Today we’re excited to announce the next generation of Cloudflare Apps. Cloudflare Apps is an open platform of tools to build a high quality website. It’s a place where every website owner can select from a vast catalog of Apps which can improve their websites and internet properties in every way imaginable. Selected apps can be previewed and installed instantly with just a few clicks, giving…
We’ve written a couple times about the problem of patent trolls, and what we are doing in response to the first case a troll filed against Cloudflare. We set a goal to find prior art on all 38 Blackbird Tech patents and applications and then obtain a legal determination that Blackbird Tech’s patents are invalid. Such a determination will end Blackbird’s ability to file or…
Sometimes, well-intended efforts to prevent unacceptable behavior run into the reality of what it means to have an open and free society. That is what happened at the Supreme Court on Monday. Souvenir Postcard by unknown The Supreme Court issued an opinion confirming something we at Cloudflare have long believed -- that the First Amendment protects access to the Internet. Using sweeping language, Justice Kennedy compared internet access…
Back in April we announced Rate Limiting of requests for every Cloudflare customer. Being able to rate limit at the edge of the network has many advantages: it’s easier for customers to set up and operate, their origin servers are not bothered by excessive traffic or layer 7 attacks, the performance and memory cost of rate limiting is offloaded to the edge, and more. In a nutshell,…
At Cloudflare we believe in being good to the Internet and good to our customers. By moving on from the legacy world of IPv4-only to the modern-day world where IPv4 and IPv6 are treated equally, we believe we are doing exactly that. "No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind." - Taylor Swift (whose website…
Jengo Fett by Brickset (Flickr) We knew the case against patent trolls was the right one, but we have been overwhelmed by the response to our blog posts on patent trolls and our program for finding prior art on the patents held by Blackbird Tech, which we’ve dubbed Project Jengo. As we discuss in this post, your comments and contributions have allowed us to expand and intensify…
Recently Akamai published an article about CLDAP reflection attacks. This got us thinking. We saw attacks from Connectionless LDAP servers back in November 2016 but totally ignored them because our systems were automatically dropping the attack traffic without any impact. CC BY 2.0 image by RageZ We decided to take a second look through our logs and share some statistics about reflection attacks we see regularly. In…
The Internet is inherently unreliable, a collection of networks connected to each other with fiber optics, copper, microwaves and trust. It’s a magical thing, but things on the Internet break all the time; cables get cut, bogus routes get advertised, routers crash. Most of the time, these failures are noticed but inexplicable to the average user — ”The Internet is slow today!” — frustrating user experiences as people go…