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Silk – Privacy Pass Client for the Browser (github.com/cloudflare)
11 points by super256 on Jan 9, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


Call me cynical but whenever I see a corporation talk up privacy, I start to question their motivations. It's worrying that a US company that Man-In-The-Middles most of the internet (and totally does not give the NSA all your keys) is working on attestation technology.

It's already annoying to fill out CAPTCHAs and many CloudFlare-backed sites simply just block my VPN. Couple this with Microsoft forcing TPM requirements on PC vendors for Windows 11 and a future where you need a locked down MS/Google/Apple OS to even browse to most sites is getting closer and closer each day.


Couldn't download the official Windows 11 from the MS website, no matter which VPN or country or server I tried. They know them all by now. ALL. Ain't hard, of course, since all VPNs are mostly hosted at 4, 5, maybe 6 data-centers which belong to large companies. Which names are known to the ones who either deals with them or simply pays attention.


Ah, privacy extension for your browser (which, of course, gets to have the permissions to read a lot of stuff that you read in it) from the captcha company itself. A company that is de-facto middlemen collecting 80% of internet traffic (with the ability to decrypt it) and the company that also regularly performs DDoS attacks on websites which are not yet under its so called shield. Sigh. You guys, you'll be history. Vanishing before anyone can even remember what the company name was. See, how can anyone threaten you like this without you just laughing it off, or ignoring it, or simply disregarding as some garbage unsubstantiated claims? And is this a threat? No, it isn't. You won't need any outside help with the vanishing. And the employees, who craft your code, laboring under the illusion they're doing good - some of them will wake up. Some will perish. And some will turn on you.

If I didn't know what I was talking about... then maybe, maybe, you could've said it's rubbish. But I've dealt with you. You're just another parasite. Only, a slightly less sophisticated in that the pace at which you consumed the web will be amplified when that same web consumes you, eventually. Maybe this world deserves parasites, but a better class of.


Oh, btw, I've recently stumbled upon a VPN-service -- officially registered in country thousands of miles across the ocean from America, not even in Europe. That VPN was pretending to be about privacy and blablabla. The usual. Even offering static ips and port-forwarding (which is rare) and accepting BTC. But the coolest thing was how easy it was to just see through and know who they were: simple check of its IP and the associated ASN lead directly to this captcha-company name. Not to say that was a surprise - an amusement, more like - at how they put every little tentacle they can afford to use out there, to reach everybody, and especially the ones trying to avoid them.

So you keep it up. Waste the money. Even it's not yours, but taxpayers' money (which isn't unlikely). All in vain. And for what purpose? What goal? Who knows. Does it matter for us to try and guess if it ain't going to work?


Cloudflare is operating a VPN service without using its name? Are you sure it’s not someone else forwarding their traffic through Cloudflare (as common with many v2ray providers)


Pretty sure, because the static ip-addresses were offered only for the servers located in very specific countries and particular locations - namely in the US & Canada. And, "coincidentally", that's were the ip-address of their website was.

In addition, they were very adamant about advertising how a static-ip address would relieve you, the customer, of the pains of captchas and thus be whitelisted.




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