‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

Cloudflare OHTTP gateway

203 points · 95 comments · est

  1. 0x073 · · focus · HN ↗
    As cloudflare is the gateway for half the Internet and the other half is meta Google and Microsoft, I would prefer to share my IP with the website I visit instead some big tech companies.

    But maybe I get privacy wrong.

    1. someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
      Why not both? When browsing Microsoft, give your IP to Cloudflare. When browsing Pouet, give your IP to Pouet.
    2. ThatMedicIsASpy · · focus · HN ↗
      What if the solution is garbage? There are ad blockers that click every ad. Random google searches, random chatbot searches, random clicks.

      I have a feeling that privacy is easier to protect if you just mix what you want to hide with a lot of garbage.

      1. stubish · · focus · HN ↗
        If a human was manually reviewing your logs, maybe. But that isn't the problem. Your stream is already a pile of garbage amongst billions of other piles of garbage. Programs will find the keywords they are looking for no matter if they are looking in a big pile of garbage or small.
    3. krzyk · · focus · HN ↗
      There are other CNDs, and Cloudflare isn't event the largest one, it has best marketing and free solutions.
      1. jbverschoor · · focus · HN ↗
        Cloudflare provides so much more than just CDN, and in a very nice package
        1. krzyk · · focus · HN ↗
          As do others, they had to because CDN is not that good source of income nowadays, so most went into other offerings that are more profitable.

          As I wrote, Cloudflare excel at marketing. And offers to consumers (as opposed to B2B).

    4. johnhess · · focus · HN ↗
      This separates who sees what. Cloudflare (or any OHTTP gateway) sees who talks to who, but can't see the content. The service sees the content but not who you are/your IP.

      You can imagine a lot of threat models where who you talk to isn't sensitive, nor is "someone talked to them about X" but knowing both facts is a risk.

      1. thayne · · focus · HN ↗
        For a single transaction that's great. The problem is whene a large fraction of the internet is served by a single entity (say cloudflare), then that entity has information about what sites/customers were visited by a specific ip address, and which ip addresses visited a certain site/customer.

        Although, that is still better than them having the source ip and the content.

    5. charcircuit · · focus · HN ↗
      Many of those websites are hosted by big tech companies via their cloud offerings. These clouds have even developed software for reading files within the VMs they are hosting.
Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.