I’m sure we didn’t. We just needed a lot of people to work underground in the coal mines and in the heavy industry, steel etc. And those were labor intensive jobs, so they needed to attract a lot of workforce. In a coordinated effort, sure. But out of economic motivation. These people ended up working hard jobs alongside each other. And they built and shaped the region. Made it rich. And I got born into that kind if place. With some history to it and a bit less ethnic uniform population. But there’s no evidence they read some old scripture from nomadic people and thought yes, that what we need to enforce… Instead people found out there’s a lot of coal underneath their feet. And they found out the more they dig up and sell to other people, the more wealth they get. The workers wanted to have a roof over their heads and something to eat for themselves and their families. I think that’s very straightforward, and my ancestors were clever enough to figure out how trade works, on their own. I’m not aware of any evidence of a different origin story for my region. Sure. Maybe we didn’t invent the word for it. But the motivation and decisions of the feudal lords, company owners and employers, and the government is well documented.
And concerning America: Isn’t that a melting pot because all the Europeans went there? In order to seek opportunity, or not to die of famine? And some Africans got there as well and we all know how much say they had in that process? I mean obviously North America is a melting pot. Otherwise we’d find Native Americans there and Aboriginal Canadians, not a load of people with European decent. But that doesn’t have anything to do with 1965?
I feel Anti-DDOS and Cloudflare as a web application firewall has traditionally been a lot of snake-oil as well. Sure there’s applications for it. Especially for the paid plans with all the enterprise functions. And all the way at the other end of the spectrum, where it serves as a means to circumvent NAT and replace DynDNS. But there’s a lot in-between where I (personally) don’t think it’s needed in any way. Especially before AI.
From my own experience, personal blogs, websites of your local club, church, random smaller projects, small businesses… rarely need professional DDoS protection. I’ve been fine hotsing it myself for decades now. And I’m not sure if people know what they’re paying with. I mean everytime we get a Cloudflare hiccup (or AWS…) we can see how the internet has become very centralised. Half of it just goes down for an hour or so, because we all rely on the same few, big tech services. And if you’re terminating SSL there, or use it to look inside of the packets to prevent attacks, you’re giving away all information about you and your audience/customers. They don’t just get all metadata, but also read all the transferred content/data.
It all changed a bit with the AI crawlers. We definitely need countermeasures these days. I’m still fine without Anubis or Cloudflare. I block their IP ranges and that seems to do most of the job. I think we need to pay a bit more attention to what’s really happening. Which tools we have, instead of always going with the market leader with the biggest marketing budget. Which problems we’re faced with in the first place and what tools are effective. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution. And you can’t just roll out random things without analyzing the situation properly. Maybe the correct answer is Cloudflare, but there’s also other way less intrusive and very effective means available. And maybe you’re not even the target of script kiddies or annoyed users. And maybe your your convoluted Wordpress setup isn’t even safe with the standard web application firewall in front.
Anubis is an entirely different story. It’s okay concerning privacy and centralisation. It doesn’t come without downsides, though. I personally hate if that thing pops up instead of the page I requested. I don’t like how JavaScript is mandatory now to do anything on the web. And certain kinds of crawler protection contribute to the situation how we can’t google anything anymore. With all the people locking down everything and constructing walled gardens, the internet becomes way less useful and almost impossible to navigate. That’s all direct consequences of how we decide to do things.