It’s not good that cloudfare (or any single entity) “owns” half the internet.
100% this^. Even if they aren’t actively doing anything terrible that we know of, it still totally undermines people’s privacy, even those of us who try to be careful about that sort of thing. Cloudflare is fingerprinting you when you visit sites that use their services for security, and like google, their sheer ubiquity across the web means they can effectively watch and track you wherever you go.
More and more I’ve been running into the full-page error “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” while just browsing around the web. A site is completely locked to any user who runs into this error; it’s not just a popup notification, its a blank page with nothing but the error message and the only way to “fix” it is to whitelist their fingerprinting scripts. I use extensions like uBlock Origin of course, but for more fine-tuned script blocking, also uMatrix, so it’s usually because of one of those that I get the cloudflare error. I could of course whitelist it, but I never do, I just decide that page is not worth my time. But it’s getting harder to stick with that principle as I run into it more all the time, even for sites that it never used to be an issue. It’s also part of why it keeps getting more difficult to browse the web with TOR browser.
Fuck cloudflare. They’ve wormed their way into most of the web now but they’ve managed to do it in a quiet way that usually goes unnoticed if you’re not a privacy nerd. Everyone knows google and amazon are evil and do all that they can to track anything and everything people do, but cloudflare is becoming just as insidious.
For anyone reading this who might be scratching their head as to what “tankie” means, you can find descrriptions of its history a number of places, but for all intents and purposes here on the fediverse, it simply refers to the people who have the most education in history and socioeconomics. Since reality is in direct contradiction with most of the prevailing narratives pushed by the powerful beneficiaries of the dominant systems (the most obvious of these systems being capitalism), there will always be a contingent of true believers in the dominant narrative who are shocked to find that there are others who openly reject those narratives. The former will clutch their pearls, aghast that the propaganda they’ve believed all their lives is being questioned by these… these… muckrakers! And so a pejorative is used (hence the word “tankies”) to otherize and sequester the individuals best able to challenge those narratives, individuals whose presence tends to trigger the uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance in those who aren’t yet ready or able to put their beliefs to honest questioning.
In short, if you have no problem with seeing and reading perspectives that might make you question your own perspective, then you should have no problem with the “tankies.” And as for those who would actively defederate from those vile tankie instances so as to avoid having to confront even the possibility that their own beliefs are riddled throughout with deep misconceptions, well that should tell you something about the priorities of those tankie-fearing communities.