In defense of this user we have had a few system wide outages which have shut down major communications networks and news outlets.
Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts.
Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.
Site owners can turn off the captcha by reducing the security level.
I understand why it exists, I just wish they didn't use a Google service for it...
The lack of competition probably shows the difficulty of the task. A global CDN is complicated and expensive (physical infrastructure, all the interconnect agreements) and a big technical challenge.
It is quite possible to setup a global CDN overnight. Spin nginx reverse proxies in all AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode POSs, and you'd have a good enough network. Throw Inna control panel and you got yourself a contender in the budget CDN sector.
Cloudflare was rather innovative, with their authorative and recursive DNS, peering agreements with many ISPs including the ones that others didn't bother about, free SSL (Which they offered with Comodo even before Let's Encrypt), etc.
That is a fast way to burn a lot of money . Cloud Service Providers like the ones you mention heavily marked up sell metered bandwidth with no guaranteed allocation and are considerably more expensive than say a tier-2 player like hetzner/OVH or spinning your own servers in a Colo.
Sure, but no cloud company offers the amount of locations you can get on Cloudflare. Now you've even got edge compute, bringing really low global latencies for some applications.
CloudFlare offers Privacy Pass where with 1 captcha completion you generate something like 20 tokens, meaning you can bypass 20 captchas after that. Sadly nearly every website just uses pure Google captcha which forces you to go through the ordeal every single time.
Is this your product? If so, how can I cash this out into tangible currency rather than an ERC token, and is it possible to select the amount of labeling (ex: users I identify as bad have to go through 10+ pages, users I identify as OK go through 1)?
thanks a lot for articulating my point better then I did, but I don't really care about the downvotes because I know that my opinion will be accepted within 5-10 years if the trend keeps going the way it is... ;)
Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts.
Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.