Technology

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.

It is Cloudflare that creates this functionality and gives access to it to its customers though.

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

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.

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.

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.