Richard Stallman's personal site.

https://stallman.org

For current political commentary, see the daily political notes. RMS's Bio | The GNU Project

Reasons Not to Use Cloudflare

Many web sites use Cloudflare to filter access. The goal of preventing DDS attacks is not in itself bad, but Cloudflare does bad things to each legitimate visitor: ● It determine's the visitor's location based on per IP address. (Using a proxy can thwart this.) Tracking people is unjust. ● It acts as a man-in-the-middle in encrypted (HTTPS) communication between the visitor and the site: Cloudflare knows what page the visitor is looking at and sees any other communication as well. At times in the past I've noticed that Cloudflare blocked connecting via Tor. My recollection — which is somewhat hazy by now — was that Cloudflare decided that the Tor exit node cast doubt on whether I was a human being, and it asked me to answer a CAPTCHA. (Why should it matter whether I am a human being, I wonder, when all I try to do is look at a page once?) I have no objection to answering a CAPTCHA, in principle; however, Cloudflare disregarded my answer, because the CAPTCHA depended on nonfree JavaScript code that Cloudflare sent to my browser. Of course, I refuse to run that.