Cloudflare PR. Fuck them. Blocking VPNs from accessing websites is very open web of you.
Cloudflare blocks VPNs at the request of whoever is running the server. There are tons of websites running on Cloudflare that work with VPNs.
There are also many Lemmy instances that are intentionally blocking VPNs because they have to to stay afloat.
Exactly. My employer uses Akamai, which is larger than Cloudflare. Akamai provides the ability to block traffic from Tor, traffic from VPNs, traffic from any countries you desire, and so on. They also provide managed lists of countries listed in things like ITAR so you can easily block them if you want.
Nope. Cloudflare use a complex set of fingerprinting tools that determine security scores. It's literally social credit system for web user agents and the site admits have little control over that.
While true that there are security scores, the site admins set which score (if any) to block at. So, they do have control over that. Same goes for the bot fight mode as well. So, site admins do have control over whether or not to block based on the associated score, just not over the calculation itself unless configured otherwise.
The control is very limited unless you're enterprise subscriber and even then CF is super sneaky and doesnt actually report the real world. I had a few clients where they were clearly suffering losses due to cf implementation (you could literally see sales dip when cf is enabled) but they didnt believe me because cf dashboard doesn't report false positives or anything of that sort and they had no in house analytics to really understand the issue.
It's literally not limited. If you don't put a WAF rule based on the score then it doesn't get blocked based on the score. It's that easy. I've got clients and my own site on Cloudflare, so I know how it works. You don't even need the pro subscription to do that.
You control the score but not how its calculated. My score is incredibly high just because I'm on Linux with Firefox - how important is that to you as an e-commerse site admin?
I'm using a VPN with my cloudflare reverse proxies right now. That blocking is configured by the website owners, not Cloudflare.
For what it's worth when you set up your site on cloudflare you get to choose how strict you want security to be and what URLs it applies to, or just disable it and use it only as a CDN. Or even disable routing entirely and use it only as your DNS.
It would be nice if they were more clear that enabling some features might block legitimate users though.
What about servo?
Perhaps Servo isn't apolitical enough. 🥹
Remember, technology is political and our major technology-related problems are political, not technological. We wouldn't be building alternative browsing engines if Chromium was a community-built project, unaffiliated with an ad company.
E: FWIW, this comment suggest the initial political Ladybird snafu may have been remediated.
I think that kinda weird and bad statement from the ladybird lead makes way more sense when you realize that his first language is german.
German, like other gendered languages, uses the male gender for an unknown person, using a genderless pronoun like "they" in german is a deliberate political stance that would prompt debate and is unusual and, frankly, weird, since the male pronoun is used as a neutral one.
Given that he apologized and changed it to they later, and no other incident of the sort happened since, I personally am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The ladybird contributing guidelines currently read:
Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.
i take less issue with him using gendered pronouns by default than i do with him being overly dismissive of someone trying to adjust the language to be more inclusive.
Just remember that from his perspective, you are arguing against grammatical rules that are at the core of his communication experience due to his first language being German.‘so perhaps his initial reaction was confusion because he didn’t understand the angle - he thought he was being inclusive? Maybe?
I dunno I’m probably playin devil’s advocate without all the information here; I’ve just been resisting making jokes connecting grammatical pedantry to Germany the whole time.
Pretty much yeah, he thought he was already being inclusive, and I don't blame him for doubling down initially given how awful that github thread was
It's actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.
I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It's important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can't just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it's hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it's core.
As a Russian language speaker, I can tell you any gender-neutral language is absolutely impossible with Russian. The old kind of egalitarian (just normal really) language was to use the same form and gender of the word denoting profession or position as with male person, when it's a woman. Because the old feminitives usually meant "wife of someone of that profession", with a good deal of confusion whether they mean that or actually a woman of that role, and also they have sort of a flavor of vulgarity.
There's a modern (very limited to leftist fashion) tendency of inventing feminitives not common before.
Like for "author" there's "автор" (male form usually used for women too), "авторша" (traditional feminitive with a flavor of rudeness), "авторка" (new fashionable feminitive nobody really uses).
Or for "psychologist" there's "психолог" (normal male form), "психологичка" (not traditional, kinda rude feminitive), "психологиня" (new feminitive really used often enough, but that's when it means someone your age with that being like below 35).
If it's written in German, I'd agree. In English, no he is just wrong. But perhaps is English just sucks, I don't know and I don't care to find out.
You might be right. I'm looking at that as a more general issue of what "no politics" implies. E.g. can we use that to predict how the people working on it would handle the project affiliation in the future. That is, for example are they willing to let it be taken over by a large tech corporation? They're already using the weakest of licences - BSD. The whole point of us supporting another browsing engine by contributing to it, developing for it, or using it is so that we escape the browser-under-ad-company problem. If make Ladybird the next Chromium competitor and the team gets jobs at say Microsoft, then we'd end up back to square one.
Gendered language is stupid and antiquated and I say this as a native speaker of a gendered language. It's just such a poor communication design.
Is it surprising to anyone?
Or maybe servo didn't mourn the fascist Charlie Kirk enough: This is Ladybird's Creator.
At least both projects funded by cloudflare support fascists. Omarchy is by DHH, who is not a good person
They doubled down and showed their true colors. AFAIK they never tried to improve the situation after that.
They don't appear to be sponsoring that one
fuck cloud flare
How come?
How can people not see that any single corporation standing between us and 20% of the entire interweb is a bad thing? You think this time they are going to turn out to be the good guys?
Why blame Cloudflare though? Make your own service or push other companies to offer their services for free like Cloudflare. If Cloudflare is "fucked" like you want to, do you think the web will become more free? No, those 20% of the web will either be gone(because it's not free anymore), or will move to those really big corps that own the other 80% of the web.
Isn't Ladybird adopting Swift as their preferred language? I'm slightly confused on why Ladybird over Servo. But I am sure people at Cloudflare have more knowledge than me. So I guess there is a good reason.
Yep, they're moving from C++ to swift.
How does that work?
Working with raw buffers and memory in Swift is a frustrating experience.
I’m a big fan of Swift, but when I drop to systems level I don’t feel it’s a good fit.
Here's the dev's post: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031
(Sorry for Xitter link)
Thanks, I couldn't figure out how to convert the x.com URL to xcancel. Do you just change the domain?
Awesome to hear!
The best way to test a language for a project is definitely this bake-off method, so I do trust they did their due diligence.
Cloudflare alternatives anyone?
I'd say Bunny CDN is pretty good, but here's a more complete list: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare
CF aside, I'm not the biggest fan that Ladybird decided on Swift, since it's such an Apple-centric language. Wish they'd sponsored Servo instead.
Ladybird instead of Servo? And then some obscure desktop environment? What the fuck are they even trying to achieve here? We already got some big names and they're betting on the small ones?
Ladybird has been a serious competitor for months, and its ideology is excedingly good and user-oriented, so thats why
Idk why they sponsored Omarchy, but it looks cool, altough I dont see what they'll get from that
Omarchy is a Linux distro.
And I think ladybird is a bit larger of a project than servo, and they can't sponsor every single browser engine.
Omarchy mentioned!!
Ladybird needs to be careful who they accept money from
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