This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Cloudflare PR. Fuck them. Blocking VPNs from accessing websites is very open web of you.
Cloudflare blocks VPNs at the request of whoever is running the server. There are tons of websites running on Cloudflare that work with VPNs.
There are also many Lemmy instances that are intentionally blocking VPNs because they have to to stay afloat.
Exactly. My employer uses Akamai, which is larger than Cloudflare. Akamai provides the ability to block traffic from Tor, traffic from VPNs, traffic from any countries you desire, and so on. They also provide managed lists of countries listed in things like ITAR so you can easily block them if you want.
I'm using a VPN with my cloudflare reverse proxies right now. That blocking is configured by the website owners, not Cloudflare.
For what it's worth when you set up your site on cloudflare you get to choose how strict you want security to be and what URLs it applies to, or just disable it and use it only as a CDN. Or even disable routing entirely and use it only as your DNS.
It would be nice if they were more clear that enabling some features might block legitimate users though.
What about servo?
Perhaps Servo isn't apolitical enough. 🥹
Remember, technology is political and our major technology-related problems are political, not technological. We wouldn't be building alternative browsing engines if Chromium was a community-built project, unaffiliated with an ad company.
E: FWIW, this comment suggest the initial political Ladybird snafu may have been remediated.
I think that kinda weird and bad statement from the ladybird lead makes way more sense when you realize that his first language is german.
German, like other gendered languages, uses the male gender for an unknown person, using a genderless pronoun like "they" in german is a deliberate political stance that would prompt debate and is unusual and, frankly, weird, since the male pronoun is used as a neutral one.
Given that he apologized and changed it to they later, and no other incident of the sort happened since, I personally am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The ladybird contributing guidelines currently read:
Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.
i take less issue with him using gendered pronouns by default than i do with him being overly dismissive of someone trying to adjust the language to be more inclusive.
Just remember that from his perspective, you are arguing against grammatical rules that are at the core of his communication experience due to his first language being German.‘so perhaps his initial reaction was confusion because he didn’t understand the angle - he thought he was being inclusive? Maybe?
I dunno I’m probably playin devil’s advocate without all the information here; I’ve just been resisting making jokes connecting grammatical pedantry to Germany the whole time.
Pretty much yeah, he thought he was already being inclusive, and I don't blame him for doubling down initially given how awful that github thread was
It's actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.
I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It's important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can't just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it's hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it's core.
Is it surprising to anyone?
Or maybe servo didn't mourn the fascist Charlie Kirk enough: This is Ladybird's Creator.
At least both projects funded by cloudflare support fascists. Omarchy is by DHH, who is not a good person
They don't appear to be sponsoring that one
Isn't Ladybird adopting Swift as their preferred language? I'm slightly confused on why Ladybird over Servo. But I am sure people at Cloudflare have more knowledge than me. So I guess there is a good reason.
Yep, they're moving from C++ to swift.
How does that work?
Working with raw buffers and memory in Swift is a frustrating experience.
I’m a big fan of Swift, but when I drop to systems level I don’t feel it’s a good fit.
Here's the dev's post: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031
(Sorry for Xitter link)
Thanks, I couldn't figure out how to convert the x.com URL to xcancel. Do you just change the domain?
Yep
Awesome to hear!
The best way to test a language for a project is definitely this bake-off method, so I do trust they did their due diligence.
fuck cloud flare
How come?
How can people not see that any single corporation standing between us and 20% of the entire interweb is a bad thing? You think this time they are going to turn out to be the good guys?
Why blame Cloudflare though? Make your own service or push other companies to offer their services for free like Cloudflare. If Cloudflare is "fucked" like you want to, do you think the web will become more free? No, those 20% of the web will either be gone(because it's not free anymore), or will move to those really big corps that own the other 80% of the web.
Cloudflare doesnt want an open web, wtf.... More ridiculous fake posturing from big tech.
I think they do
If everything is big tech and walled gardens. what is cloudflares role?
Why does CloudFlare not want an open web? I don't know why they care. Can someone please explain? Is it because they sometimes block VPNs?
They do.
The basis for the FUD is that Cloudflare controls a lot of the web since they're used as a CDN, DDOS mitigation, domain registration, etc. However, what the FUD fails to mention is they don't provide most of the infrastructure for the web, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure totally dwarf their footprint. DDOS protection and whatnot may be provided largely by Cloudflare, but not the rest of the web stack.
Cloudflare very much doesn't want one or two companies to dominate the web because that'll kill their business model. The more diversity there is on the web, the more attractive their services are, because people are willing to pay for things to just work.
I can explain. Cloudflare does not block VPNs, some website owners choose to block VPNs using Cloudflare services.
Cloudflare itself is very open to VPNs, like you can use their free services to proxy your VPN over their network bypassing country providers blocking. You'll have to pay a lot for such service in Amazon or Azure.
So their business model is that poor people can receive cool services for free providing marketing for their business clients to pay for even better services. And they do provide cool services for free and even better services for reasonable payments.
Closed web means Google, Amazon and Azure own their business and the web. They don't want that neither in business sense nor in moral sense.
Edit. I'd like to emphasise that Cloudflare is the only CDN that provides their basic services for free to common people, making the web available to common people, making the web more free.
I've seen a couple of threads here where people shit on Cloudflare(including this one). They are stupid, don't know how the web works and are out of their minds.
Cloudflare wants the web to be made of web pages. But they also have an interest in the web being at least slightly dangerous (so there's an incentive to buy their protection services), and at least somewhat hard to make work well when served from a potato (so there's an incentive to use their CDN to shave off those milliseconds of latency). And, as a large provider of excellent and often free services, they end up as an administrative single point of failure and thus a potential point of control. It's a lot easier to wiretap one Cloudflare DoH resolver than thousands of ISP routers across dozens of ISPs, for example.
None of this is because Cloudflare is somehow Bad People; they're powerful and thus dangerous, but not, as far as I can tell, evil. The worst thing about them seems to be that they'd prefer to stay out of content moderation completely rather than try to find and boot all the Nazis, which looks like it might be an incorrect position that is possible to support with arguments.
they'd prefer to stay out of content moderation completely rather than try to find and boot all the Nazis
With how loose this word(and others) is used nowadays by people from Israel, USA, Russia, Africa and maybe other countries I prefer Cloudflare to stay that way.
Idk, but a lot of Lemmy instances also don’t play nice with VPNs. Some of them are using Cloudflare, but idk if all the ones blocking VPNs are the ones using Cloudflare. But bot traffic is a big problem, and Cloudflare poses a solution to that. It’s not the ony solution, but it is a pretty good one.
You can’t really have a free social media network and not have it block VPNs. At least not with large public instances.
Cloudflare alternatives anyone?
I'd say Bunny CDN is pretty good, but here's a more complete list: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare
CF aside, I'm not the biggest fan that Ladybird decided on Swift, since it's such an Apple-centric language. Wish they'd sponsored Servo instead.
Omarchy mentioned!!
