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Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

I think the discrimination against third-world countries are justified as that's the main source of clickspamming and like factories.

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Cloudflare is for me the no. 1 company by far which is clustering up the web with their little border controls. No other company made surfing the web so complicated and annoying from distant regions of the world for me.

And because many website owners are just install and use Cloudflare with standard settings they don't care.

It's good that Cloudflare addresses this problem with their extension now but I had a little too much bad taste... this extension is long overdue and I still think it's not the best solution to the main problem (standard DNS settings too restricted).

>I think that discrimination is ok as long as it is not me, or my group being discriminated. FTFY

Did you just assume my nationality?

Do you have a source for that claim? How does sharing IP's with 'like factories' and thousands of other legitimate users justifies getting captcha-blocked by Cloudflare without explicit instructions from the website owners?

Note that you're asking the question as if the statement is true and you just inviting an opinionated justification. The answer to "how does sharing IPs with like factories justify blocking others" is easy to give an opinion on. Proving this is the real cause, that the local ISPs are not doing anything against it, etc. is what I think we should be asking.

Social media like factories are usually targeting websites that are not hosted by Cloudflare (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Youtube etc.)

If the like factories are using 3rd world IP's they are probably real human ( https://www.rt.com/viral/388169-smartphones-factory-generate... ) because bots can be run cheaper on a 1st world server because bandwidth, IP, and power usually cost less there. Captcha is an anti-bot measure and is not (or at least shouldn't be but I'm finding it hard to pass CF's captcha as human) very effective against actual humans.

I don't even think CF considers(or even aware of) the existence of a like factory on the same network for displaying the captcha and I am pretty sure they don't justify their captcha blocking with it. It's more likely that they just see a bunch of connections coming from the same IP and naively concludes that it must be a bot.

I'm sure it's easy to make "excuses"(vs justification) but given the real harm it does to actual human users and questionable effectiveness against the doubtful ill-effects of the existence of like factories against CF-hosted websites; I'd like to hear that "justification."

bots can be run cheaper on a 1st world server because bandwidth, IP, and power usually cost less there

First world server IP ranges are treated just as poorly for this exact reason. Try browsing the web through a VPN/proxy on an OVH (French) server. I get captcha requests on Youtube videos and Google searches.

Are people actually downvoting this comment just because it's not politically correct?

I mean, you could argue that it's not fair to discriminate entire countries because of the lax abuse policy of their ISPs, but the comment is correct: that's the reason those countries are discriminated against in this context.

Maybe people are downvoting because GP says it's justified in their opinion? It might be the truth, not most of us can't tell either way, but saying it's justified is a judgemental statement that I find 'justified' to downvote.

downvoting to indicate disagreement is the worst kind of downvoting.

It's not downvoting for disagreement, I think adding a judgement (like "they deserve it if that's where click farms are") is not constructive to the conversation.

I didn't downvote but I don't believe the claim was 100% factual. Cloudflare has always been horrible with dealing with shared IP's even if the users are all legitmate non-malicious. I once worked in an office with a single shared IP for ~200 people and we got constantly captcha-blocked by Cloudflared websites. It was also a problem with google but it was less prevalent and their captcha system was less annoying than Cloudlfare's.

When I was a sysadmin for a few admittedly-not-highly-popular websites, there were definitely more unwelcome bot traffic from US and EU IP's than there were from any 3rd world countries.

I also don't agree that social media "like-factories" should be a concern for Cloudflare at all. Even if they are truly a concern; social media "like-factories" are probably human-operated on third-world countries or bots that are likely running from developed world servers with access to cheaper bandwidth and IP's.

This is more insightful than anything else in the comment chain that was spawned from my GP. My opinion on the 'justifiable' end has shifted a bit, thanks!

I have downvoted because despite having 1st World passport I had experienced traveling a lot in SE Asia how Cloudflare blocks (sorry protects) 1/3 of websites.

Browsing from a cafe, using VPN results in almost every attempt of following link from HackerNews in solving endless captchas. It is like being harrassed on the border control just because you have the wrong passport.

Saddly many of the sites "protected" by Cloudflare are interesting personal sites owned by honest people who had been scared about dangers of traffic from bad places.

Cloudflare is running internet protection racket Al Capone style.

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