Lately I've been getting frequent "Error HTTP 451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons" thrown by Cloudflare whilst using Piped (a YouTube alternate front end used by Nitter).<p>However these errors are generated... in error. The page links to a DMCA complaint which lists about a half dozen unrelated YouTube (and Piped) links, none of which are being accessed when the error is generated. In fact, viewing the video on YouTube plays back fine. There appears to be a glitch in Cloudflare's URL filtering. It's been happening so frequently that Piped is often unusable.
I also get CloudFlare now blocking my access to RSS feed MP3s for some podcasts. Once the almighty CloudFlare deems you a threat, your IP is burned. These days I can use less and less of the internet.<p>I really want to just see us get to the point where we don't have to rely on such services. I refuse to use them or any other for services I run, DDoS be damned.
Cloudflare is making my live very difficult right now. Spammers are hosting websites using free domains, like .ml, .tk, so an unlimited supply of random domains, hosting them behind cloud flare which prevents us from easily getting the page content or blocking the IP for a period of time since the IP is shared.<p>Lots of spam hosted on cloudflare these days.
Cloudflare might end a golden era of scraping, when it was trivial to scrape data from any site. Now Cloudflare helps site owners to make sure than only humans can read their contents manually. As more site owners switch to similar services, web will become less and less machine readable. No automated data processing, no archiving.
I mean it's Piped's decision to host their service on Cloudflare, no? No on forces them to use that service, so I don't see this as an issue with CF. They are not "the Internet", even though their marketing makes you believe that, thousands of large services run fine without routing their traffic through them.
I still dunno how people got conned that DoH aka. "tunnel your every DNS request to american entity that is required by law to spy on you on demand" to be the new "standard" for the browsers
Have you submitted that to <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains/feedback" rel="nofollow">https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains/feedback</a> ?
Honestly, if I wasn't a technical guy and I saw my channel and all my content on some piped.kavin.rocks or yewtu.be which aren't visually distinguishable from all the non-alternative-YouTube-frontend tube sites, I would assume someone's ripping all my content and impersonating me as well. I can totally see where the DMCA is coming from.<p>And even knowing the technical differences, one may want to dissociate with a stupid domain name like yewtu.be.<p>Edit: I showed <a href="https://yewtu.be/channel/<channel_id>" rel="nofollow">https://yewtu.be/channel/<channel_id></a> to a content creator friend just now. Predictably, the reaction is "WTF, am I being impersonated? What should I do?"
I thought about submitting this a week or so ago. Here's the link to the issue and discussion on it: <a href="https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/issues/1704" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/issues/1704</a><p>TL;DR: Apparently there's a Hong Kong dude living in Germany that didn't like his videos being on Youtube, so he sent DMCA takedown requests to Piped instead and Cloudflare did a takedown on the whole domain, which only appears if sent as a referral from outside piped.kavin.rocks (or using the redirect extension for firefox).
By now Cloudflare is more of an obstacle to the free web than it is helping. A centralized entity, whose scripts from randomly named subdomains you must allow to run on your machine, or be stuck at their obnoxious "checking your browser" page endlessly reloading, because some web dev decided to put their website behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most prominent reasons for me to simply close the browser tab and leave the site.
See if changing the URL from piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v= to piped.video/watch?v= will work. I've never had the "Unavailable for Legal Reasons" error when using the latter domain name.<p>Additionally you can set up a permanent redirect with a browser addon like the Redirector to always be sent from piped.kavin.rocks to piped.video.
CloudFlare again..
Offering their service to crime forums, credit card fraud shops and phishing websites, while making usage of Tor and VPNs nearly impossible or atleast a pain.<p>Coupled with the hypocrisy of an open web and freedom of speech, it makes CloudFlare arguably one of the worst threats to the web as we know it.<p>Whereas the freedom of speech ala Cloudflare stops as soon as it can generate cheap PR, because then a website is quickly blocked after a few media reports.. or in case of Piped as soon as the content mafia is complaining.
LibRedirect is working fine with Piped for me. I think I hit some blocked URL but it's trivial to remove it from the list, most mirrors are definitely working.
I used to love Cloudflare but their argument for free speech absolutism went out the window when they started making judgement calls about which sites to block and which to keep. Now I'm just disappointed but not surprised. Will probably move off entirely once Tailscale funnels allow for custom termination CNAMEs.<p>If this particular instance is them getting DMCA'd then it's not really their fault, but I'm confirmation biasing it with a pattern I see of them making more and more judgement calls about what to host and becoming more like a standard 100% profit-driven megacorp hosting provider.
And cloudflare again!<p>Those guys... not to mention their pesky "browser verification" which is does not work with noscript/basic (x)html browsers.
This is the same company that has repeatedly gone to the mat to ensure Nazi’s and targeted hate campaigns remain active online. But this is where they draw the line?<p>They have on multiple occasions had long and public campaigns talking about how important it is to fight censorship in all its forms except a random DMCA troll in Hong Kong?<p>I don’t think Cloudflare really love “free speech” as much as they pretend in their public messaging.