Yeah, probably not - because they don't explicitly have to, as outlined in the post. The very architecture of CF's services essentially enables "blackmail as a service" in the sense that, CF protects the attacker and essentially creates a coercive environment in which the victim "has" to pay CF to protect them from... the very attacker that CF protects.
This is the part that's wrong. CF is not creating the fact that sites are vulnerable to DDoS, and these attacks would happen even if the sites were kicked off.
If some guys are going around slashing tires, would we demand that tire repair shops not sell to them? Would we say it's blackmail because the tire shop sells to anyone, and selling tires to them "creates a coercive environment"?
That gets confusing because it sounds like a special thing they're doing in addition to their main function.
If the back of the store was a convention center that allowed basically any small club to use it for free, and of their many thousands of hosted clubs one or two were focused around tire slashing, that wouldn't cause the same reactions.
Yeah, I ran a phpbb forum (alongside my normal static site) on a 486 in 2003 or so. It worked. It was slow, but it worked just fine for my friends and I! I remember it took multiple minutes to generate the SSH server key after the initial install lol
Yeah, I was actually running it on a 386 at first. In those days I didn't have much money and I just dumpster-dived computer hardware that was thrown out behind computer shops. Back before recycling stuff got regulated, PC repair shops threw out totally-working hardware all the time. Every piece of hardware of the web server was free, including the monochrome CRT monitor I had hooked up to it, and the awesome IBM Model M keyboard. The best dumpster find ever was a working Pentium 4 machine, all they took out of it was the HDD! Good times :)
In the mid-90s, I retired my 486 hardware and brought it over to a local ISP that we were friends with.
It had a second life doing stuff like delivering mail, handling IRC, serving web pages, and whatever else a few of us wanted from it. The performance was fine.
(The Pentium-ish machines stayed on desktop duty where GUIs devoured resources.)
Because some things only work in Chrome. It's a fact. It's terrible.
We're the frogs being boiled, over the last decade. People sounded the alarms, but they were looked at like they had tin foil on their heads. Now, it's clear they were right.
I'm speaking generally, of course. I use Firefox for all my personal stuff, except for those situations where it doesn't work.
Chrome likes to make up new "standards" and then some websites adopt them immediately.
That said, I can only remember two instances of that slightly inconveniencing me in the past, and both times I was inconvenienced by a Google-run website: once upon a time Google Earth refused to work, and once upon a time I couldn't tweak my Google Meet background. Both are no longer the case.
Citation needed. I've seen the opposite--unless there's a very specific niche that can't be otherwise solved, there's huge internal resistance to going it alone.
The biggest counterexample I can think of: WebUSB was critical to Chromebooks supporting external devices, but I can see why Safari might not want it. It has Firefox support at last, though.
Citation of what exactly? That not all browsers implement the same thing at the same time and that some features are Chrome-exclusive because for one reason or another other browsers refuse to implement it?
Is that really something you need a citation on? You sure seem to have come up with an example of your own.
In the past there were features that didn't work at all; I used to hit those regularly. Device setup flows, AV features, etc. These days, it's never "this doesn't work on other browsers". It's always "this is worse on other browsers", whether because they don't test it or because they don't care.
YouTube is terrible on Firefox. There was a period where it was usable but got increasingly worse with missed frames, low frame rate. On FastMail and Gmail the expanded search overlay doesn't disappear when you click outside (ESC doesn't work), you often get stuck with it. On YouTube when you stop hovering over the "I like this" etc. on full screen video view, the tooltip doesn't disappear. It's death by a thousand cuts.
I wonder if he's using a Radeon gpu, those have had issues like video playback making the entire ui framerate drop. But it happens in steam/electron too, not only firefox. The shader cores aren't used much either, it's just a bug.
A lot of IT now curates the extensions for the browsers and doesn't allow extensions not on the whitelist and then they basically just only do that work on Chrome and disable Firefox. It's kinda self defeating in the long run imo but that's the problem in the industry.
I've run into a few restaurant sites whose ordering pages just do not work properly (or at all) in Firefox. Also webgl2 performance is unfortunately still much better in Chrome vs Firefox; as an example, FoundryVTT (virtual tabletop software) works fine in Firefox but is a stuttery mess IME (though it has improved slightly in the last few years).
ups.com is one that really infuriates me. It shows 404s for me on Firefox and works perfectly on Chrome.
Kaiser's website works mostly on Firefox. Recently I had to print a "letter" and on Firefox it was blank and printed fine with Chrome.
I don't know if it's still this way, but Google Meet didn't work very well in Firefox, so last year I took all my meetings in Chrome.
These are just what I remember. There are a LOT more.
EDIT: on the UPS thing... it happens when I follow links from gmail in Firefox. Sometimes it wouldn't 404, but I'd see a "..." and it would just stay that way.
EDIT2: for a long time (not anymore), sending Kaiser emails was broken. Hitting enter would warp to the bottom on the page and I'd have to scroll back up to finish typing. They're completely redesigned the website recently and that bug is fixed.
95% of people who use Chrome have no clue what browser they are using.
They got Chrome when it was bundled with every single installer ever for about a decade (which was so prolific and scummy that Microsoft had to make the "default app" picker system more defensive, because Chrome was abusing it more than microsoft apps were).
When you installed Java, you also got Chrome set as your default browser with no interaction.
Or they one click downloaded it from Google.com because of a giant banner saying "You gotta download chrome"
It's insane to me how rarely people on HN seem to actually know the history of this. Everyone who worked in tech support in the 2010s experienced this.
It was an identical strategy that most spyware and adware used at the time.
Not everyone has a well paying tech job. Many have to use their devices until they literally die and many more choose to do so because getting a newer device would mean having to deal with the bullshit of newer software.
I've just 'upgraded' a friend who was using a ThinkPad T410, released Jan 2010. So sixteen years. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it except it was capped at 8GB RAM and chugged along slowly.
Oh yeah, I know "the average person" still thinks Chrome is the best browser (if they even care at all about what browser they use), but I mean in tech circles is where it surprises me...
Yeah plus 99% of the time those reshuffled features are extraneous shit I never cared about for a millisecond in the first place. "We moved Stickers over here!" ... that's nice, I'm here to make some software and had to open this horrible web app to look at a flow chart someone made.
Any kind of tour/nag tooltip on any app/site I use stays up forever, until they hopefully finally realize I am never going to interact with their cognitive-energy-wasting noise that should never have been shown to begin with. I've had the "try out dark mode" tooltip showing on JIRA for months. Just don't show these. Don't waste people's time. There are sites I close and never come back to because they start with an unskippable tutorial.
Just a couple examples offhand..
Discord (constant tooltips covering the screen to harass me to try "Nitro", or some new AI BS I am never going to even remotely consider trying)
Miro ("Sign in with Google" modal in the top right, "CANVAS 26" conference signup site stripe covering the top of the screen, frequent "What's new" modal covering the entire app, "How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or co-worker?" net promoter score survey covering the bottom of the screen, which makes zero sense whatsoever as an enterprise user)
JIRA ("Try dark theme" tooltip covering the top right of the page)
Figma ("Reconnect with Community" tooltip covering some content on the left)
The thing is, nobody is ever going to feel bad that you've ignored their little feature. It'll just keep nagging you into the future until you dump the product. In spite of many saas products collecting data on every mouse movement and keystroke, perpetually, they seem to do nothing with that data.
Yeah, it depends. Some webapp vendors will actually look at metrics of interaction with those tooltips/tutorials, though I'm sure most don't. But yes, there are things I've had showing on the screen for months and months (like the "Try dark theme" which has been showing at the top right of JIRA since whenever they added that)...
Oh, do you perhaps mean Theodore Payne Foundation at https://theodorepayne.org/ ? I was just searching Thomas Payne Foundation and that was what came up
IG was cool when it started, but yeah, its acquisition (and shortly before) was such a swift downhill slide. Haven't even logged into my account in years and years.
People have this real tendency to say x never would have accomplished y, when in fact the ecosystem was ripe for it
The Winklevoss twins, whose project Zuckerberg intentionally delayed while he got to market first (whatever it was. I don't know exactly. Some say it was only a dating site. Some say they used bootstrapping effects to onboard colleges first). It was 2003 or whatever. It very well could've disrupted Myspace or Friendster and made them multi billionaires
"Instagram had no users" people really liked Instagram. It could've taken off, if it wasn't already
Whatsapp - Whatsapp was profitable. Now Zuck has access to your phone numbers
Stop a) whitewashing his history and b) stop assuming "blah never would have accomplished". That's an utterly bizarre take in the face of theft
Been using Flickr since 2005, and been paying for Pro since 2015 (it cost $24.95 then). It's still the best photo-sharing community, by far.
Pretty disappointed my Pro subscription somehow increased by 60% this year. That's pretty uncool. I guess all the crippling of free accounts still hasn't reduced costs enough, or something. It's bad enough you can never see original size on free accounts anymore (even though I'm now paying $135/year!), apparently reduction in functionality that was theoretically supposed to keep costs down still hasn't prevented a continual escalation of Pro subscription cost (regardless of my minimal usage of the site).
Yeah the time capsule thing is a big part of its value to me. I will never forget how disappointed I was when the "Macintosh" group disappeared. I think at some point I actually chatted with someone who worked at Flickr and explained that the group owner simply closed it at some point (can't remember 100%). It had so many photos going back to basically the earliest days of Flickr, of all kinds of awesome photos of Mac computers of all eras, not only new digital photos but tons of stuff people posted from prior decades. The other Mac/Apple-related groups were not as comprehensive. That was good while it lasted, at least. I wish there was some way to re-open the group :\
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