tech solutionism

[deborah]

Tech people really love going off into a corner and building some app to solve a social problem, but where they've misidentified the problem and haven't talked to domain experts to find out what would actually help.

Anyway something I'd love to see from the infosec and tech exec community is a good list of alternatives to Cloudflare for different use cases. Something like:

Do you need:

DDOS protection?

Use Company A

Speed?

Use Company B

A company that will protect you when trolls issue tons of false complaints against you for illegal activity, but that won’t protect sites that are actual festering pits of TOS-violating, dangerous, violently racist and transphobic, and illegal activity, and agrees with you that “allows fan fiction of underage characters” isn’t illegal?

Use Company C

Virtual private networks at scale?

Use Company D

Localization for compliance?

Use company E

Especially for smaller sites *cough cough* oh hai dreamwidth that are frequent targets of bored assholes but don't have a CISO or a big budget IT staff to research alternatives, it would be nice to provide that information. Much more useful than someone making one more app that will revolutionize! your! workflow! through the magic of making an all-React, blockchain-powered, data-harvesting, SaaS re-implementation of some native desktop tool.

(Yes, this is an acknowledgement that finding a company that will do the third one is hard. As Dreamwidth knows from Adventures In Keeping A Credit Card Processor.)