimportant?
As usual, the purpose doesn’t justify the means. The goal could and should be achieved without this nonsense
How so?
These active captchas instead of methods not visible to the user are worse at hindering nefarious use than regular human use
What’s regular?
Care to expand on that? Why are captchas bad?
Sorry, I assumed this was already common knowledge. There’s another thread fork from a comment.
Tl;dr they’re not good at their purpose and cause unneeded annoyance to users.
And the cloudflare ones are broken as fuck. It varies but I often just can’t pass them. Answer it, wheel goes round and then back to having to tick it and start again. Beep boop.
If I see a cloudflare check I often just don’t bother loading the site at all.
Yeah cloudflare gets a similar reaction as a paywall. Fuck this site, I’ll go somewhere else
Agree
Idk man, I’ve seen hundreds of examples showcasing how they significantly reduce bot traffic. The point isn’t to make it impossible for a bot to get past it, it’s to make it so expensive per request that it’s not worth it.
I’m not saying the effect on bot traffic is none
Because they are anti-vpn and thus anti-privacy.
it’s about time someone fuckin did it.
it’s a shame it’s Russia though.
What are you even talking about?
cloudflare is a symptom of the corporatization of the internet.
they goals are counter to the goals of the internet to be a distributed repository of communities and information.
CF not only unifies all the communications through their services, which can cause worldwide outages (happens literally every year), but collects and tracks users across all other network requests.
CF is anti-privacy and pro-corporate interests.
That clarifies it, thanks