Comparison of the human disempowerment severity of 3 walled gardens (Facebook, Google, and Cloudflare) – Uncaged
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  • @perestroika@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4•3 months ago

    I mostly agree with the article - Facebook is the weakest attractor currently. As for how to compare CloudFlare and Google - that’s difficult, because they provide too different services.

    Myself, I’m somewhat irritated but not much influenced by both.

    My primary mobile phone runs an old version of Replicant, so I don’t get access to Google Play or their app store. Of course, being a programmer and having chosen this, and having no shortage of mobile devices, I can work around the difficulty, but I realize many people can’t.

    CloudFlare irks me when I try to protect myself against spam and ads. It’s a constant dance of turning security measures on and off to get through their barriers. Their lack of transparency also irks me. I recently had to build a script to fix someone’s customer database. It had to query the local state postal company (a user of CloudFlare) for postal codes (zip codes). Of course, CloudFlare blocked access because my user agent string looked homebrew. I had to have my program pretend being CURL before it finally let me access the resource. Having to trick someone to access a public service isn’t my idea of a good passtime. :)

    • @freedomPusherOPEnglish
      3•3 months ago

      As for how to compare CloudFlare and Google - that’s difficult, because they provide too different services.

      The comparison article probably needs to mention the walled garden definition article, which spotlights the 3 oppressions:

      • (oppression 1) Exclusion— to keep people out
      • (oppression 2) Trapping— to keep people locked-in and held captive by inducing dependency
      • (oppression 3) Opacity— to keep people uninformed

      When it’s decomposed that way, it makes comparison feasible. It’s kind of similar to drugs. Psilocybin is a very different UX than cocaine and caffeine. But you can compare the addictions of very different drugs by separating psychological addiction from chemical addiction. And in each you can talk about the intensity of the addiction.

      The article at hand separated wants from needs. This makes the comparison manageable. Facebook is roughly comparable to having a psychological addiction whereby it’s largely a matter of self-control. Whereas Cloudflare would be roughly more analogous to a chemical addiction, where if you stop using it you are penalized by losing things you need (things that support your human rights).

      The overall problem the article tackles is Google and Facebook as widely known villains that the masses are well aware of. Cloudflare is widely unknown and gets no heat from digital rights orgs (many of which naively put their own resources in Cloudflare’s walled garden). It’s a huge oversight when Cloudflare has much more of a stranglehold on essential resources and it’s far less escapable. Cloudflare should be getting the biggest spotlight of all.

      CloudFlare irks me when I try to protect myself against spam and ads. It’s a constant dance of turning security measures on and off to get through their barriers.

      I never directly use Cloudflare because of my boycott on it. I will go as far as to grab archive.org-mirrored content to reach CF’d content but that’s as far as I go. Tor actually helps me avoid CF, inherently. So I’m curious what protections you use from spam and ads and how that affects your Cloudflare visits. That needs to be documented. In fact, it would help expand the list groups excluded. If Cloudflare is mistreating uMatrix users, for example, then that should be added as a group of people Cloudflare excludes.

      • @perestroika@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        I never directly use Cloudflare because of my boycott on it. I will go as far as to grab archive.org-mirrored content to reach CF’d content but that’s as far as I go. Tor actually helps me avoid CF, inherently. So I’m curious what protections you use from spam and ads and how that affects your Cloudflare visits. That needs to be documented. In fact, it would help expand the list groups excluded. If Cloudflare is mistreating uMatrix users, for example, then that should be added as a group of people Cloudflare excludes.

        Neither do I - my post was not clear enough about that.

        I often need to use CloudFlare-equipped sites, and often have to adjust NoScript and uBlock to get them to work. :)