I recently stumbled across Cludflares trustpilot page and the reviews were completely mismatched from the way I have experienced people talk about them on forums. The reviews on trustpilot make them sound awful, but I have only seen recommendations for them on forums, often people say they are the best DNS provider.
Whats up with that? Does anyone know why there is such a disparity.
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1d14rb7/cloudflare_took_down_our_website_after_trying_to/ is the most recent Cloudflare drama. They’ve been known to fuck customers before but I can’t really find specific examples. Obviously their protection can also be overzealous and block legitimate traffic too, which pisses off users as well.
Beyond that there’s many more philosophical reasons to hate Cloudflare - they’re a highly centralised point of failure and like in the story linked above could at any time “alter the deal”, so to speak. As an advocate for the free and open internet I wouldn’t consider them a force for good any more than Google, Facebook or Amazon.
They’re also hated for blocking privacy tools like Tor and blocking scraping, which does suck, but if cloudfail doesn’t work anymore you can still always search SHODAN for website title/headers to see if the LB is accessible directly via the internet. DNS management at medium sized corpos is usually a clusterfuck so it’s definitely a non-zero chance.
They’re not only a centralised point of failure, but also a man-in-the-middle for so many sites that they can effectively track people all over the internet through web and DNS requests, and fingerprint browsers through CAPTCHA scripts, and even read people’s HTTPS traffic.
I consider them a hostile actor.
It was made up by a shitty illegal crypto casino:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41091144
Of course you can’t find specific examples because they are known to be great with customers.