Birbla

Discussion summary

Discussions about Cloudflare's features include criticism for enabling malicious content and copying competitors, alongside some praise for its utility.

What the discussion says

  • Some users criticize Cloudflare for facilitating malicious activities like phishing.
  • Others appreciate its ease of deployment and protective features.
  • There are concerns about copying successful projects and lack of transparency.
“Cloudflare has the astonishing ability to make me hate them more as a company every new feature they launch.”
— vevoe
“Cloudflare is really good at launching features that facilitate low-friction deployment of malicious content.”
— heipei

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Hmm, that's fun and useful. Here is snake game for 60 minutes.

    https://drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev

    by smalltorch
  • $ curl -I https://drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev/ curl: (7) Failed to connect to drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev port 443 after 47 ms: Couldn't connect to server

    Tried from two hosts, different countries.

    by Self-Perfection
  • What an honor. I got a high score of seven.
    by copper-float
  • Your code appears to have a bug where if the arrow keys trigger a change of direction twice in a single frame interval, it can mistakenly send the snake back on itself.
    by tengbretson
  • Makes sense. It plays nicely with the vibe code kids who don’t know how to do GitHub or don’t know to ask their LLM about it.
    by janandonly
  • From FTP to CI/CD to drag and drop, society is going backwards
    by navigate8310
  • Reminds me of web development in the 1990s.

    I honestly miss those days of deployment simplicity.

    by alberth
  • FTPing files to `~/public_html` was the best... Miss those days.
    by gesis
  • There is a reason I had to lock my better version of this (https://quickish.site) behind Google OAuth to start. Like it or not, this type of stuff is going to be more popular than it was when Netlify / Heroku was doing it a decade ago.
    by PaybackTony
  • Cloudflare gives me mixed feelings. The services are good and well priced. What bothers me is that they've become infrastructure nobody opted into - you don't have an account, you just pass through their network on the way to a large share of what you visit. They terminate TLS, so it's plaintext on their side.
    by VimEscapeArtist
  • The people who own the content you decide to visit opted into it though, and they're the ones paying for it, right? No one accidentally sets up a CDN. I'm struggling to imagine workable economics where we have the rich services that we have today on the web but individual users get to dictate to sites they visit what their tech stack needs to be in real time. Imagine visiting your banks website and they're using Cloudflare, and you decide nope, I want the data delivered by CloudFront. Then the next person 20ms after you decides they don't like either of those, they really want the world to burn so they demand Azure.

    That at least would bring back local bank branches at least. And movie rentals by mail.

    by mrngld
  • It’s funny the EU hasn’t designated Cloudflare as a Gatekeeper yet.
    by layer8
  • Cloudflare is obviously more trustworthy/robust here, but if name of the url matters to you, my site non.io [1] allows for named uploads, ie https://html.non.io/solara [2]

    Somewhat useful if you want a url that isn't a hash / is more self descriptive.

    [1] Launch discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695

    [2] This was a demo of the output of a design tool I'm working on, only the home/accommodations/about pages work.

    by jjcm
  • > No account needed. Deployment is active for 60 minutes, then expires unless you claim it.

    (https://x.com/BraydenWilmoth/status/2074894829616509358)

    by ChrisArchitect
  • Same deal as their Cloudflare Workers previews from a few weeks ago: https://blog.cloudflare.com/temporary-accounts/
    by simonw
  • There must be some really good protection on this. If I enabled such a thing on any of my servers it would be full of warez, porn, malware, CSAM and who knows what else within minutes. Curious how they manage to keep it clean.
    by Bender
  • Yeah, I was going to start a file drop site like 0x until realizing what it'd be used for
    by DakotaR
  • They already allow hosting static websites so I think the same guardrails are implemented.
    by hoppp
  • At least when it comes to bad types of porn, it's be similar to Imgur allowing anonymous uploads. They already do CSAM scanning on uploads to their R2 storage:

    https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-simpler-path-to-a-safer-intern...

    by busymom0
  • Only live for an hour.

    But that won't stop people doing bad stuff for an hour I guess. Vibe code up some on-demand thing that you ping...

    by mattlondon
  • The protection is that they're rich enough to handle requests from law enforcement without going to jail themselves. They'll certainly pass your IP address to law enforcement if asked.
    by inigyou
  • They had a short blog post about this:

    https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-07-08-...

    by altbdoor
  • Wow the people in this thread are a huge bummer. This is much cooler and I doubt this is a real safety issue. You can already sign up for a free cloudflare account and deploy it for free, on your own, on a free workers.dev domain. The friction removal here isn't going to meaningfully change the security / amount of malicious content.
    by jonluca
  • After my hoster started asking me for 700€ for a year of hosting a static website of like 100Mb i moved to CF worker and github. I would selfhost but thats not allowed without license
    by thenthenthen
  • Oh poor you, bummed by people WHO ACTUALLY care about the web.
    by camillomiller
  • But why need they so much license rights?

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48841559

    by croes
  • Agreed I think this is pretty solid especially since you get all the Cloudflare benefits like CDN from the get-go.
    by superjose
  • You're encountering the "contrarian dynamic" which dang described in this post (which also explains why your own anti-contrarian comment reached the top) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
    by pegasus
  • When you see a group of people being critical, you can either see it as a “bummer”, or you can see it as people critically thinking about a thing.

    Is it really more useful to have everyone expressing how much they like something instead of identifying problems?

    Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

    by arcatech
  • Well according to the people in this thread it was previously impossible for bad actors to host a website, and CloudFlare has now given them this unique ability.
    by combyn8tor