The 16‑kilobyte curtain. How Russia’s new data‑capping censorship is throttling Cloudflare
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A new form of state-level internet filtering that restricts data flow is disrupting access to large portions of the global web for Russian citizens. Cloudflare, the world leader in DDoS protection and high-traffic load management, is being targeted by these new data caps, which appear designed to push users toward Russian-controlled services. Meanwhile, the move leaves Russian businesses dangerously exposed.
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A new form of state-level internet filtering that restricts data flow is disrupting access to large portions of the global web for Russian citizens. Cloudflare, the world leader in DDoS protection and high-traffic load management, is being targeted by these new data caps, which appear designed to push users toward Russian-controlled services. Meanwhile, the move leaves Russian businesses dangerously exposed.
According to technical experts, internet service providers across the country have begun implementing a rule that limits data transfers from sites using Cloudflare to just the first 16 kilobytes. This technique is relatively subtle but effective: very lightweight, basic websites can still load, creating a façade of normal internet function, while modern, media-rich sites are effectively broken.
16 KB per website? What part of the normal internet is that small? What part of the indie web is that small?
e.g. look at the smallest sites on https://512kb.club/
Or is this just 16kb per request, which would make more sense with the following explanation:
Analysts report that similar throttling is also being applied to other major western hosting providers popular with Russian users, including Germany’s Hetzner and the US-headquartered DigitalOcean... [they] are widely used by Russians to host private VPN servers, which allow them to bypass the Kremlin’s ever-widening blocklists.
AFAIK, VPNs maintain a long-standing connection that would definitely use more than 16kb at a time.
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A new form of state-level internet filtering that restricts data flow is disrupting access to large portions of the global web for Russian citizens. Cloudflare, the world leader in DDoS protection and high-traffic load management, is being targeted by these new data caps, which appear designed to push users toward Russian-controlled services. Meanwhile, the move leaves Russian businesses dangerously exposed.
Its an endless arms race. Next will be chunking vpns that chunk requests down to 16kb packets and reassemble on the other end. There is nothing stopping a custom protocol from working around this limitation, in a safe secure manner.
Just a matter of time.
