Cloudflare 2024: Global Traffic Up, Google Still King, US Churning Out Bots (theregister.com) 11
Cloudflare's 2024 internet traffic report highlights a 17.2% global increase in traffic, with Google maintaining its position as the most visited service and the U.S. responsible for 34.6% of bot traffic. The Register reports: One surprise (or perhaps not) is that IPv6 traffic is actually down as a percentage of the packets that passed through Cloudflare's network. It says that 28.5 percent of global traffic was IPv6 during 2024, whereas last year's report put this figure at 33.75 percent. The company also reveals that a fifth of all TCP connections (20.7 percent) are unexpectedly terminated before any useful data can be exchanged. Causes of this could vary from DoS attacks, quirky client behavior, or a network interrupting a connection to filter content.
Coudflare says about half of these incidents were connections closed "Post SYN" -- after its server has received a client's SYN packet, but before a subsequent acknowledgement (ACK) or any useful data. These can be attributed to DoS attacks or internet scanning, while Post-ACK or Post-PSH anomalies are more often associated with connection tampering activity such as filtering, especially if they occur at high rates in specific networks. Mobile device traffic accounted for about 41.3 percent of the total, which is roughly the same as last year. This is largely split between the Apple and Android ecosystems, with iOS on almost a third and Android accounting for two-thirds. [...]
Google's Chrome appears to be the most popular browser by far, accounting for 65.8 percent of all requests during 2024. Just 15.5 percent came from Apple's Safari browser, which leads the way on iOS devices, naturally. Microsoft's Edge accounted for 6.9 percent of browsing, while Mozilla Firefox stood at 4 percent. For search engines, Google also claimed the top spot, with a greater than 88 percent share of all search traffic that passed through Cloudflare. Yandex and Baidu were next with 3.1 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, while Bing trailed with 2.6 percent. DuckDuckGo accounted for 0.9 percent of searches. You can read Cloudflare's full Year in Review here.
Coudflare says about half of these incidents were connections closed "Post SYN" -- after its server has received a client's SYN packet, but before a subsequent acknowledgement (ACK) or any useful data. These can be attributed to DoS attacks or internet scanning, while Post-ACK or Post-PSH anomalies are more often associated with connection tampering activity such as filtering, especially if they occur at high rates in specific networks. Mobile device traffic accounted for about 41.3 percent of the total, which is roughly the same as last year. This is largely split between the Apple and Android ecosystems, with iOS on almost a third and Android accounting for two-thirds. [...]
Google's Chrome appears to be the most popular browser by far, accounting for 65.8 percent of all requests during 2024. Just 15.5 percent came from Apple's Safari browser, which leads the way on iOS devices, naturally. Microsoft's Edge accounted for 6.9 percent of browsing, while Mozilla Firefox stood at 4 percent. For search engines, Google also claimed the top spot, with a greater than 88 percent share of all search traffic that passed through Cloudflare. Yandex and Baidu were next with 3.1 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, while Bing trailed with 2.6 percent. DuckDuckGo accounted for 0.9 percent of searches. You can read Cloudflare's full Year in Review here.
They forgot (Score:2)
CloudFlare largest global internet surveillance system in the world.
Remember kids: if you do anything on the internet, CloudFlare knows about it. And if they don't like you, no internet for you!
Re:They forgot (Score:4, Insightful)
They're already unelected internet sheriffs. (Score:3)
They will outright block browser versions or operating systems they don't like for 'security' and not allow legitimate connections.
Re: (Score:2)
If you would actually *use* their service you would know that CF does not block much unless you specifically configure them to do so.
That's the beaut of their service, they allow you to control who can visit your domains and who cannot.
They're not without blame, but I would actually consider them to be sensible good guys in this snake pit that we call the web.
All of the internet has been scooped up (Score:2)
IPv6 (Score:2)
My ISP, despite advertising IPv6 on their web site, disabled IPv6 for the entire city this summer and has yet to turn it back on. Myself and several other customers have filed several complaints with no resolve.
IPv6 is a shitshow by ISPs, and as customers, what resolve do we have!?
Right now, I'm looking at bulk IP transit, because thankfully I'm in the middle of downtown, but outside of this core area which is also littered with data centers, normal users have no alternatives.
Agreed, though... (Score:2)
I'm on Xfinity and was surprised how poorly IPv6 all works. Experimented a few times trying to enable it and get tests from Google searches to agree everything was fine. Never happened.
Saw an opinion piece about the IPv6 transition and it basically diagnosed the situation as 'ipv4 is good enough, so nobody is upgrading to v6'. We made enough workarounds, and enough stuff would break at a forced transition, that it likely won't happen on it's own.
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In case it
What Goes Around Comes Around (Score:1)
How do you identify bot traffic? (Score:2)
Can home routers be set up to watch for typical bot traffic? Or modems? Yes it'd be more work for them (making them slower and more expensive), but that seems a logical place to insert a tool like this... at the border.
Or what about ISP's periodically informing users they have malicious devices on their network.
Assuming we can't prevent issues like this in general, then we need a process that'll catch known bad situations. Like virus scanning, but for network traffic. And without a personal cost nobody