Thibault Meunir writing on Cloudflare’s blog:

Based on our data, it takes a user on average 32 seconds to complete a CAPTCHA challenge. There are 4.6 billion global Internet users. We assume a typical Internet user sees approximately one CAPTCHA every 10 days.

This very simple back of the envelope math equates to somewhere in the order of 500 human years wasted every single day — just for us to prove our humanity.

They aren’t just doing napkin math, they’re also trying to fix things:

We want to get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: a real human should be able to touch or look at their device to prove they are human, without revealing their identity. We want you to be able to prove that you are human without revealing which human you are! You may ask if this is even possible? And the answer is: Yes!

I held off on having a CAPTCHA on our site for as long as I could, but the spammers are relentless (did you know they’ll even click on email confirmations now?!) so I finally gave in.

I’d do darn near anything to be rid of ‘em again (any ideas?), but it seems the alternative that Cloudflare is pursuing requires hardware security keys. Interesting stuff, and definitely worth a read, but it’s all experimental for now and I don’t know if/when we’ll be able to put it in practice.

There’s a new speed test in town…

With many people being forced to work from home, there’s increased load on consumer ISPs. You may be asking yourself: how well is my ISP performing with even more traffic? Today we’re announcing the general availability of speed.cloudflare.com, a way to gain meaningful insights into exactly how well your network is performing.

We’ve seen a massive shift from users accessing the Internet from busy office districts to spread out urban areas. Although there are a slew of speed testing tools out there, none of them give you precise insights into how they came to those measurements and how they map to real-world performance.

This is pretty cool and I’m updating my DNS as I write this. They’re offering two flavors: 1.1.1.2 (no malware) and 1.1.1.3 (no malware or adult content).

Since launching 1.1.1.1, the number one request we have received is to provide a version of the product that automatically filters out bad sites. While 1.1.1.1 can safeguard user privacy and optimize efficiency, it is designed for direct, fast DNS resolution, not for blocking or filtering content. The requests we’ve received largely come from home users who want to ensure that they have a measure of protection from security threats and can keep adult content from being accessed by their kids. Today, we’re happy to answer those requests.

The setup is easy, and only requires changing two numbers in your primary and secondary DNS.

I love internet history articles like this one from Cloudflare:

On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems, the guy who made Zork, the NTP guy, and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix. The problem was simple: there were 455 hosts on the ARPANET and the situation was getting out of control.

Flan Scan is a lightweight network vulnerability scanner. With Flan Scan you can easily find open ports on your network, identify services and their version, and get a list of relevant CVEs affecting your network.

This is a wrapper around Nmap which turns it into a full-fleged network scanner and makes it easy to deploy on Kubernetes.

Today, our network spans 193 cities in over 90 countries and interconnects with over 8,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, public cloud providers, SaaS services, and enterprises. We estimate that we operate within 100 milliseconds of 98% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world, and 93% of the Internet-connected population globally (for context, the blink of an eye is 300-400 milliseconds). We intend to continue expanding our network to better serve our customers globally and enable new types of applications, while relentlessly driving down our unit costs.

There’s a lot of interesting tidbits in this filing. I love this lead-in to the industry analysis section:

The Internet was not built for what it has become.

Cloudflare just launched a VPN for people who don’t know what V.P.N. stands for.

…we think the market for VPNs as it’s been imagined to date is severely limited. Imagine trying to convince a non-technical friend that they should install an app that will slow down their Internet and drain their battery so they can be a bit more secure. Good luck.

What’s interesting is the patience they’ve demonstrated with this launch. They first had to learn a thing or two about…

…the failure conditions when a VPN app switched between cellular and WiFi, when it suffered signal degradation, tried to register with a captive portal, or otherwise ran into the different conditions that mobile phones experience in the field.

The basic version of Warp is free. To put folks at ease (cause they’re a for-profit company), they’ve been transparent about their motives and shared “three primary ways this makes financial sense” for them.

(READ ALONG IN YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE TRAILER VOICE) … In a world where serverless is still being demystified, CloudFlare, a company who’s focused on pushing things to the edge, launches a game changer for not only serverless, but for cloud computing at large. Unlike every other cloud computing platforms out there, this platform called Workers, doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. This, is the future of serverless and cloud computing. Join Zach Bloom in this epic tale as he tries to convince you why.

OK, seriously — this news bubbled up to me enough times that I just had to share it. Here’s the tee up of the problem they faced — how they’re going about solving it is truly a great read.

Two years ago we had a problem. We were limited in how many features and options we could build in-house, we needed a way for customers to be able to build for themselves. We set out to find a way to let people write code on our servers deployed around the world (we had a little over a hundred data centers then, 155 as of this writing). Our system needed to run untrusted code securely, with low overhead. We sit in front of ten million sites and process millions and millions of requests per second, it also had to run very very quickly…

it’s exciting to see Cloudflare bridging the gap between IPFS and the traditional web.

Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway is an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer. We hope our gateway, hosted at cloudflare-ipfs.com, will serve as the platform for many new highly-reliable and security-enhanced web applications.

For those who want a deep dive into IPFS check out the show we did with Juan Benet – The Changelog #204.

For those wanting to 86 8.8.8.8, here’s the 411 on 1.1.1.1.

They’re making some pretty big claims here. One is that it’s fast (which DNSPerf corroborates). The other big claim is that it’s “privacy-first”. This one is a bit harder to corroborate but their promise is pretty convincing:

We will never log your IP address (the way other companies identify you). And we’re not just saying that. We’ve retained KPMG to audit our systems annually to ensure that we’re doing what we say.

If you care about speed and privacy (you should) there is a good chance you should consider switching to this.

Cloudflare gave Kenton Varda a mission — Make it so developers could run code on Cloudflare’s edge.

Kenton Varda, writes on the Cloudflare blog:

Eventually, we settled on what now seems the obvious choice: JavaScript, using the standard Service Workers API, running in a new environment built on V8. Five months ago, we gave you a preview of what we were building, and started the beta.

Today, with thousands of scripts deployed and many billions of requests served, Cloudflare Workers is now ready for everyone.