Items tagged with CloudFlare
When you log onto a service, make a purchase, or do something else on the web, you have a decent chance of running into a CAPTCHA. Everyone knows what they look like, and it can be incredibly obnoxious: “Select all the buses. Click on bikes. Does this photo have traffic lights?” CAPTCHAs do not even work all the time, leading to even more frustration. Now, Cloudflare says it is time to “end this madness” by eliminating them entirely. Secure CDN and DNS services provider Cloudflare posted a blog about CAPTCHAs and how they are the bane of human existence on the internet. Cloudflare did some quick napkin math, assuming it takes a user on average 32 seconds to complete...
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Over the last couple of weeks, hackers have been out in force, breaking into Microsoft Exchange and other services. Now, a group of international hackers who view themselves as vigilantes have breached Silicon Valley-startup Verkada Inc. This gave the hackers access to the live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras installed in numerous businesses and organizations. Today, the hacker group went public, explaining that they had footage from Tesla, Cloudflare Inc., and many other high-profile organizations. Moreover, the hackers accessed footage from “inside women’s health clinics, psychiatric hospitals and the offices of Verkada itself.” One video even showed footage from...
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Domain Name Service (DNS) servers partially make up the internet's backbone as we know it. They allow anyone to plug a URL in and go to a website, as otherwise, we would have to know the IP address for every website. These servers also handle IP addresses from people trying to get to websites, which could be a privacy concern. To quell the concerns, CloudFlare plans to implement a new DNS standard called Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (oDoH) to ensure privacy through a “technical guarantee.” When DNS first launched and with implementations that remain today, data is sent in plaintext over the internet to resolve a website with DNS servers. Thus, the Internet Engineering Task Force standardized...
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Update (8/31/2020): It is now coming out that "misconfiguration at a major external network provider" led to the issues. The article has been updated to reflect this. As it goes, if something is not supposed to break, it probably will. This morning, some people had trouble getting to websites across the internet. DownDetector showed a large spike in people reporting issues, and it appears it all came down to a problem with an external network provider. Around 6:30am CST, a rather large spike in issues began to crop up across the web, from Starbucks to Call of Duty multiplayer sessions. Video streaming, log-in services, and whole websites themselves were having problems. For the...
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Losing a bit of market share to Ryzen should have been a wake up call for Intel, and to some extent, it was—Intel said last September it was vowing to "aggressively compete in all segments." The troubled path to 10-nanometer production while rival AMD racks up wins with its 7nm tech should have been a wake up call as well. And lest another wake up call is still needed, Cloudflare is breaking up with Intel after a long relationship and courting AMD exclusively for its Gen X servers. Cloudflare is yet another feather in AMD's cap, and it speaks to the stiff competition Intel is facing against a rival that, quite frankly, struggled to compete in meaningful ways before Zen. But that was before,...
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One year ago today on April Fools’ Day, Cloudflare launched its1.1.1.1 DNS service that was aimed at helping to speed up DNS requests, improve privacy, and give users an overall boost in internet performance. The 1.1.1.1 DNS service is still operational, and has become the second largest public DNS service behind #1 Google, while offering half the latency. Back in November, Cloudflare launched its 1.1.1.1 app to bring its speedy and privacy-centric DNS service to Android and iOS users, and today it is expanding the app with the addition of Virtual Private Networking (VPN) functionality. The company is calling this VPN “Warp”, and it encrypts all of your data, not just traffic...
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Microsoft has had its fair share of problems with its Windows 10 updates over the years, with the biggest onslaught of issues being experienced recently with the October 2018 Update. Unfortunately, there's a new issue affecting Windows 10 users, and it's related to the Windows Update mechanism. Some Windows 10 users began reporting this morning that they have been unable to hit the Windows Update server to check for or download updates for their PCs. Normally this process would be relatively straight forward, with Windows 10 either presenting you with a list of available updates or telling you that there are no updates available. However, users that have Comcast as their ISP in...
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At this point, it sure seems like the folks at Cloudflare know how this whole "internet" thing works, as the company is trying very hard to keep the web fast and more secure. That includes websites that are cached using its services, helping to deliver faster page loads to the reader, or even routing your own internet connection through its servers for better privacy. Earlier this year, Cloudflare released its 1.1.1.1 service, which like Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS, routes all of your internet connections through the company's own servers, in effect obfuscating your true origin (except to Cloudflare). At home, using a specific DNS might not be too important, since speed is (likely) already at its best,...
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Each year on April 1 we are a bit skeptical about some of the stuff we read because some of it isn’t real. Cloudflare, the same company that uses a wall of lava lamps to generate encryption keys, swears that its new 1.1.1.1 consumer DNS service is the real deal. The promise is that the new DNS service is the fastest on the web and is designed with privacy-first in mind. If you aren’t sure what DNS is, Cloudflare describes it this way, "DNS is the directory of the Internet. Whenever you click on a link, send an email, open a mobile app, often one of the first things that has to happen is your device needs to look up the address of a domain. There are two sides of the DNS network: Authoritative...
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Most people have probably never been to Cloudflare's San Francisco office, but those who have been there would have noticed a large wall of lava lamps in the lobby. It is hard to miss—after all, it is not everyday that you come across dozens of lava lamps arranged on a set of shelves, not even in Spencer's where these groovy items are commonly found. What is not immediately obvious, however, is that the wall of lava lamps is not for decoration. Cloudfare is using them for encryption. It sounds wild, but for all that computers are capable of doing, the are not that great at picking random numbers. That is a problem, because proper cryptography relies on the ability to generate random digits that...
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Yesterday, Qualcomm announced that its Centriq 2400 Series processors are now shipping to its customers, nearly a year after it began sampling the chips. Available in 40-, 46- and 48-core versions, the Qualcomm is positioning Centriq 2400 as a worthy competitor to Intel's Xeon processors in the data center server market. Up until this point, Qualcomm has contended that the 48-core Centriq 2460 offers a 4x improvement in performance-per-dollars versus the Intel Xeon Platinum 8180. While those figures are much appreciated, we wanted to see some real world benchmark data so that we can make our own conclusions. Thankfully, the folks at Cloudflare were able to put a 46-core Centriq 2452 up against...
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A lot has sure changed in the past year, especially since the time before Edward Snowden, who we talked about yesterday, came forth with his NSA revelations. Anyone who cared about hiding their identity pre-Snowden were generally considered privacy nuts. But post-Snowden, the desire to keep private online suddenly seemed a lot more sane. But let's face it: Keeping truly secure is not that simple, especially for someone who's not well-versed in networking, or computers in general. As Ars Technica notes, there's even been some people who'd be considered "experts" that have slipped-up, causing themselves to be briefly exposed and de-anonymized in an instant. Whether you're a noobie or an expert,...
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The Internet is as wide and wonderful as it is dark and dangerous. So many individuals and groups use it as a powerful platform for advocacy, raising awareness, disseminating “dangerous” (to tyrants) ideas, and more, but all too often those entities face threats from actors looking to censor them, knocking them offline using DDoS attacks. Cloud provider CloudFlare has unveiled something called Project Galileo that seeks to protect against those threats. “CloudFlare is partnering with NGOs and civil society groups to identify outlets for free-expression online,” reads the website. “Once identified, CloudFlare will extend our Enterprise-class DDoS protection to ensure...
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DDoSing a Web server has become the de facto way to exact revenge on someone, or some company. Not a week, or sometimes even a day, will go by when you can't read about some ongoing DDoS attack. We've seen them spawned by Internet goofs to professional criminals. DDoSing is easy, and it's effective. That's why it's so heavily-used. Usually, though, DDoS effects are not quite like what we saw with Spamhaus earlier this week. As mentioned in that post, a record-setting 300Gbit/s was shot at Spamhaus and its host, CloudFlare, crippling a portion of the Internet to much of the UK and other regions in Europe. The first thing that might come to mind when a DDoS attack strikes is, "What could...
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If you've had a difficult time connecting to select websites over the past few days, there's a very good chance that an on-going attack against spam-prevention agency Spamhaus is to blame. Spamhaus, based in London and Geneva, helps e-mail providers filter spam, and to do this, it manages a blocklist that includes any server verified to be used for the sole purpose of distributing unwanted content. You can see where this is going. Cyberbunker, a host that touts its willingness to host anything outside of child pornography and terrorism materials, recently found itself on Spamhaus' blocklist. It hasn't taken too kindly to the inclusion, and has begun working with "criminal gangs" in Eastern Europe...
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