Both can be true?
Yup
Cloudflare is a business. Businesses protect their profits. Online casinos are scams subject to regular massive DDOS by their scumbag competitors and by people who want them shut down. Cloudflare wasn’t going to eat that loss anymore so they kicked them to the curb to save money. Also the time frame wasn’t 24 hours. More like a month. This makes me suspect the scamming casino’s story more.
Cloudflare as a business provides DDOS protection. If they kick out those who get ddos’s, what’s their value? (Sure, WAF etc. but you get the point).
Also, as much as casinos are ethically questionable, they are also business. Very regulated businesses even (while tech is kind of a Wild West).
And insurances provide monetary compensation until you become a common liability, too high to be covered by any sort of fee. DDOS protection is just the same. It’s only feasible if it happens rarely, like they usually happen. However if it’s a common occurrence it will just eat up the profits made by the fees and then some, which just is stupid to do in any case.
Comparing Cloudflare to insurance companies is not how you’ll convince me they’re not acting like jerks lol
I don’t want TP convince anyone they are not like jerks, but rather highlight why a corporation would do something like this to a (most likely) lucrative client.
It’s a completely different thing. DDoS protection is not like insurance. Insurance is putting monetary value on a risk and paying off if that risk materialises. DDoS mitigation is a set of technical measures that are implemented. Most of the DDoS protections are features which are implemented (e.g., when the traffic is more than X, require captcha for all requests). It doesn’t have any marginal cost for the provider.
And you can argue the same for the network infrastructure. Once you have the bandwidth, as long as it’s not saturated it is a waste letting it idle.
So I really don’t see how even being under DDoS every day can “eat up your fees”. Maybe you can elaborate?
It is similar in that there’s a pool of resource shared between all the clients, and the service provider can shift this resource around when in need.
You can make this argument for literally every business, though. Which business does not have a single pool of resources and multiple clients to consume them?
To me it seems a really arbitrary argument. Insurance companies estimate a risk, and if their chance to pay is almost certain, then for them there is no point in insuring you, they lose for sure so they refuse you.
DDoS protection services don’t pay if their customers get DDoS. Cloudflare doesn’t need to go and deploy more network appliances every time a customer gets DDoS’d, nor they need to hire additional engineers to implement features. They have done this already and if they do it’s a company-wide investment, not a per-client investment.
You can make this argument for literally every business, though. Which business does not have a single pool of resources and multiple clients to consume them?
The majority of factories. They get an order in and produce the product until that order is fulfilled. They don’t have to be running 24/7, it is just that that is the most profitable.
But if you stick to your “analogy”, a factory also chooses who their customers are. And if some are too demanding, they just drop them. Like the casinos.
OK, sorry. Digital services businesses.
Also, once factories have machines etc., they might prioritize one customer over another, but I doubt they decide a customer is not profitable. In fact, digital businesses don’t have by design the problems posed by the physical world, and this is especially true in b2c businesses…
I should have elaborated on it a bit more, my bad.
While it’s true that DDoS is more of an active technology rather than a CYA thing. It does however also act as insurance when it comes to the “blame game”: if your site goes down it’s not your fault but the provider’s fault, meaning you might be able to recoup lost profits through a lawsuit.
Of course the only way to avoid this for the provider is to provide better and stronger systems, which normally would grow homogenous through more customers and/or growing fees for all customers, which would pay for better capacity and stronger protection by itself.
However here we have a client that is a high value target that others might want to take down at all costs. Even if they didn’t sue, a strong enough attack might, alongside naturally expected DDoS on other clients, not only take down this customer’s server, but others as well, which really isn’t something you want, for the reasons stated above. And rapidly increasing security could be not worth it, as it could devolve into an arms race by proxy with a high risk of the customer leaving if you raise their fees to much, leaving you with a system which’s maintenance will now dig into your profits due to a lost big income stream, or make other customers leave if you raise the general fee.
To be honest, I have never even heard of anybody who sued a service provider for failing to mitigate DDoS, or for letting an attack through a WAF, etc. I am quite positive that the contracts/T&C you sign when you subscribe to the services are rock solid, otherwise cloudflare would be under extreme liability. Also, usually you have the ability to customize the DDoS settings, choose thresholds etc. I really can’t imagine a company having any real chance of getting the provider to reimburse you. The only service that usually has SLA is the uptime of the CDN, which if breached should be compensated. I am quite sure that in the cheap plans the SLA is probably not very high.
Also, what you say about a customer that someone might want to take down is true for all customers that require DDoS protection. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t pay for the service on the first place. Cloudflare serves a bazillion customers who are much bigger targets than a casino, I don’t think they were afraid of the exposure. Also, when cloudflare receives a high DDoS attack, for them is awesome marketing. Imperva, Akamai, Cloudflare are basically identical and the selling point is exactly “how big can they tolerate?”.
Honestly rather than speculating on what we don’t know, I propose a simpler option: cloudflare plans are designed to get customers one foot in the door with a super cheap plan, to them each individual customer has basically no marginal cost. However, once the customers are in they can identify the ones they can squueze and find reasons to push more expensive plans. If they bump 1/30 of them, even if they other 29 will leave, they are in plus (250x29 < 10000 x 1).
To me this seems simply a business strategy. They specifically say “Unlimited & unmetered DDoS attack mitigation” in the cheapest plan, afterall.
I think they are only “very regulated” if they are based in certain western countries?
I used to hear a bunch of stories about issues getting payouts.
It doesn’t matter where you are based (as a company, if this is what you meant), it matters where you operate, and lots of countries are regulated (not only Western - which in many cases are not, incl. many US states). There are basically three types of markets: regulated, gray (not regulated, not forbidden) and black (forbidden). Different companies operate in different markets, depending on their strategy (and level of shadiness). Payment processing (deposits & payouts) is done using external providers (as many as possible to serve different countries), and there are quite a lot of regulations regarding money laundering, politically exposed people and so on that they have to comply with, both for gambling regulations and international laws (e.g., European laws are quite strict when it comes to AML).
Obviously you may have customers from a regulated country without “operating” there, which means advertising, offering the site in their language, etc. But, when you withdraw money identity verification is necessary, and companies can be fined (or worse) if they willingly retain customers from regulated markets without the local license.
So yeah, there are companies that do shady stuff, but mostly it depends on country regulations. The company I worked for targeted Nordic Europe (mix of gray and regulated markets) and South America (mostly gray markets, on the way to be regulated), for example. Usually gaming authorities are quite keen in collecting their taxes, so they tend to be quite active in pursuing those who violate their regulations (like if you decide to operate where you can’t).
It’s not that they got DDoSed, it’s that unregulated off-shore gambling is illegal in many countries, so their IP addresses were getting blocked in these countries. The way CDNs like CloudFlare work is that many customers share the IP addresses, so they were getting other CloudFlare customers blocked as well.
CF wanted them to move to a “bring your own IP” plan so that their IP blocks wouldn’t affect other customers, and that came with the steep price tag.
That’s not what OC mentioned, which is what I was answering to. They mentioned the logic that getting DDoS made them unprofitable customers, I questioned it.
I perfectly understand the issue. If cloudflare was getting their IP blocked in countries where the casino was dodging regulations, they should have simply written that, and forced the customer to block traffic from those countries. The BYOIP is not the only way to solve it. Imperva forced the website i worked for to block Russia (which was not a market we were operating in) to prevent their IPs being blocked in Russia, for example. They didn’t bring it up as an option somehow, and that gives to this an extortion vibe.
Online casinos are also tech. The devops in the article literally says they set up proxies to continue operating in countries where their main domain is blocked. I know the core domain of casinos are very regulated, but I doubt the entire tech aspect of online casinos are regulated. I imagine there’s plenty of fuckery to do there.
Also casinos will throw out people who benefit too much at the expense of the casino. The casino benefitted too much at the expense of Cloudflare and refused to share the profits, so Cloudflare did what any casino would do and kicked them out.
The entire tech aspect of online casinos is regulated, from procedure to register customers, to bonuses, to segmentation, to popups that you need to show during game, to responsible gaming features, to security controls in the infrastructure, to reporting etc. I worked for one and I took care of the compliance to licenses. Nothing is perfect, of course, but you are under tight scrutiny, especially when you start accumulating licenses.
I don’t think casinos will throw out anybody ATM, they mostly work on quantity of users, they don’t care of few individuals who win (in fact they are good business - they will most likely play again in the future). Actions are taken against specific segments of users that are deemed high risk (e.g. suspected sure-betters, syndicates etc.). There is no need to throw them out, usually limits are applied.
For cloudflare, still nobody explained to me how using features and bandwidth already available costed anything more for Cloudflare.
They provide a whole lot more to begin with.
Sure, which is why I said:
(Sure, WAF etc. but you get the point).
An online casino would mostly benefit from WAF, DDoS protection and caching.
The arguments I was responding to is like saying that if you get too many web attacks they should kick you because the WAF is not anymore profitable. It doesn’t make any sense.
They didn’t get kicked out. Just moved to a more expensive solution / pricing structure
Cloudflare wasn’t going to eat that loss anymore so they kicked them to the curb to save money.
I am arguing with the logic that claims this is reasonable, not discussing what they did.
I don’t have a problem saying that they should charge more, but it’s them who made an unlimited plan to become a monopoly charging 250/month.
That wasn’t it, Cloudflare didn’t like the way the casino was using Cloudflare’s IPs, since they were getting banned in multiple countries.
Cloudflare only offers byoIP as part of a business package, and that comes with extortionate pricing.
Cloudflare is a business. Businesses protect their profits
You say that like it’s ok to do shitty things as long as “you’re a business protecting profits”
The purpose of the comment is clearly: “Cloudfare didn’t kick out the casinos because of a compromise with good ethics, but because it was making them lose money”. Please read it again.
I was just having issues with your opener which sounds whole lot like justification.
I’m not the person you were replying to, either.
I say that like its the way things are.
I was reading the blog post by the casino’s tech person and kept thinking to myself, “this is a casino; they may not be the most reliable narrator”. That said, CF was also stupid slow on taking down kiwi and stormfront, so they’re not great either.
Both of them suck and this whole thing is amusing to me. Hopefully this will serve to improve CF’s behaviour.
What was kiwi?
KiwiFarms, a forum dedicated to doxxing and IRL harassing of LGBTQ people, women, and anyone else they didn’t like. It
wasis a breeding ground for Nazis and other Conservative bigots and their ideologies, and they successfully harassed people into moving and hiding (or worse).Edit: they’re still around
Specifically, it started out to track, dox, and harass Chris-Chan (originally just for being a weirdo though they eventually came out as trans and made news in 2021 for being arrested for incest). The nearly two decade old (since 2007) ongoing campaign against them means they are probably the single most documented human being in history.
They don’t often target women just for being women, but much like with trans people and furries they also hate a hate-on for crowdfunded youtube personalities and fat acceptance and all of those groups do have their share of women (especially the last one - fat acceptance is primarily about women). They even target fundamentalist Christians and Quiverfull families sometimes (which tend to be very Conservative).
Also, there’s no “was” - they still exist are are operating.
For those horrible enough to like this.
Sometimes each other too if my information is correct. So even if you are a bad person and want to harass innocent people, kiwi farms isn’t the place to be.
Bad people are bad people towards you too if you give them the chance. Just don’t be bad, much better. Don’t hate!
They target anyone a critical mass of their users think might be entertaining to target, and yeah that sometimes includes each other.
Better to give them a wide berth and try not to draw the attention of the snarling horde with too much time on it’s hands.
A website similar to 4chan, but much much worse. They’d dox pretty much anyone they didn’t like, often LGBTQ+ people and allies
It isn’t clodflare’s job to take down or in any way take a stance on what websites they are providing most likely only DDOS and DNS services for.
That’s for example why privacy sites can use them.
It’s the police or maybe hosting provider that should decide when/if to take down sites.
If cloudflare were hosting the site I think they have more responsibility.
I feel like if you’re protecting a site that has caused as much harm as kf, it might be morally correct to stop doing so.
Context?
cloudflare has a known habit of taking heavy users and forcibly converting companies from a $250/m plan to a $12,000/month plan.
some people would be happy for that to happen to bad entities like an online casino, but really, to cloudflare the business use is irrelevant and it could happen to any of us.
the lesson is to minimize your cloudflare dependencies. if you have to use it, use it in an agile method where you can move to something else quickly should you need to.
Thank you
12000 a month is probably chump change for a casino and money well spent at that for the features cloudflare provides
At my job, a reasonably sized it customer generates about 100-500k a month.
For 12k a month just the DDoS protection would be worth it for a site of that nature and size but they also get CDN access with full control over the caching, and a web application firewall.
The way I see it the casino was trying to plate share at a buffet and got caught so now they are complaining about having to pay the correct amount.
The casino has like millions of folks at $300/month according to a comment on another topic about this.
Based cloudflare.
My feed has been all about posts like this one https://programming.dev/post/14669153
If yours hasn’t you’re missing some stupid flame wars and nothing of value.
That makes sense, I don’t subscribe to !technology@lemmy.world and only ever check ALL if there’s an emergency or I’m logging into a fresh install of Sync.
reminder that cloudflare routinely works with white supremacist and other hate sites to protect them and have most recently refused to stop hosting kiwi farms, as they were doxxing and threatening trans people
They don’t “work with white supremacists”. They try to self-polish the tremendous power the have, seeking neutrality in most cases.
THIS MESSAGE (MATERIAL) CREATED AND (OR) DISTRIBUTED WITH PURPOSE OF HATE AND (OR) ENCOURAGING HATE.
You forgot to put it.
I heavilt dislike cloudflare, but this is not valid reason to hate them.
You’re describing Twitter and Facebook as well.
Removed by mod
The same place that regularly bullies and bear-baits ‘lulcows’ for entertainment? The same people who bullied an autistic adult over a shitty Sonic fan character webcomic?
Nice! A topical meme relevant to today’s top Lemmy story!
I think I haven’t seen story you mention.
Thanks
What is a “top” story on Lemmy, given everyone subscribes to different communities? Is it the most popular across all communities?
Por qué no los dos?
What’s the problem with CloudFlare? They’re trying to make a profit, and so in the long run are the same as anybody, but every interaction I’ve had with them recently has left me impressed.
Edit: The answer is that the way their thing works nullifies HTTPS.
Remember when google was beloved by everyone back then when they’re still have “don’t be evil” motto? Cloudflare right now is like google back then: super useful, provides a lot of free services that would be expensive on other providers. But unlike google, if cloudflare go full evil in the future, the impact will be much larger because they’re an mitm proxy capable of seeing unencrypted traffics across all websites under their wing. Right now they’re serving ~30% of top 10,000 websites and growing.
Oh, okay, so I’m not wrong that they’re good right now.
I’m a little unclear on how it works. Do they strip off HTTPS somehow? Otherwise, there’s not too much unencrypted traffic around anymore.
Do they strip off HTTPS somehow?
Well yes, how else they can provide their services such as page caching, image optimizing, email address obfuscation, js minifications, ddos mitigation, etc unless they can see all data flowing between your server and your visitors in the clear?
Cloudflare is basically an MITM proxy. This blog post might be helpful if you want to know how mitm proxy works in general: https://vinodpattanshetti49.medium.com/how-the-mitm-proxy-works-8a329cc53fb
Jesus Christ, I didn’t realise.
One of the services they provide is free SSL certificates. As part of that, they have the private key to decrypt the traffic. They aren’t trying to hide that— this is true of any service that hosts the SSL cert for your site.
Does that mean it wouldn’t be an issue if you bring an SSL cert from say ZeroSSL but use Cloudflare for DNS, caching, DDoS protection etc?
For DNS and DDoS protection that wouldn’t directly be an issue.
For caching it would be breaking. You cannot cache what you cannot read (encrypted traffic can only be cached by the decrypting party).
It’s not who issues the cert that matters, it is who hosts it. Hosting it includes having the private key. You always have to trust your website host, full stop.
Man, I thought we were done with this shit when HTTPS became standard.
With what? HTTPS has to terminate the encryption somewhere and that place has to have the private key to do so.
CloudFlare is providing the same service here as all other hosts of HTTPS websites do.
Well, depends. If it’s hosted on AWS and HTTPS terminates there like it’s supposed to, Amazon could look inside, but a human being would have to personally hack your container and extract the data, so that’s a bit better. If it’s something more like Wix, though, sure. (Is Wix still a thing?)
If you use the AWS load balancer product or their certificates, they have access to the private key, regardless of whether you forward traffic from the LB to the container over HTTPS or not.
If you terminate the SSL with your own certificate yourself, Amazon still installs the SSM agent by default on Linux boxes. That runs as root and they control it.
If you disable the SSM agent and terminate SSL within Linux boxes you control at AWS, then I don’t think they can access inside your host as long as you are using encrypted EBS volumes encrypted with your key.
You have no proof that they’re “good right now”. The big five corporations were forwarding data to the NSA for years before the surveillance leaks exposed them.
Your privacy default should not be to trust an MITM, ever.
There’s no proof they aren’t doing anything nefarious with that data right now, other than company statements saying, “trust us”.
People default to trusting giant corporations first it seems.
Their a corporation, at best they’re baby Hitler…
I’m not sure if this is ironic bc I’ve been exposed to too many irony-poisoned comments lately, but cloudflare exists to profit off your data. They’re not there to help you, your data and its trends are the product.
They are the world’s largest MITM as a service.
RIP your inbox. Enjoy a whole lot of self-righteous lectures in business ethics.
- They seem to hate my devices. Lots of captchas.
- They seem to hate when people bypass their country’s censorship. Using sites behind cloudflare through tor is pain without end.
I get so many cloudflare captchas browsing on Firefox. They mostly go away when I change my user agent string to Chrome. Making the Internet more hostile for a particular group of users is pretty shitty behavior in my book.
I use Firefox and can’t remember the last time I got a cloudflare captcha
They’ve gotten a lot better over Tor - that’s the main thing I’m thinking of, actually. I used to give up most of the time when captcha’d, but now with the JavaScript based verification I pretty much always can get in, even on mobile.
Most providers don’t give a shit about Tor, or actively try to block it. They actually went out of their way to make it easier.
What’s the problem with CloudFlare?
So far, not much other than being “too” content neutral for a lot of people. They have potential to be immensely horrible whenever they decide to engage in enshittification to maximize profits.
they’re called crimeflare for a reason. besides being a government goldmine having access to everyone’s encrypted TLS traffic, they selectively enforce censorship in unethical ways.
why block kiwifarms when you still allow hosting monkey torture sites? or sites for sourcing bathtub HRT secretly sent to minors? they shouldn’t be policing the internet in the first place. this is dangerously close to invalidating Section 230 protections as well.
there’s so many more reasons it’s not even funny.
Apparently they also strip encryption off and see everything, too.
They see everything because they have to for some of the services they offer which gives them a huge potential to do terrible things that they have not actually pursued yet to date, hence the “so far” in my comment.
No terrible visible things, at least. God knows how much data they’ve hoovered up.
True. But that just falls back on the “not yet” part of things. They’re likely sitting on a massively valuable pile of user data and when they get greedy enough it’s going to be ugly.
They’re a giant middleman getting everything you put into html forms unencrypted.
That includes all your usernames, passwords, and everything you submit via text boxes. Do not trust any site that uses cloudflare.
This is such a Lemmy take, good god.
“Cloudflare has been around for over a decade and doesn’t do anything nefarious with my data and have never shown any intention of doing so… but, consider this for a moment… what if they DID?”
Cloudflare has been around for over a decade and doesn’t do anything nefarious with my data and have never shown any intention of doing so
Citation needed.
Oops, I’ve got a citation for you.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-prism-secure-ciphers
I know the response will be what you already said in a previous comment about companies saying “trust us bro” so I’ll take the L on this one.
Appreciate the humility, thx.
This is such a Lemmy take
What makes it funnier is that he’s one of the main Lemmy devs lol
Trusting US corporations by default rule
NGL I’m struggling to follow that image, do you have a higher res version or an explanation if you don’t mind?
Oh hey, thanks for Lemmy!
Yeah, I’m a bit horrified to learn that Cloudflare is the crytographic endpoint for clients. I’m wondering how much stuff I’ve let them see while unaware now.
Y’know, because obviously nobody would voluntarily sign up for this kind of security bad practice. /s
No probs! Yeah it’s wild that a lot of people not only using cloudflare sites, but also running them, don’t seem to mind that cloudflare is hoovering up everything.
Oh yeah I’ll do a full research next time I enter a web page to see who hosts it. If it’s by Amazon or Microsoft I’ll give green light.
None of the above is easily possible, a lot of us do it.
Both of course, but if I had to choose, Cloudflare. Definitely Cloudflare. That company must be purged by fire and magnets. Sure, casinos are evil, but they mostly stay in their lane doing their thing of preying on the vulnerable. When Cloudflare just straight up breaks half the internet for lunch and there’s, by design, no way around it.
In this particular story, if there’s any truth to it then it’s basically extortion. They could have just said that due to their usage profile they will need to switch to an enterprise license for the next billing period . Instead they tried to extort it within 24h lol.
And of course you have to buy a whole year of service (lol). This last thing is a symptom of a degenerate market with few competitors. No company that fears competition would try to pull that stunt.
No, the site had 2 weeks. They decided to argue with CF until that deadline was up.
What exactly has Cloudflare done to those poor casino thugs, they were only trying to extract more money from gambling addicts?!?
🤘
I won five grand from an online casino in 2001, and they not only paid me my winnings, they also included an extra $262 in comps for having bet aggregately over a quarter of a million dollars. That money went a long way for my early-20s ass. Paid off a credit card and bought a new mattress for me and my new wife.
When Full Tilt Poker got shut down by the DOJ, though, I was sort of okay with it. There were waaaaay too many action flops for those hands to have been truly randomized.
Gambling ruines lifes. Just because people can get their win does not mean it should be defended in any case. These casinos intentionally make people addicted, causing so much suffering and death.
you can defend casinos as long as you treat it as entertainment and don’t bet your entire life savings on it and cry about it
I set my initial bet amount, once that’s gone my game is done. on the other side if I double it my game is done
No you cant defend them. If you dont get addicted easily, good for you. They prey on those that do
These casinos intentionally make people addicted, causing so much suffering and death.
Noted, but so does alcohol and you can find it almost everywhere. Most people have the capacity to exercise caution when engaging in potentially addictive behaviors. Unless we intend to ban everything that could cause addiction and lead to destruction of a person’s life (gambling, alcohol, tobacco, food, sex, claw machines, loot boxes…), then we have to let people make their own choices and be responsible for their own decisions. When it becomes apparent to a person that they have an addiction, it is their own responsibility to tend to it.
Sure was nice of the state to require your 2001 online casino to list in writing the odds of winning and enforce payment. But sure, they did you a favor and the state is bad, people are solo acts and you should be free to prey on the less powerful
Yeah, because that’s just what I said.
Sorry, I’ll extrapolate more precisely.
Casinos spend unfathomable resources on learning exactly how to wedge their ads deep into your mind and get you hooked on their satisfying little dopamine loops, but it’s your personal failure if you, an ordinary person who is statistically speaking living paycheck to paycheck raising a kid with no savings, succumb to them. And your responsibility to fix it.
Correct?
they also included an extra $262 in comps for having bet aggregately over a quarter of a million dollars.
Why do you have credit card debt that had to wait for a 5k gambling “windfall” if you can afford to slowly spunk 250k up the wall at the same gambling sites?
you have a problem… you are an addict…
I can’t figure out if this is a joke post or not
I think what he means is that he bet some money, won, and then used that to bet again, repeat and eventually the aggregate bets made totalled to be 250k.
This. Granted I was 24 and not great with money as my wife and I had about $1500 in credit card debt, but once or twice a year I’d put down $50 for a little fun money and play at an online casino for no more than a week or until the $50 was gone. The first time I tried, I managed to use a modified Martingale system for several days and worked it up to five grand before cashing out. Was never successful at making anything close to that again, but I never played with or lost more than I could afford.
Today, apart from a car note I took on two weeks ago after a car I drove 200,000 miles over the past 14 years finally gave out, I am debt free and have been since 2016, and I genuinely can’t remember the last time I went to the casino. But, when I did, I brought $200, lost it but had my fun, and went home. No addiction whatsoever.
Because I was 24 years old and I put $50 on a debit card and managed to pump it up to $5000 and it was a one-off occurrence more than two decades ago? Relax.
he learned from his mistake chill the fuck out
Only two buttons and you got five fingers. Math>you
Where does online sports “betting” fit into this meme? Genuine ask because I have no experience or awareness of online casinos. Thanks.
Generally if it’s connected to gambling there’s scummy stuff going on.
That was number 13. Online casinos.
They usually go hand in hand.
