<story><title>Unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses</title><url>https://blog.cloudflare.com/consequences-of-ip-blocking/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>decide1000</author><text>On my previous job everyone on the wifi was routed through a VPN connection to a datacenter. Basically 4500 people using the same outgoing IP.
CloudFlare really made me hate the captcha&amp;#x27;s and verification pages they put in front of websites. Some websites sometimes were not accessible at all, literally blocked for hours.&lt;p&gt;I understand the position of CloudFlare where they basically don&amp;#x27;t like governments to block their IP&amp;#x27;s. On a smaller level this is exactly what CloudFlare is doing. Why is that justified?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a deep contradiction&amp;#x2F;hypocrisy around Cloudflare that can&amp;#x27;t be
ignored. It&amp;#x27;s funny when I try to click on the article titled &amp;quot;the
consequences of blocking IP addresses&amp;quot; to find I cannot read it,
because my IP address is blocked by the company that wrote the
article!&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a couple of thoughts I&amp;#x27;ve had about Cloudflare recently;&lt;p&gt;One is that Cloudflare are a problem because they are self appointed
policemen who do not know who the good guys or bad guys really are.
Such well intentioned but naive &amp;quot;helpers&amp;quot; almost always cause more
harm in the world then they solve.&lt;p&gt;Another is that Cloudflare do not understand the nature of Free Speech
at a fundamental philosophical level. There are two essential sides to
it. The freedom to write&amp;#x2F;speak must be matched by the freedom to
read&amp;#x2F;listen. Cloudflare&amp;#x27;s model pf the world recasts this as a
&amp;quot;tradeoff&amp;quot; and pits the speakers against the listeners. It does this
because there is money to be made from &amp;quot;service providers&amp;quot; but none to
be made from ordinary internet &amp;quot;users&amp;quot;. It robs Peter to pay Paul.</text></comment>
<story><title>Unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses</title><url>https://blog.cloudflare.com/consequences-of-ip-blocking/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>decide1000</author><text>On my previous job everyone on the wifi was routed through a VPN connection to a datacenter. Basically 4500 people using the same outgoing IP.
CloudFlare really made me hate the captcha&amp;#x27;s and verification pages they put in front of websites. Some websites sometimes were not accessible at all, literally blocked for hours.&lt;p&gt;I understand the position of CloudFlare where they basically don&amp;#x27;t like governments to block their IP&amp;#x27;s. On a smaller level this is exactly what CloudFlare is doing. Why is that justified?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>viraptor</author><text>Their &amp;quot;oh no, we need more transparency, we&amp;#x27;re blocked&amp;quot; without even once mentioning they&amp;#x27;re causing the same issues is infuriating. It&amp;#x27;s great they realise there&amp;#x27;s a problem, but they really need to be on both sides of that issue&amp;#x2F;solution.&lt;p&gt;A heading called &amp;quot;Lack of transparency with IP blocking&amp;quot;? Let me get my tiniest violin CloudFlare... This is a joke until they stop serving a stream of captchas for some IPs.</text></comment>