Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.
The irony
Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.
Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.
The embarrassment
This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.
It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to spin this as CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)
The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.
The microblog discussion
Microblog chatter here.
I wonder how that can best be expressed without overly cluttering the forum. The purpose of the forum is to track that, so it would be useful if someone would post lists of signficant or essential public resources that are in walled gardens. Maybe one thread for all of North Korea and a thread for Russia, .. Venezuala, etc. But note as well if Tor is blocked but not in a fiefdom (walled garden), then [email protected] is the best place to post them.