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Comment by warrenm | Hacker News Reader

And every Cloudflare customer is a company I won't do business with (unless there is absolutely no way around it)

Cloudflare is running the single biggest, most blatant man-in-the-middle attack in history, and far too many people are happy about it

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Agreed. The same goes for the 3rd party "data privacy" popups which simply hide a long list of opt-outs several layers deep in a Vendors list. I refuse to use such sites and I let them know by email.

In what way is it an attack? (I know what a mitm is, I'm not asking you to explain that - I'm pretty conversant in the concept of a proxy, I'm asking you to explain why it's an attack specifically)

they block and/or slowdown vast swaths of the internet

if that's not an "attack", I don't know what is

I don't get it. They offer a service that that people choose to sign up for and take active steps to use. I don't see how that's an attack. Honestly I'm still trying to understand who is being attacked.

Like is it an attack on the site owner - are you saying cloudflare is extorting them or something? That seems unlikely but I agree that would be a form of attack... it also doesn't seem to be what you're saying.

Is it an attack on the user of the website because the website owner successfully denies visitors it does not want? Does that mean that login credentials are a form of attack too? Would an on-prem load balancer or WAF that dropped all traffic from a region or matching patterns still be an attack?

It just doesn't make sense that it's an attack.

They block and/or slowdown over 20% of the internet

How can you not see that as anything but an "attack"?

The cloudflare customers who benefit from the bot protection do not see it as an attack. On the contrary, they see it as a defense from an attack.

Also, it’s quite disingenuous to label cloudflare as only slowing things down. One of their primary functions is a global CDN/cache which significantly speeds up otherwise bandwidth constrained sites.

Man in the middle attack typically implies an unwanted third party, which in this case is not true since Cloudfare is explicitly and voluntarily trusted by the host server. It wouldn't be all that different if the web server had the browserintegrity checks developed themselves.

>an unwanted third party

This is precisely what Cloudflare is doing to end users - causing problems like OP (and myriad others) experience by slowing down and/or blocking major chunks of the internet

I understand that it may be viewed as unpleasant, but ultimately if you install a proxy on your end that the server does not like (say an ad-blocker), I don't think it would be fair for the server to say its suffering a MITM attack. Likewise, even if the client is not happy with the third party the server is requesting, it still doesn't make sense to call it a MITM, IMO.

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