Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):
This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.
I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.
While I have been reading through this topic, I have been feeling worried since I was thinking about using Cloudflare to protect a site of mine for some time. This is because I found out from somewhere that they have protection against AI LLMs scraping page data from websites, which is what I’m mainly worried about since there are things and stories that I put a lot of thought and work into. And finding out about Cloudflare shutting someone else down here over what sounds like the level of traffic has me feeling I might not be able to use them and not sure what other options there are.
Yeah pretty much all red flags from cloud flare
Can’t wait for this to become a louis rossman video
Multi CDN integration is a thing. And fuck CF. Unlimited means unlimited. Stop trying to lie to your customers and change the rules.
If the IP’s were an issue, then they wouldn’t have offered to make the issue go away with $$$.
I mean more money would solve the IP issue.
Step 1: Get more money Step 2: Buy additional dedicated IPs for the casino Step 3: Profit from the profits of a casino.
250$ a month for their service seems like cloudflare was straight up losing money on the deal. Although cloudflare seemed to have given them extra time than they said before terminating service, which they didn’t have to do. That being said, I think both sides suck here.
Nah. CF initiated a contract renegotiation, and then suspended services right after being informed the customer was price leveling.
That’s crappy.
They gave less than a single billing period notice for a price increase.
That’s crappy.
They sent a price increase for 40x the current billings, with no corroborated cost or value.
See where I’m going here?
I agree. It’s shitty for Cloudflare to just straight up destroy this company’s DNS, but also it seems like the company violated the ToS. They had about two weeks to migrate to something else, but instead they just continued debating with CF. Also, this company doesn’t have a secondary DNS server in case CF ever went down? That’s pretty stupid on their part. Redundant systems are key, I hope they learned that lesson haha
Isn’t CF advertising themselves as the solution to needing multiple DNS’ with their failsafes, switchovers and load balancing?
If I need to maintain multiple anyway, what’s the benefit of CF to begin with? There are a million CDNs out there I could use instead, if I still have to maintain the network architecture.
Do you believe everything that companies tell you? If Google or Apple tell you “we’re the solution to everything, you never need to buy anything else”, do you listen to them?
No, but if I use a service to solve a specific problem only to see the need to have a failover in place regardless, I might as well not use the service.
Realistically, this is why you pay for Akamai. You don’t get these shenanigans.
How the fuck were they still on a $250 dollar a month plan when they pumped through $2000 a month worth of traffic? That’s shady on the companiy’s part and Cloudflare shouldn’t have allowed it to happen in the first place.
Each party played their part here and did shitty things. Sounds like the tech equivalent of a crackhead arguing about selling stuff to the pawn shop employee.
The $250/month plan supposedly includes unlimited traffic. If there’s actually a limit where you’re supposed to switch to a more expensive plan with no standardized price, maybe CF should say what the limit is?
They absolutely should have outlined a traffic limit for the $250 a month plan. That’s on Cloudflare for allowing it.
That said, if you make wildly excessive use of that loophole it probably shouldn’t surprise you if they do something like this. They called it “trust and safety” because it allows them to do anything they want under the guide of security.
Really, they didn’t define their service clearly and wanted to fire them as a customer unless they paid up for what they felt they were owed.
If something is marketed as “unlimited”, I don’t think there is such a thing as “wildly excessive use”. This isn’t a competitive eater going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and being mad about getting kicked out. It’s a business using a service in a way that’s seemingly in-line with what they paid for.
It’s the same definition of “unlimited” that Telcos use: you pay for unlimited but it really is XXgb of data per month, after that they either disconnect you or throttle your traffic at a glacial pace…
And in both cases, that is bullshit. Just because it happens doesn’t mean we should accept it.
A man walks into whorehouse at half past seven, inquires about prices, and learns that it’s 250 per night, per person for the room. “Everything they consent to is available to the customer” says the proprietor. Gladly he pays and climbs up the steps with his hand clasped tenderly, finally landing upon a plain pink cushion, whereupon he proceeds to fuck the absolute shit out of his companion for six full hours. The brothel quakes in rhythm with their dual shrieks of ecstasy for the full duration.
As he begins dressing himself across from the nearly comatose prostitute, the proprietor returns, requesting two hundred and ninety dollars for the extended stay and sixty for the damage to her employee. It was at that moment that the man realized that the madame was a 70 foot tall crustacean from the Paleozoic era. He yells “goddamn Loch Ness monster, I ain’t giving you no three fifty!”
…huh?
South Park reference. Probably the funniest episode in the whole show outside of “Hare Club for Men”.
I worked for Akamai for 7 years.
This is why, if your CDN infra is core to the operation of your business, you make your systems accommodate multi-CDN integration. Cutting one CDN off shouldn’t be significantly difficult, and it comes in handy during contract negotiations. All the major players work this way.
Don’t believe anything advertised as unlimited , cause it isn’t, they always cover their asses in the fine prints in their TOS.
Sounds like any Cloudflare customer should reconsider their hosting setup . Mark Anderson has decided to strip the customers to increase the bottom line… And once the numbers are up but the customers are gone… Will move on to the next company
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
Yikes. That sounds bad.
I’m a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino.
Okay all my sympathy is gone. Online casinos deserve to die.
That said, my feelings towards economic vampires aside, the way the events unfolded is concerning to say the least. Cloudflare has been racking up evil-corp points quite rapidly in recent months.
I just wonder how much was left out
That’s fair, this is one part of the story, and it’s not like screenshots can’t be doctored. Any screenshot taken from the web is ridiculously easy to manipulate.
If it’s providing games of skill like online poker, it’s actually a very intellectually stimulating game. People have made a ton of instructional videos and many books on the poker variations.
After playing poker professionally I was able to leverage the skills of bankroll management and emotional control to become successful in investing in the stock market.
I held all of my stocks through the entire pandemic to rebound from a loss over multiple years holding tech to a $600,000 profit by buying at the bottom. If I hadn’t played poker I probably wouldn’t be able to stomach looking at a six digit loss in 2021. I only sold my bonds which I used to buy more stocks at a cheaper price (which was the point of the bond allocation)
Is it really so crazy that if you practice gambling you might end up good at gambling? I dont see any difference between playing the stock market and playing cards for money.
Stocks are just the rich white man slot machine.
Yes, that’s the point, I’m good at combinatorics, probability. These mathematical skills have a lot of carryover
Would you advise others that learning through increasingly higher stakes is a good way to practice these skills and apply them to make a living?
I admit I dont have much issue with gambling as recreation/sport, but I dont know its a benefit to society to treat gambling as a profession.
Stock brokers gambling with others money is a whole other thing.
Only to the point that you get bored and do something useful with your new knowledge.
People enter tournaments for all kinds of games and those tournaments have money prizes and entry fees. I think it’s unfair to single out poker since it’s a game of skill.
It just so happens it doesn’t make sense to play without even the smallest stakes. Otherwise the best strategy is to go all in with any hand and try to double up quickly (if the chips are free, there’s no downside to doing this)
Even like $2 buy in games are much tighter than play money games
Everything in your post seems to give reasons for recreational gambling, and I do agree that the stakes are part of the game, and one with no stakes is markedly different. It does seem though that this is all in service of fair play, and to reward those for requiring they pay to prove they are in good faith.
To me I dont think the potential reward is the point with recreational gambling. You might even give your winnings back in a friendly game were you to find out that the stakes bled out into real life.
However I dont see how all of this applies to gambling as a profession and as a part of society in larger ways such as stock markets and Crypto currency. What’s the supposed benefits of that?
I would argue that the professional setting is not recreational at all, and in many cases is abusive, with there seeming to be some intent to disguise how abusive it is to the victim.
Nah, you don’t play with stakes that could matter to someone. In my case, our buy-ins in the home game are $28 when converted to dollars and nobody bats an eye at dropping $100
The tiny reward does make it more interesting because you actually care about winning. It’s better to do $20 stakes and keep the money than play for $100 stakes and have to give it back because someone was irresponsible with their money
I used to be in credit risk for a very large stock market company.
Calling the bottom of the market is the same as betting big and getting 21 in blackjack.
Super cool when it happens, but not skill. The number of grown men I had to hear crying because they were dollar cost averaging down to the bottom until they went broke still disturbs me.
I’m happy this worked for you, but it was not skill.
You can’t go broke with 1x leverage, and I bought $AMD all the way down from $100 to $70
If it went to $50 I wouldn’t go broke, if it went $1 I wouldn’t go broke. I just would have missed a bigger opportunity
If it goes from $100 to $1, there’s not much left to go before bankruptcy/delisting. Say hello to swaths of BBBY bag holders… oh wait, no bags left there!
It’s still gambling and getting people addicted.
People get addicted to alcohol and caffeine. Should we can those too?
I’m really glad for you, that sounds amazing. I don’t think you’re the rule, though. I think you’re the exception. I also feel like it wouldn’t be unfeasible to have competitive/e-sports poker while still strictly regulating online casinos.
As a person who works in server hosting (not as devops or IT), I’m often privy to customer interactions. I feel like my company does a really good job at damage control - where if we fuck up, some rep gets on the phone and makes things right. We’ve eaten costs on behalf of our customers.
But sometimes, you just gotta tell a customer to go fuck themselves.
And those customers, those biggest complainers are often in online gambling, crypto, adult content, or racist shit.
We get DDos’d a lot from it. But I’m glad the company I work for doesn’t bow down to garbage companies.
I’m honestly not surprised.
I used to hook up with a guy who was 100% convinced that he could game the system. It had something to do with break frequencies from various services and certain time windows for playing. He won sometimes, but he obviously didn’t talk much about his losses. He wasn’t a very happy person, and I think gambling offered an easy release.
That’s my big issue with gambling. It’s a business preying on addicts leaving many in financial ruin, and overall they do nothing for society at large. Here in Sweden it is regulated, but you honestly don’t notice it. There are so many internet casinos vanishing and cropping up on an almost daily basis. If you turn on the radio the adverts are like 40% online casinos, 40% sex toy sites, and 20% various services, like tyre shifting, glass repairs, etc.
I despise gambling, I don’t gamble myself and I consider it a tax on those who don’t know math. That said, I worked for a gambling company and I know that different companies target different types of customers. Also they have responsible gambling programs that are more or less serious (some of which might be required by regulations). The company I worked for operated in Scandinavia and was sportsbook heavy (vs casino heavy), and had quite serious measures against suspected addicts (immediate block, calling the person on the phone if there were any signs like long sessions etc., proof of income to set limits proportional to income etc.), because it was considered bad for business. Many companies in general are terrible, and especially those who depend on casino games, where the margins are fixed and the dynamics are more prone to create addiction (available 24/7, quick feedback etc.).
If it had been a sports betting site OP would have said so. The fact that they said “casino” says it all.
Many do both, I would say the vast majority. Same regulations and licenses apply, in fact. Simply some companies invest more in casino (which are purchased games from vendors in the vast majority of cases), some invest more in sportsbook. I guess the OP’s case is the former, but it’s not a very relevant distinction to make.
Today’s tech business model:
First you get the power, then you extort the money.
First of all, congrats! Your business must have become pretty successful. How exactly did CF decide to “ask” you to switch to Enterprise?
Maybe…
* You violated their terms of service…
I wouldn’t say Cloudflare is innocent, here, but this business handled Cloudflare the cudgel that was used to beat them. They admit to doing something with their domains that was expressly prohibited in the service they were paying for.
Then they offered to resolve it in whatever way CF deemed appropriate and CF refused to elaborate exactly which domains were the issue.
Right. And if you depend on them for your logic with cloudflare functions you will never be able to migrate to another CDN.
Never let a vender do anything for you beyond standardized features. That’s why a “selling point” if we go with this guy we can do this… never makes sense. Because if option B can’t do it also you wouldn’t want to do “this”, and you should probably implement it in a more old-school way.
The same thing happens in fastly with the VCL
Regarding the HN shenanigans, their algorithm does some weird things.
If a new post gets too many upvotes and not enough comments, it gets demoted very quickly.
If any of the activity appears manufactured, it basically delists the post.
Very exploitable, but also prevents popular articles that don’t stimulate conversation from sticking around on page 1 for too long, and makes botting upvotes do more harm than good.
HN is a libertarian hellhole full of divorced incel energy
Not a huge surprise, they’ve got a long history of doing all kinds of scumbag shit. Nobody should be surprised when the leopard eats their face.
You think we’re hitting that point where line go up must wreck lives?
We hit that point centuries ago, if not millennia.
- what is HN? Edit: never mind, answered below: hacker news (ycombinator)
- daaamn… I hated cloudflare before for their shitty and non-adblocker-compatible (often not working at all) “I am not a bot” checks, but fuck me are those EVIL motherfuckers…
