this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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Public resource but access restricted and exclusive

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This community tracks restricted access resources (generally websites) that are supposed to serve taxpayers and the general public, but they fail in that duty by imposing arbitrary restrictions on access. This is where we document these cases.

Most often, it is the Tor community who is marginalised by incompetantly implemented infosystems. This community will be mostly littered with references to tor-hostile public resources to a fatiquing extent, but this is expected. It is not necessarily limited to Tor. Any demographic of people who are refused service would have a relevant story here. E.g. someone traveling outside their country and being denied access to a homeland website on the basis of presumed IP geolocation.

This is very closely related to the [email protected] community. But there are some nuanced differences. Not all fiefdoms are necessarily always restricted access. E.g. some rare Facebook pages are reachable to non-FB users.

And not all manifestations of restricted access entail a fiefdom. E.g. it’s increasingly common for a gov website to block Tor visitors at the firewall without involving a digital fiefdom.

Cases of Cloudflare, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like can be crossposted in many situations. They are a fiefdom walled garden and also commonly configured to restrict access. IDK.. use your best judgement. Might suffice to just post in [email protected] in those cases.

Also related: [email protected]

Scope and rules:

What is not relevant here:

This community is focused on tax-funded government programs and services like public education, social services, voter reg, courts, legal statutes, etc. NGOs and non-profits may exist for the pubic benefit, but if they are not funded by force (taxation) then they are not really relevant here.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/28580567

Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.

The irony

Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.

Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

The embarrassment

This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.

It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to claim CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)

The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.

The discussion

More chatter here.

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