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I was suggesting that the person had a problem with our service and could try contacting us. The 'story' posted has little detail of any kind so it is hard to assist.


The story is about a general practice/design of CloudFlare, not a specific site. Fixing it for one site or one user ip address won't fix the fundamental design that CloudFlare expects a human and a web browser behind every request.


I am Cloudflare's CTO. I know how our systems operate. I was asking for this person to contact me so I can understand what is happening in this instance.


RSS is an XML file that is accessed by HTTP clients that are not browsers and do not render Javascript.

http://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html


The two issues the author brings up are broad issues I run into with Cloudflare protected sites all the time. The fundamental assumption that everything using the internet has a full JS engine and a human immediately ready to solve a reCAPTCHA is flawed, and thinking instances like this are a one-off is inherently wrong.

Torrent traffic, file transfers, VOIP and all the other non-HTTP type traffic that Cloudflare just breaks by default make up a good chunk of the traffic you see on the web. That Cloudflare pitches itself as a one and done solution with minimal configuration just nakes this worse, since website owners generally won't bother to set up custom rules for RSS feeds and the like. Additionally, if even 1% of the RSS feeds that were broken by cloudflare were emailed to you, your inbox would be flooded.


Torrent traffic, file transfers, VOIP and all the other non-HTTP type traffic that Cloudflare just breaks by default make up a good chunk of the traffic you see on the web.

Huh? We don't handle non-HTTP traffic. How can we break it?


wget or curl might be examples of breakage.

I'm known to use console/text clients (w3m, lynx, links, elinks[2]) from time to time. Cloudflare definitely interferes with these.

Not sure about the other examples given.

And, to hijack: I wanted to say thanks for the work on a Tor-friendly anonymised reputation system. I've commented on that in the past, and need to take a closer look / see others' thoughts, but definitely appreciate the effort.


Isn't the web, by definition, HTTP(s) connections only (ports 80/443)?


Referring to an upset end user's complaint with drama quotes doesn't strike me as particularly good form




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