Your sign-up form is a weapon | Bytemash

How bots used our sign-up and forgot password pages to bomb real people's inboxes, and what we did to stop it. A practical guide to subscription bombing for founders and developers who think CAPTCHA is an "I'll do it later" task.

It's a problem, but I really dislike the solution. Putting a website with known security issues behind Cloudflare's Turnstile is comparable to enforcing code signing—works until it doesn't, and in the meantime, helps centralize power around a single legal entitiy while pissing legitimate users off.

The Internet was carefully designed to withstand a nuclear war and this approach, being adopted en masse, is slowly turning it into a shadow of its former self. And despite the us-east1 and multiple Cloudflare outages of last year, we continue to stay blind to this or even rationalize it as a good thing, because that way if we're down, then so are our competitors...

Honestly I really like CloudFlare as a business. There's no vendor lock-in, just a genuine good product.

If they turn around later and do something evil, literally all I need to do is change the nameserver to a competitor and the users of my website won't even notice.