
Participate in the “Internet Slowdown” with one click - rdl
https://blog.cloudflare.com/participate-in-the-internet-slowdown-with-one-click
======
mhurron
This has to be one of the most useless campaigns. Yet another slactivist
'don't really do anything but damnit feel like you did.'

It doesn't 'raise awareness' (more slactivism). People have heard of Net
Neutrality.

This does nothing to educate about it. There is no information here, just
Oggie Boogie scary shit might happen (but don't worry we won't risk clicks to
show you).

And that's even if you see it. I've been to reddit off and on all morning, I
happened to finally notice the very small black box in the corner with the
stupid vague message. No idea when it showed up. I was starting to think
reddit wasn't even going to bother with a banner. I'm willing to bet most
people will be the same way since, again, no one is willing to risk some ad
impressions to actually put anyone out.

When your solution to a problem is 'don't really do anything about it' don't
be surprised when shit happens.

~~~
epi16
I say the same thing every time I read a "slacktivism" post, but here we go
again: if this is useless, what do I actually do to help? Seriously, I'm not
posing this as rhetoric.

I've already filed a fairly long, unique comment to the FCC, but I've heard
that the FCC ignores most comments unless they come from well-known players.

I donate money monthly to the EFF.

I've signed the letter to the lawmakers on Battle for the Net.

I don't have a personal website, so I can't put up a banner ad.

So, given that I've heard comments on this site and in person that all of the
above counts as slacktivism, just makes me feel better, and doesn't contribute
to an actual solution, what do I do to influence this issue? Ignoring the
possibility of coming into large sums of money and buying myself a congressman
of my very own?

~~~
davidw
Calling or writing letters (not emails!) to congressional representatives is
another thing you can do.

FWIW, I think that donating money is pretty real.

~~~
epi16
Are letters taken more seriously than emails? That's good to know, thanks.

~~~
at-fates-hands
I've spoken to several reps and they say yes.

This is mainly because they get inundated with email. Letters and snail mail?
Not so much. You actually have a captive audience to a degree when you send a
letter.

------
doctorfoo
I'm going to repost what I commented on CloudFlare's blog, since they don't
appear to have published it (yes, I was a little angry. I've had to put up
with these CAPTCHAs for the last week):

Ha, so much irony, CloudFlare.

The company that is determinedly CAPTCHA-walling as much of the internet as it
can get its hands on supports Network Neutrality...? Reeaally?

You support network neutrality, as long as your users don't use Tor. And don't
use a VPN. Or any other kind of shared IP. Or have cookies disabled.

No, your support of network neutrality is utterly, utterly shallow. You might
pragmatically support it, as it pertains to you not having to pay any more for
your data pipes, but you share none of the principles behind it - that all
people should have the same access to content.

Oh look - I try to access BattleForTheNet.com: "Please complete the security
check. Please enable cookies".

An IP address is not a person. Somehow Twitter, Facebook, Google, can figure
this out... Why can't you?

 _Edit_ : Also, is anybody else affected by these CAPTCHAs? I can't believe
it's just me. Literally half of all news articles and such I try to read, I'm
getting CAPTCHA-walled by CloudFlare. It's quite scary to suddenly realise how
much control this single company has. (Not to mention incredibly annoying.
I've taken to simply avoiding several news sites I used to browse.)

~~~
jgrahamc
Your blog comment has been posted; we don't moderate things that are criticism
(or anger) only spam. But the moderator does need to be awake.

As the for CAPTCHA problem you are seeing, having you tried contacting
CloudFlare Support about it? We can look at the IP you are coming from and see
what's happening.

~~~
doctorfoo
> having you tried contacting CloudFlare Support about it?

I could do - but I'm kind of angry that I even have to. What about the less
technically literate, who might barely know what CloudFlare is, let alone
figure out how to contact their support? (Yes, _I_ use a VPN, but there's
plenty of ways a non tech person might have a shared IP.) And why should I
have to go to this effort, just to get _read_ access to a website?

And what if I'm on a different IP tomorrow? Begging for my IP to be unblocked
is no long term solution. (What about when malicious activity comes from it
tomorrow, after you unblocked it? You'll just block it again.)

Just now, in my other browser tab:

>Please complete the security check to access coinmarketcap.com

(btw, Disqus is giving you different comments depending on whether https or
not, that's why I missed my comment being published.)

~~~
jamespo
Not technically literate enough to contact cloudflare support but using TOR or
a VPN is an interesting combination.

~~~
cbd1984
> Not technically literate enough to contact cloudflare support but using TOR

It's more likely than you think:

[https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en)

[http://piratebrowser.com/](http://piratebrowser.com/)

All someone needs is to have read something on some social media website,
followed a link, and installed some software. Boom, they're accessing the
Internet through TOR.

------
idlewords
There's something baffling about making a strong stand for net neutrality
while promoting the heavily centralized web. Cloudflare seems like a neat
company, and I enjoy their technical posts here and elsewhere very much, but
the phenomenon they represent is just as harmful to the web as the object of
this protest.

~~~
rdl
You could make an argument that CloudFlare is centralization, but you could
ALSO make an argument that CloudFlare, by letting smaller sites continue self-
hosting but using CloudFlare for scaling, is also more decentralized than the
realistic alternatives.

I'd ALSO prefer a world where everyone can get 10G to the home/office, great
power, and global anycast with a bunch of sites around the world, from an
infinity of vendors without strong content controls. Unfortunately, the
alternatives to CloudFlare-like services seem to be:

1) Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. -- if you're popular or
controversial, this isn't great.

2) Hosting with large global entities (AWS, Google, etc.) with much more
restrictive content policies, and with greater control over the technical
stack you use.

3) Setting a pretty high floor for cost or technical competence to host a site
(you're a clear outlier on the technical competence side in 2014, with colo'd
boxes. sadly)

I love being able to spin up a random VM on my personal colo'd hardware,
behind CloudFlare, and know it can deal with attacks or load; it would cost me
a lot to build every random thing entirely on its own.

There are some potential issues with using CloudFlare for certain kinds of
sites (turning over SSL keys, for instance, if you want us to handle your
https traffic), but we have technical solutions to those, some of which we've
presented over the past year, such as "keyless ssl", where you continue to
retain custody of the private key and we just ask you every time we need to
open a session to a new user.

It's not a perfect solution, but I think using CloudFlare is actually the best
available choice for a lot of sites, and we're trying to make it better all
the time.

And yes -- the end of Net Neutrality probably wouldn't hurt CloudFlare very
much; it would arguably make it harder to run a site without it, or without
going to some kind of provider who has also negotiated with the access
networks. This isn't really a commercial decision so much as a "we like the
free Internet and support it" decision.

~~~
spindritf
_Inability to resist DDoS /traffic surges/etc._

I heard a rumour[1] that you guys drop users on smaller plans when they get
hit. Supposedly people get an e-mail

 _WHY WAS MY SITE TEMPORARILY DEACTIVATED?_

 _CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network serving millions of websites.
Sometimes a large DDOS attack to one of our Free or Pro customers may degrade
network performance. In these cases, we may temporarily remove the website
under attack to avoid network degradation._

and they're on their own. Is it true?

[1] [http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-
polski-o...](http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-
odpowiednik/page-2#entry421175)

~~~
eli
Just like there's no such thing as "unlimited data storage" there isn't really
such a thing as "unlimited DDoS protection." I assume there's SOME limits on
how much you get with a free or even $20 plan. I can only imagine what the
companies that specialize in DDoS protection charge.

~~~
spindritf
Sure. But if protection starts at $200/mo (CloudFlare Business) then it's not
really for smaller sites with a controversial opinion. For $200 you can get
two dedicated servers with DDoS protection on top.

~~~
valarauca1
2 dedicated servers might buy you ~3-4GB/s of DDoS protection. Cloudflair's
base model protects from around 100GB/s, which what commonly takes banks
offline (Bank of American, or Chase be taken down with ~70GB/s).

They gave talk at defcon21 about migrating a 300-400GB/s DDoS (Roughly 1.25%
of all internet traffic in the US at the time was that DDoS).

When you start getting into DDoS's >300GB/s your DDoS will start causing
issues for providers, and backbone companies, not just Cloudflair.

~~~
spindritf
I didn't mean going at it alone with two rented boxes but rather a service
provided by your operator with the rental like
[http://www.soyoustart.com/en/anti-
ddos.xml](http://www.soyoustart.com/en/anti-ddos.xml)

------
NicoJuicy
I'd rather see some popular websites participate with editing their webserver
to throttle the FCC :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608)
for more information (If you have Nginx, Apache, MaxCDN)

Currently, it throttles to model (28,8 kb/s) speeds when someone connects with
an FCC IP.

If you are throttling the FCC, add your list to the new HN post on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608)
\- Update your servers, do something!

~~~
khc
Why just the FCC? Why not the Congress and the Whitehouse as well?

------
skrebbel
Why would any global app show an American national political campaign to all
their users?

In reality I'm mostly sad that the campaign _is_ purely USA ("contact your
rep" \- I don't have a "rep", it doesn't work that way here), but if I see it
on any app that knows where I'm located, I'll know that the owners' world ends
at their country borders and that I'm a second class user.

~~~
cbd1984
> Why would any global app show an American national political campaign to all
> their users?

Because it affects them, too, and they have a right to know what the risks
are, even if they can't do anything to help very directly.

------
userbinator
I bet a huge number of users that see this popup are just going to react with
"Oh, another bloody advert... piss off" and click the X. It has too much
similarity to the "Speed up your PC now! Make Internet faster!" sort of ads,
so I think it'll get ignored in the same way.

Then again, those ads wouldn't exist if they weren't effective...

------
aw3c2
Right after telling Cloudflare all about who visits your websites. Please only
show this to US americans, it would be weird to slap this in the face of the
majority of the world population.

~~~
rdl
If you're a current customer, you already trust us with your logs. We've got a
good track record of fighting for user privacy, and IMO if you wanted to get
records of a site's visitors, you'd probably go directly to the site if at all
possible -- smaller sites generally aren't in a position to fight subpoenas
and letters, whereas we do.

(disclaimer: I work at CloudFlare after selling my crypto startup to them
earlier in the year, and work on security/privacy products)

I agree it's kind of unfair to non-USA people to suffer website slowdowns over
US politics. It's also unfair for non-USA people to get spied on by NSA or
droned by CIA. Unfortunately they don't ask me :)

------
dfc

      > As we’ve seen that bandwidth pricing is not reflective of the
      > underlying fair market value when Internet service providers have
      > monopolistic control,
    

Where was the fair market value of bandwidth presented/derived? I did not see
it on the page submitted or the page linked to in the excerpt.

~~~
rdl
It's a reference to [http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-
bandwidth-ar...](http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-
around-the-world)

i.e. telstra extracting monopoly rents by being a monopoly, vs. the otherwise
prevailing price.

I agree it's difficult to treat bandwidth as a true commodity, especially when
there's a monopoly, but I think it's clear that if Australia weren't Telstra's
victim, bandwidth prices would be far lower.

------
MyDogHasFleas
re Internet Slowdown: I'm stuck on a dissonance between the status as
presented vs. the reality as I understand it. I may well be wrong/uninformed
and I'm happy to be educated if so.

Here's the status as presented:

"Battleforthenet.com (a project of Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, Fight for
the Future, and Free Press) has organized a day of protest against the United
States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal that will allow
Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to
those companies’ content online. Those additional fees will allow Internet
service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will
get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible."

Here's my 2 points of dissonance:

1\. "...FCC proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies
additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online."

a) the FCC proposal is about allowing Internet providers to optionally provide
higher speed/quality access for a fee, not about "charging" fees "to provide
access".

b) There's nothing stopping Internet providers from doing this right now,
since the original FCC net neutrality regs were shot down by the courts. So
saying the FCC proposal would "allow" them to do it is not accurate, as they
are "allowed" to do it right now.

So, as far as I know, the correct statement would be:

"... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an
optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the
companies' content online."

2\. "Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to
essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access
normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible."

From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to
slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a
fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a
company's content.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> "... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing
> an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access
> to the companies' content online."

In the context of government regulation "allow" and "not disallow" mean the
same thing. But "allow" implies letting monopoly ISPs get away with doing
something wrong while "not disallow" implies avoiding unwarranted government
interference. You can hardly fault them for their language choice there.

And there is very little practical difference between "access" and the lack of
"higher quality/speed" necessary for the service to be used. Netflix at four
frames per second is hardly "access to Netflix."

> From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to
> slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a
> fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a
> company's content.

Again, these things are equivalent. There is no difference between "slow down"
and "not speed up" in practice. It has the identical result, you're just using
different words.

~~~
MyDogHasFleas
There's no difference between "allow" and "not disallow"? There's a huge
difference.

"Allow" means to affirmatively allow ISPs to charge fees when they couldn't
before, while "not disallow" means to not put new regulations in place
stopping ISPs from charging fees.

"You can hardly fault them for their language choice" \-- to me it's much more
than a language choice, it's saying something correctly or incorrectly,
realistically or framed in some other reality.

And if saying it correctly "implies avoiding unwanted government
interference", does that justify saying it incorrectly? Do the ends justify
the means? Is propaganda OK if it's for a cause we believe in?

An analogous discussion for "slow down/make inaccessible" vs. "not speed up".
There's no difference between these things? I think there's a huge difference.
If I'm a company that doesn't pay the fee, will I get the same service I did
before, or will I be slowed down/cut off?

As I read the proposed FCC regs, it's pay-for-speedup rather than don't-pay-
and-get-slowed-down. But this "Internet slowdown day" campaign is explicitly
saying that sites will get slowed down. How do I reconcile these two things?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> "Allow" means to affirmatively allow ISPs to charge fees when they couldn't
> before, while "not disallow" means to not put new regulations in place
> stopping ISPs from charging fees.

How is that a difference? The result of both is identical: The ISPs won't be
permitted to charge fees.

Look at it in a different context. Because of a technicality in the wording of
a statute, all existing traffic laws are found unconstitutional. The
legislature introduces a bill that reinstates most of the traffic laws in a
way which is constitutional but the bill doesn't reinstate the prohibition
against driving while intoxicated. Are you really claiming that someone who
points out that the bill "allows driving drunk" is incorrect? At best you're
being incredibly pedantic.

> An analogous discussion for "slow down/make inaccessible" vs. "not speed
> up". There's no difference between these things? I think there's a huge
> difference. If I'm a company that doesn't pay the fee, will I get the same
> service I did before, or will I be slowed down/cut off?

In the presence of sufficient capacity no packets are dropped and there is no
fast lane or slow lane. The only way to have a fast lane is to have
insufficient capacity and then allocate the existing capacity in preference to
the fast lane at the expense of the slow lane. The result is to slow down the
people who don't pay the fee.

~~~
MyDogHasFleas
I would say the pedantry is on the other foot. :)

Your drunk driving analogy is strained to say the least. Net neutrality has
not been in effect though all of ISP history, except for a brief period before
the courts shot it down. To compare that to a hypothetical drunk driving law
scenario is way off the mark. It's much closer to reality, as opposed to
pedantry, to say that the new regulations don't disallow the ISPs from
charging fees, because for almost all of history, there was no regulation
about this.

Regarding fast/slow lane, you are making two logic errors. One, implicitly
assuming it's a zero-sum game, when it's not. The FCC's intent is to incent
ISPs to increase capacity so they can allocate that capacity for new (paid)
services. Not to slow down existing clients. Two, assuming we are just talking
about bandwidth. Quality of service in all its aspects could be on the table
for paid services. Bandwidth alone is not sufficient for good streaming.

------
okasaki
I wish these were hidden for non-US ips. I don't care about US issues and even
if I did there's nothing I could do.

------
flavor8
This doesn't work on my site. Perhaps a javascript issue. Tried it
temporarily, disabled.

------
ianstallings
Nah.

