this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
449 points (99.3% liked)

Programming

17374 readers
211 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains

Source of this is from Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare posted at 11:34 Jul 9,2023. It was posted to his twitter (@eastdakota). Not linking to twitter bc don't want a deadlink next time twitter makes API changes. And not to drive traffic to twitter :D

Edit: July 11th update, arstechnica published a detailed explanation

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-is-tanking-amid-threads-surging-popularity-analysts-say/

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] varsock@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I dont know to what capacity twitter uses cloudflare but cloudflare is rather ubiquitous. Even if twitter didn't have services with cloudflare, when a user's device resolves the domain name "twitter.com" to an IP address, it might go through Cloudflare's DNS servers. And givien the ubiquity of Cloudflare DNS, this is likely frequently. By monitoring the DNS queries for Twitter.com, Cloudflare can estimate the traffic volume by analyzing the number and frequency of requests received.

I don't know why cloudflare's CEO would do that or where he keeps his huge steel balls, but today I learned I can mine Cloudflare's internet usage data. And I might have found a new hobby!

Cloudflare Radar has an API that gives access to Cloudflare’s data on global Internet traffic..

Radar’s API is free, allowing academics, data sleuths and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet usage across the globe.