Is our ‘friend’, making everything easier… NOT!
From a friend re Cloudflare, so much for personal ‘security’ by using something other than Google or Safari-
Damned good question…
And then there is this little ‘pearl’ re Google’s cloud-
Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud’s biggest blunders ever: Google’s Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper’s incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn’t happen until May 15.
Full article, HERE from Ars Technica.
So y’all go right ahead and put your stuff on Google, and use that cloud to store your data. It’ll be safe, they said…
In reality, the ‘cloud’ is nothing more than somebody else’s computers somewhere, and you have no idea where…or who has access to it.
The other thing I wonder about with Cloudflare is how they are going to handle VPNs with this new change, since a ‘true’ VPN logs back to a primary site somewhere other than you usually are, so CF ‘may’ alert that you are logging in from an ‘unsafe’ location.
I know that previously, we had issues with the .gov VPNs both due to the hotel’s ‘treatment’ of VPNs (e.g. not allowing connection), or the VPN dumping the connections from a foreign country (considering it a hacking attempt).
Sooooo, if you value your ‘data’, whatever it may be, I’d recommend a local removable hard drive or thumb drive, updated regularly, and a copy of the same off site at another location.
Cloudflare doesn’t care about VPNs. They really just want to be sure that it’s a human not a bot pretending to be one. Having said that, I suspect that if the apparent end point looks like a known VPN one you’ll have to pass a “check all squares with X” test rather than the basic check box test because hackers tend to use VPNs.
However they are almost certainly not selling that data because they don’t have a way to communicate it well. That’s why if you visit half a dozen cloudflare fronted sites in a row you are likely to asked to prove you aren’t human multiple times.
BTW You can (and should) block cloudflareinsights.com any way you can along with facebook.net, ads-twitter.com and the google equivalents (googletagmanager.com and google-analytics.com)
Indeed. Some of these things are, I’ll admit, convenient. Safe and reliable, though, not so much. Have a trove of photos? Not on the Cloud if you can help it. Documents? Writings? Nope. But it extends beyond that. At the last count, you can depend on… yourself (and if you are a Christian, God). So don’t outsource your security or your life.
I’ve avoided the cloud. Your post reinforces my reason for being suspicious of the hype, and the knowledge people that manage such things can be incompetent and lazy.
I never place critical data on any cloud. High-speed external USB drives are cheap.I have three that I rotate weekly. Thumb drives, if speed isn’t an issue, are cheaper.
I have never trusted the cloud. That’s why it’s so annoying that everything wants you to “back up” to them.
Francis- Thanks, I was not aware of that!
Ian et al- Agreed!
Regardless of where you put your data, what you must do is encrypt it.
I keep book files backed up on a hard drive, on a jump drive, and in a paid-for cloud storage site. Nothing else goes onto the cloud. I also have back-up, on-computer programs to backstop Word (required for work).
The G00g lost any shred of trust I had in it back in 2019 when they said, “Oh, yeah, if you use GClassroom? We own your content.” They’d already pulled a few fast ones with data storage, so it didn’t surprise me. Now I just assume they are out to get me.
My OS is Microflacid, so I have One Drive. Whatev. I also have an external hard drive that I back up to. My other file backup I can read with a candle.
Most pirates and DDOSers wouldn’t exist without Cloudflare.
They’re evil. The people that use them are morons. I’d compare it to paying the mob protection money.
FrancisT: Good tip, thank you. I’d been considering that, the next time I see that pop up in NoScript, I’m going to move it to specifically “Untrusted”.
John: I’m getting a “Arms dealer selling to all sides in the conflict” vibe from Cloudflare.
Backups: http://www.taobackup.com/
Click through the pages (yin-yang symbol is “Next page”). It’s short, it’s entertaining, and it’s oh so true. I laughed at page 5, “Testing”. Nope. Not spoiling it for you.
With regard to ISPs blocking VPNs: I run Nord VPN and it has a setting that supposedly disguises VPN traffic. Also has a killswitch that kills the connection if there is a momentary interruption.
As regards Cloudflare, if I have a connection problem I notify the site that their software choice is causing me to buy xxx elsewhere. And I don’t buy from them.
My most reliable and secure backup is hard copy, stored in my safe. If you really want it to be safe, hard copy is the safest.
“In reality, the ‘cloud’ is nothing more than somebody else’s computers somewhere, and you have no idea where…or who has access to it.”
You know the .gov has access. Anything you store on the cloud you give up 4th amendment protections for.
All- Agreed, and yes, hard copy IS the best…sigh
The Google follies continue:
https://is.gd/giRikw
The Register: Google Cloud shows it can break things for lots of customers – not just one at a time. Deleted about 40 networks that services needed, causing late Friday fun.