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.
That's fair. I don't really think it's cloudflares fault though. Since it's a feature that websites use to protect against bad actors and robots. No one forces anyone to use cloudflare. Those websites would likely have gone with somebody else if cloudflare didn't provide that service
First of all you have to separate Cloudflare’s pre-emptive attack on Tor from that of other targets (VPN, CGNAT). The difference is that the Cloudflare patron is given control over whether to block Tor but not the others.
Non-Tor blocks
Cloudflare is of course at fault. CF made the decision to recklessly block whole groups of people based on the crude criteria of IP reputation associated to a member of the whole group. It would be like if someone was spotted shoplifting as they were running out the door, and security only got a glimpse of red hair. And then the store would refuse service to all people with red hair to make sure the one baddy gets blocked. It’s discriminatory collective punishment as a consequence of sloppy analysis.It’s an anti-feature because it’s blunt tool cheaply created by a clumbsy tech giant who has the power to bully and write-off the disempowered who they marginalize as acceptible collateral damage.
Tor blocks
Cloudflare defaults to harrassing Tor visitors with CAPTCHAs which are usually broken (because the CAPTCHA service CF hires is itself tor-hostile, but CF is happy because CF profits from the uncompensated labor from the captcha solutions). The CF patron can whitelist Tor or blacklist Tor (in addition to default shit show). DOGE proactively chose to blacklist the Tor community.Defaults are important. Read about “the power of defaults” and how Google paid billions to Mozilla just to be a default search engine in the browser. The money speaks to that importance. CF is 100% responsible for the default state of their sites. Cloudflare (and CF alone) decide what the default setting is.
Exactly why someone using Cloudflare rightfully gets the blame for their shitty choice to use CF. Most particularly when it is a tax-funded service. At least in the private sector we have the option of walking. I will not use a CF website (even if Tor is whitelisted) - so they lose my business. But when public money is spent on CF who denies demographics of people who are entitled to the gov service, it’s an injustice because you cannot boycott gov services (you cannot get a tax refund if you are excluded).
I didn't really consider tor since that is not something I use at all.
No ddos protection and all that is absolutely a necessary feature for lots of sites.
Blocking Tor is useless for DDoS protection because there are not enough exit nodes to impact a US federal website more than a fly on the windscreen of a 16 wheel tracktor-trailor. Such an attempt will bring down Tor itself before the DOGE admins even notice.
I didn't comment on the TOR part. I don't know anything about that. So I can't take any stance.