Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.

The irony

Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.

Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat – all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

The embarrassment

This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.

It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to spin this as CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)

The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.

The microblog discussion

Microblog chatter here.

  • Shadow@lemmy.ca
    2·
    4 days ago

    all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

    You confuse bandwidth and resources. Bots are often the most impactful clients of any site, because serving an image costs virtually nothing. Generating a dynamic page is WAY more resource intensive.

    • evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.orgOPM
      22·
      4 days ago

      You confuse bandwidth and resources.

      Bandwidth is a resource. Citations needed for claims to the contrary.

      Bots are often the most impactful clients of any site, because serving an image costs virtually nothing.

      Nonsense. Text compresses extremely well. Images and media do not in the slightest approach the leanness of text.

      Try using the web through a 2400 baud modem. Or try using a mobile connection with a small monthly quota of like 3gb and no other access. You will disable images your browser settings in no time.

      Generating a dynamic page is WAY more resource intensive.

      Bots and humans both trigger dynamic processing, but bots and humans of text-based clients to a lesser extent because the bandwidth-heavy media is usually not fetched as a consequence and JavaScript is not typically fetched and executed in the first place.

      • Shadow@lemmy.ca
        4·
        4 days ago

        I’m guessing you’ve never run infra for a popular site before.

        Yes bandwidth is a resource, but unless you’re hosting Flickr or haven’t optimized your images, it’s not the most in demand resource. It’s also one of the cheapest parts, compared to paying for the ram / CPU / multiple machines required to support a large site.

        I’ve debugged hundreds of customers who suddenly had their site fall over. Not a single one was due to their bandwidth being saturated, it’s almost always bots hitting some poorly optimized code.

        Trying to spin images as the primary resource consumer of running websites, just isn’t true.