Given the recent threats from Cloudflare against Italy and siding with Vance, Musk and co., this is definitely not a far-fetched reality. Big Tech has demonstrated which side they are going with.
I wasn't referring to the state censorship request, but rather to the 'flocking' to self-proclaimed champions of free speech in the current Trump administrations as a cry for help.
I personally find that the fact that a private company compels a list of IPs and domains that they want blocked to get blocked more alarming than that.
When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.
> When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.
Mafia has a vested interest in broadcast rights of football matches in Spain?
Spain blocks Cloudflare because the football league La Liga has a court order that allows them to point to IP ranges that are hosting/fronting live streams of football matches, and get ISPs to block access to those ranges.
If the sports league is influential enough to have a standing court order to be able to unilaterally block IP ranges for the entire country, I'd imagine that organized crime might take an interest. I have no idea if it's the case but when something already seems to have an outsized influence it wouldn't be crazy to imagine that others interested in that power would also take an interest.
Moreover, I think the point of the parent comment is that they're blocking quite a bit more than just football games. It sounds like the claim is that the blocking is willfully broad because of other influences, not necessarily the the purported more narrow intent is necessarily from those influences.
More than mafia, ex-francoists oligarchs. And these could be stomped down tomorrow from CF by cancelling all the tangent services for those, even for Spanish banks and related industries (tourist and construction avoiding both attacks and serious disbalancing harms). The Ibex 35 would near collapse overnight and Tebas being kicked out from their own people.
Not OP but, oh common. This entire thing IS political. Big Tech IS in bed with the authoritarian US apparatus, they have been very transparent about it. What are you expecting to gain from your message? Pedantry points?
OP, not a bot. CF definitely chose to be political in the message, so regardless of what Italy did or who is right and wrong, posting that message is just a message that reliance on CF can just be a bad idea long-term.
There were strong signals from the CF CEO that they align with the Trump administration.
They threatened to pull the plug on all Italian customers.
This is relevant to this conversation: CF recently acted in a way that makes some people think it might cut its services to people for political reasons.
I don't find your comment particularly well articulated or continaing anything besides name calling (the "bot farming"). Can you articulate your opinion on the matter?
Most likely not, this is more of a way to retire with money earned from software development and spend time "on business" that isn't really financially viable.
Kudos to author for going this path, but it takes a lot of resources to be able to make a move like this, which is not really an option for a large majority of population.
I am just wondering would stacking up batteries, charging them off-peak and using/selling back during peak usage be as good as this, or even better? Seems like this shouldn't be a viable scenario, but given the prices and idle capacity, it seems just investing in batteries and charging them at night, to be used/sold to the grid during the day would be as good as a solar installation.
We had an expensive solar install due to restrictions around our roof, so the solar would typically have been cheaper.
Another consideration is that battery installations in the UK are charged at 20% VAT, but if they're installed as part of a solar installation, they're charged at 0% VAT. So even if your main interest is in getting the batteries, a small solar install might make sense because of the savings.
The author pays £0.07/kWh off peak, but can export at £0.15/kWh. The author paid ~£7500 per powerwall which has ~13.5kWh capacity. Assuming full charge/discharge every night, you can make ~£1.08 per day, which works out to about 19 years to pay back.
Utilities normally consider disincentivizing this type of behavior from residential customers as one of the factors when setting their export pricing.
You can usually save more by generating solar locally and using it to power the home and charge the battery, then discharging the battery during peak hours (usually around and just after sunset) to earn the most. Obviously higher upfront capex.
Pure grid cycling is also frowned on by some utilities.
Octopus in the UK has tariffs where it basically takes over your system (ie the batteries in particular) and subsumes them into its wider activities, eg:
>it seems just investing in batteries and charging
I mean a lot of companies already do this with megawatt/gigawatt installations.
The key is peaking and grid stabilization. If you're a huge provider you can pay for all your batteries in a year or two if there is some large grid emergency and rates skyrocket.
If you're a non-commercial user, it's going to be hard because the provider rates you pay/get paid are much more likely to be fixed at a pretty low rate.
We are "just fine" with blurry details, on some level... but a lot of processing a movie holistically comes from that level of detail being present. Even if few people walking out of the theater could put their finger on why the world felt vibrant, it'll come down to the fact those details were there.
So much of movie making is like that. No normal person comes out of a theater saying "wow, the color grading on that movie really helped the drive the main themes along, I particularly appreciated the way it was used to amplify the alienation the main character felt at being betrayed by his life-long friend, and the lighting in that scene really sent that point home". That's all film nerd stuff. But it's the lighting, the color grading, the camera shots, all this subtle stuff that the casual consumer will never cite as their reason for liking or disliking the movie that results in the feelings that were experienced.
They aren't necessary. People still connect with the original Snow White, and while it may have been an absolute technical breakthrough masterstroke for the time, by modern standards it is simple. But used well the details we can muster for a modern production can still go into the general tone of the film; compare the two next to each other while looking for this effect and you may be able to "feel" what I'm talking about.
Fair enough, I agree with the sentiment, especially about the lighting, colour grading, shots and similar details that form the overall "feel" of the movie.
With my comment I was referring to some things that end up being indistinguishable even if insane number of hours were put into it being photorealistic. For example, take a shot where background is heavily blurred. Maybe those assets took a lot to render, compute, used fancy hair simulations and had a lot of details, but they were very far in the distance and camera choice made them indistinguishable from a static background. This is what I am wondering - where is the balance of not doing things that are bound to not be noticed by anyone.
I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses going on with our memories of SD TV, too. A decade or so ago I plugged an old PS2 into my 50" plasma TV (which I bought just after plasma TVs got suddenly cheap :D ) and then spent a good 10-15 minutes trying to find a setting to increase the resolution before realising that, no, that's just how things looked back then, except now it's magnified so it's really blurry.
The changes in Tahoe do not fall under the bucket of "no matter how small". We have grown to accept many small, but very annoying changes, starting from disappearing scrollbars to not showing full URL in Safari, to name a few, which were all driven by smaller touchscreens on iPhone/iPad, but with Tahoe things became quite extreme.
I had respect for Cloudflare in the past, but the CEO is obviously an idiot praising Vance's and Elon's actions. Talking about free speech on X, is quite hypocritical.
This is just a sign that top management of Cloudflare cannot be trusted with anything of importance, especially if you are not in bed with Vance/Musk & co.
I read the tweet twice and I don’t see any mention of free speech. What he’s describing, when you look past the rhetoric, sounds ridiculous: a single medium sized country is demanding power to institute global blocks of content on the internet? If that’s an accurate description, that’s deeply concerning for the long term viability of the internet.
"While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration" and "in this case @ElonMusk is right" are not how you talk about beacons.
Yes, the Administration who is famously so pro Free-Speech, that they intimidate and prosecute senators, when they make a video about "PSA: You can refuse illegal orders"
I cannot believe this is the first time that Cloudflare has been confronted by a local government which asked to perform "global" filtering of content. It is clear for anyone who has worked with bureaucrats that their "global" means "within our jurisdiction". It is extremely weird that he feels emboldened to publicly lash out like this and pull in people who are extremely unpopular in Europe.
You keep saying this, but 'global' has never meant 'in my jurisdiction' in any conversation or document I've ever read. What additional information can you provide the confirms your interpretation is correct?
He actually praised Vance role as a defender of democratic values, but Vance is known to deny Greenlands souvereignity, ready to capitulate to a russian dictator, indifference to police killing a protester recently, etc.
His idea of free speech does not include critical reporting. The wider US government is trying to shut down the BBC with a lawsuit or has public officials threaten individual journalists to their face, basically nothing is too large or too small.
> He actually praised Vance role as a defender of democratic values, but Vance is known to deny Greenlands souvereignity, ready to capitulate to a russian dictator, indifference to police killing a protester recently, etc.
Horrible stuff. I agree. His statement about free speech in the EU, when removed from him as a person, is still true. Progressive media sources agree [1]. If both aisles, as well as European free speech activists, think something is going horribly wrong in Europe, we should listen.
In Spain the LaLiga CEO, Tebas (Soccer association, they are legally fighting against Cloudflare and doing MITM's everwhere) isn't very different in that case (Francoist far right supporter).
Oof, Cloudflare has been one of the most interesting tech companies for me, and one I would have worked for in a heartbeat. But the MAGA pandering in this tweet is quite disappointing. I get it, running a large business in the US these days requires a certain amount of bootlicking, but still. And I say this while generally agreeing with Matthew's stance.
The "haters" who long ago have warned about the risk of Cloudflare MITM'ing global website traffic have been proven right. In the end, Cloudflare is another mass surveillance tool next to Meta/Google/Apple which will be weaponized in the interests of the current US administration.
I hope people go take a look at previous statements by MP/JGC (to be fair, no longer affiliated) with this in mind - I have always found them to be just as degrading and whiny as this announcement reads.
Every time any of these CEOs see even the mildest of pushback, the mask just fully falls off and you see them immediately run to the worst people on the planet.
I feel for his chief legal counsel who must be crying in their office right now. In the US, courts have been deactivated for MAGA-aligned rich people, but Cloudflare CEO is so stupid to assume that the same has happened in Italy. The arrogance and ignorance is astounding.
Nobody gets to these positions unless they're a complete sociopath who've long lost touch with reality. Just listen to anything thiel, musk, altman, vance and other degenerates have to say, some animals display more humanity than these golems
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