> I would be pretty upset if I implemented Cloudflare and it started to inadvertently hurt my sales figures.
The problem is that all these Cloudflare forensics-based throttling and blocking efforts don't hurt sales figures.
The number of legitimate users running Arc is a rounding error. Arc browser users often come to Cloudflare without third-party tracking and without cookies, which is weird and therefore suspicious - you look an awful lot like a freshly instantiated headless browser, in contrast to the vast majority of legitimate users who are carrying around a ton of tracking data. And by blocking cookies and ads, you wouldn't even be attributable in most of the stats if they did let you in.
It would be like kicking anyone wearing dark sunglasses out of a physical store: sure, burglars are likely to want to hide their eyes. Retail shrink is something like 1.5% of inventory, while blind users are <0.5% of the population. It would violate the ADA (and basic ethics) to prohibit out all blind shoppers, so in the real world we've decided that it's not legal to discriminate on this basis even if it would be a net positive for your financials.
The web is a nearly unregulated open ocean, Cloudflare can effectively block anyone for any reason and they don't have much incentive to show compassion to legitimate users that end up as bycatch in their trawl nets.
Something tells me that if you asked the store owner that the poster tried to give money to, they'd be furious at cloudflare for stopping the transaction.
It is difficult to gauge the size of the Cloudflare effect.. if the usage statistics the site owner is collecting.. are also not collected for those undesirables.
The number of legitimate users on "not chrome, edge, safari, or firefox" is about 10% of the browser market. I don't know about you, but if I'm running a shop, and the whole point of my website is to make sales, but my front door is preventing 10% of those sales? That door is getting replaced.
You don't think the people actually running the shops, whose income depends on the shop, have thought of that and thus there exists a downside that more than offsets the upside?
The people running the shops aren't the people making the decision - Cloudflare is. The shop's only real decision is "use Cloudflare" or "die to all the attacks Cloudflare exists to prevent"
Then you get burglars in your shop instead of legitimate customers.
User Agents look the way they do because this is a recurring issue.
A browser without network effects gets blocked, they look for a way to bypass the blocking, then they become mainstream and now the de-facto UA is larger than before.
Why would you assume that the 10% of non standard browsers are going to buy anything?
Demographic is important here. If I was running a shop that sold software for Linux users, sure. If I'm running a store that sells pretty much anything else? I'm not caring.
Why would you expect people using non-standard browsers don't buy things? Presumably they still eat food, wear clothing, and enjoy hobbies.
I'd think that a non-standard browser also strongly suggests that they're a financially-comfortable middle-class individual, and quite possibly a whale with FAANG income.
Sure. If there was another place to buy a better door at. But if that door manufacturer's the only one that makes doors, if the door installer and door technicians all tell you that they can't or won't make another door for you, then you just deal. Maybe crank up the prices a bit to try to mitigate your 10% shortfalls.
The place where a business looks at that problem and sees money being left on the table that it can't live without and that it has no other way of making up for... that is a very narrow stretch, and only very marginal businesses live there.
I'm not expert on this, but it appears that the Dept of Justice rolls DEI and A into one DEIA, which makes some sort of sense since any litigation would be similar. Not sure about other federal agencies
Did you read the executive order? It's not the left calling it DEIA. Its Trump.
> Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.
Because it's a pretty simple legal maneuver to say "no this EO isn't requiring us to shut down this program because we call it 'DEIA' instead of 'DEI' so it's different."
The EO is using the language of the programs to ensure that they're shut down.
Accessibility has been around forever. One of the major proponents of it was a Republican nominee for President. It has broad bipartisan support.
DEI has been around for 45 minutes and is racism disguised as anti-racism.
A sibling comment quoted it as well but the relevant thing is here:
> Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.
IMO this is a crystal clear example of why you don't lump unrelated programs in together. You lump accessibility with DEI because accessibility is largely favored and DEI is largely not. Their hands are likely tied by the text of this EO because the previous administration didn't keep DEI separate from accessibility. As I stated elsewhere accessibility is a decades-old cause while DEI has been around barely the past couple years in government circles and wider press.
If the previous administration had left them separated and stopped hamfisting DEI into DEIA I don't think this OE would have mentioned accessibility at all. But since it does, if you're a federal employee you don't really have a choice unless you want to try to make the argument that accessibility on its own is not DEIA and therefore it can stay but that's likely a losing battle.
Trump signed the order like that. If he wanted to change the order, he would have written it differently.
In any case, President Elon is pissed at accessibility folks harassing him over Twitter firings (including the firing of Twitters accessibility teams). This is stuff well within their politics and is 100% what they want.
It's not irrelevant because as I said earlier if you run a "DEIA" office and an EO says to dismantle DEI, it's a pretty easy legal maneuver to at least argue that they're different and that you don't need to shut the DEI stuff down because your office does other things too and they're all interrelated. Not saying it would work but this cuts it off at the pass. "DEIA" is a Democratic invention and that language is necessary to shut down DEI.
> President Elon
Oh I'm sorry I was under the mistaken impression you were trying to have a good faith discussion about the merits of what's happening.
The federal government is comprised of millions of unelected bureaucrats (I don't mean that pejoratively that's literally what they are). There is nothing particularly earth shattering about what Elon is doing. He's given a task by the president and he's carrying it out, which is what every single unelected executive branch employee does at one level or another.
I can find you literally hundreds of posts from people insisting that ADA is nothing but a small-business-killing shakedown, that it's makework for lawyers, that it's doing nothing to help the disabled, and that it's just as bad if not worse than DEI. What makes your claim better than theirs?
It's obviously doing something for the disabled. Reserved disabled parking spots and wheelchair-accessible building entrances are requirements of the ADA. It seems reasonable to think it "improves people's lives". A whole bunch of contrary opinions are not necessarily reasons for disagreement as much as they are simply disagreement.
I've no problem with the govt making sure that disabled people get accommodation so they can participate in civic life. I do have a problem with the govt requiring private individuals to pay for it, "handle the load", etc. even engaged in public accommodation: because it's obvious that a 20,000 sq ft publicly trade Delaware class C corp retailer has room for ramps and generous allocations of space around swinging doors, bathrooms etc. But if I rent a 500 sq foot postage stamp shop in NYC to open my dream counter service juice store which is a step up from the sidewalk, it's just too much of a burden for a new business of which 9 out of 10 fail anyway. You think juice store owners have anything against disabled people? they don't.
We all need to pay for it, not pass feel good legislation that shoves it down the throats of sole proprieter LLCs.
I’ve never seen an actually disabled person use one. They’re always occupied by cars with placards but the people are pretty clearly abled or able enough to walk across the parking lot.
the first link had one comment in support of the move, and a single, dissenting (yet reasonable) reply.2nd article had no comments whatsoever. Remember, the claim I'm responding to was "literally hundreds of posts from people insisting that ADA is nothing but a small-business-killing shakedown, that it's makework for lawyers, that it's doing nothing to help the disabled"
The problem is that all these Cloudflare forensics-based throttling and blocking efforts don't hurt sales figures.
The number of legitimate users running Arc is a rounding error. Arc browser users often come to Cloudflare without third-party tracking and without cookies, which is weird and therefore suspicious - you look an awful lot like a freshly instantiated headless browser, in contrast to the vast majority of legitimate users who are carrying around a ton of tracking data. And by blocking cookies and ads, you wouldn't even be attributable in most of the stats if they did let you in.
It would be like kicking anyone wearing dark sunglasses out of a physical store: sure, burglars are likely to want to hide their eyes. Retail shrink is something like 1.5% of inventory, while blind users are <0.5% of the population. It would violate the ADA (and basic ethics) to prohibit out all blind shoppers, so in the real world we've decided that it's not legal to discriminate on this basis even if it would be a net positive for your financials.
The web is a nearly unregulated open ocean, Cloudflare can effectively block anyone for any reason and they don't have much incentive to show compassion to legitimate users that end up as bycatch in their trawl nets.