Cloudflare. What dothey do? Are they good or bad?

[Geek-9pm]

Cloudfare.
It is  a giant Web Security company. Very very big and important.

So why did I even ask? And why on Off Topic?
Well, I had no idea. I found some news items that claim they are very bad.
However, I do not wish to put the links here. Instead, I would like to know what you know about the activities of the Cloudflare company.

One report is the Cloudfare has helped WikiLeaks  to get back online.  But is not WikiLeaks a criminal group? Yes? No?  Would it matter?

I am not trying to prove anything. I just want to know if any of this is true and if it matters. Some claim that this kind of thing invokes the first amendment rights.

Please answer me in plain English? 

[BC_Programmer]

Cloudflare Offers Content Delivery Services, which allows sites to be routed faster by delivering cached versions of generated pages, DDOS protection (by using the same network, large influxes of suspicious traffic can be blocked from site access via captcha to prevent automated attacks) and DNS services.

One report is the Cloudfare has helped WikiLeaks to get back online.

Since you've decided not to post any links, I can only assume that is in reference to wikileaks switching to using Cloudflare as a CDN to mitigate a Distributed Denial of Service attack against them in 2012.

But is not WikiLeaks a criminal group? Yes? No?  Would it matter?

That tends to depend who you ask, and definitely tends to lean into the territory of a political discussion- but in the instance mentioned it isn't relevant. Cloudflare's role did not impede on any law enforcement activity or serve as a sort of "getaway vehicle" for example- in the instance where they assisted, they provided their standard paid service such that they mitigated a DDOS from a group calling itself "AntiLeaks", who had also performed similar Internet Denial of Service floods against the Ecuadorian Government website.

[Geek-9pm]

Thank you for the response.

Until I  came upon the negative article I had no idea about any of this.
I did not want to include a link if the story is false or misleading. Google counts links and gives points for stories that get more links. This is part of how a fake news story gets attention. The more people quote it, the bigger it gets. **

I sent you a PM with  the name of the wicked source and the headline. As you see it is very inflammatory. It is not my intent to get into apolitical issue.

So then, if a big company does its best to provide a open Internet, somebody will com along and slander them for allowing bad things.

** Yes, other web sites and starting to repeat the story and make it sound like the company is working for criminals.

[BC_Programmer]

PM received, responded to it. Looks like the article falsely presented some information and presented some "facts" it could not possibly know.

In any case, the OFAC is not known for being lenient; I'd expect that if Cloudflare, a U.S Company, was not authorized to do business with sanctioned individuals and was doing so, they would have put a stop to it already.

[Salmon Trout]

I have heard that if people use the Tor network to get to Pirate Bay proxies, they can get endless capchas because they are routed via Cloudflare which gets automatedly suspicious about what it sees as very frequent connection attempts from the same Tor exit node IP address (because lots of people, apparently, use Tor to get around ISP blocks on PB), which suggests that Cloudflare aren't too fussy about what they host.

[camerongray]

Cloudflare itself is a completely legitimate product, anyone can set it up without any human intervention from Cloudflare's part, it's only reasonable to expect that dodgy websites may use it however I'd like to think that if a site is clearly illegal/violates Cloudflare's ToS, they will shut them down.  I use Cloudflare for a bunch of my own stuff, even this very website sits behind Cloudflare.  The only legitimate criticism I can see of Cloudflare is that they are now so commonly used, that if they experience outages (which has happened in the past) it can cause loads of different websites to go offline however ultimately it's down to a website owner to weigh up the risk of using Cloudflare vs going without it.

Essentially, all cloudflare does is sit as a reverse proxy in front of a website, they also usually manage the DNS for the website.  When a user reaches the website they instead hit cloudflare's servers which then  proxy the request through to the website's own servers.  The idea behind this is that they can provide caching services for various elements on their website and serve them from their global CDN which both improves performance for end users as well as reducing load on a website's own servers.  It also means that if the webserver goes down, Cloudflare can either serve a cached copy of the site or a friendly error message instead of the connection just failing.  Additionally, since end users are talking to Cloudflare instead of a website's servers directly, the website will be protected by Cloudflare's DDoS protection systems which can be prohibitively expensive for a small website to implement on their own.

[patio]

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