Cloudflare has mostly ditched third party security tools, suggests not trying that at home

Cloudflare has used AI to automate processing of incoming reports to its bug bounty program for $58 a month using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model and chose it partly because using the AI company’s security-specific Mythos model would burn through around $200,000 a month to do the same job. The company’s chief security officer ( …

[Bebu sa Ware]

With or For ?

> vendors will instead place forward-deployed engineers at their clients and charge them with “constantly making software that works for you.”

"Charge them for" seems more likely as "them" would normally refer to "their clients." (Comma after "them" perhaps.)

All C suite speak I suppose - chaining buzzwords ("forward-deployed") and slogans ("constantly making software that works for you") together in semilucid utterances.

I imagine what was meant was "vendors will instead deploy engineers at their clients' locations where they will continually create software that works for the client."

The original by using a slogan, gratuitously introduces an extraneous third party in the second person ("you") whereas also referring to the clients in the second person would be clearer and be in accord with the slogan. viz just substituting "at their clients" with "at your location" would be sufficient.

IT has always produced more bollocks than a prairie oyster farm but AI has caused a Spaffapocalyptic tsunami of codswallop.

[GoneFission]

Re: With or For ?

It's also kind of hilarious in that it evokes the image of a dedicated, highly motivated software engineer on-site building out tools and integrations just for your fancy, special, one-of-a-kind company as well as any other demands and ideas your suits can dream up. It's selling customers the closest thing to "getting Bill from Microsoft on the phone to fix this ASAP!!!".

In reality it's really just the same team of off-site over-allocated, under-resourced software developers who used to be able to work on new features and improvements in a semblance of peace, but now have to also spend hours upon hours answering phone calls and zero-notice meeting requests from every suit-wearing client that sales manages to rope into signing on the dotted line. Why pay for customer support or client relations if you can just tack it onto the developers' job description at no extra cost?

[MatthewSt]

Re: With or For ?

Charge: entrust (someone) with a task as a duty or responsibility

"Them" refers to the engineers. It's ambiguous, but not incorrect

[retiredFool]

I expect many will start poisoning the web

as a result of AI scraping. If an AI sees

for(i=0; i<10; i--)

{

do something even less clever

}

often enough, will it start mimicking it?

I also thought the line about how cloudflare is soo benevolent they went to the extra expense of ssl. I mean WTF, an extra micro-cent per connection? Possibly even a pico-cent. Yeah they love us.

[Blazde]

Re: I expect many will start poisoning the web

cloudflare is soo benevolent they went to the extra expense of ssl. I mean WTF, an extra micro-cent per connection? Possibly even a pico-cent. Yeah they love us.

They claim it was expensive because it cannibalised their product differentiation. It applied to all free accounts whereas previously SSL was a feature some customers were willing to pay more for.

But of course it was just a good forward-looking business strategy. An early recognition of what would quickly become be the norm, a differentiation compared to rivals, and a decision that underpinned their marketing for years afterwards, apparently still today. I would expect it made them a lot of money.

The marketing probably best illustrated by their lavalamp wall gimmik and similar entropy sources that play some small role in seeding SSL keys (that they stole from SGI - the original being a genuinely useful source of randomness, the current ones being fun and hopefully not harmful).

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

It is the apocolypse

AI has finally replaced McAfee ?

Surely a sign of the end time

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if they could stop crapping on the internet by frequently blocking VPNs.

[Anonymous Coward]

It’s almost like they are offering it as a service….

[Kevin McMurtrie]

And if they could stop crapping on the Internet by being every criminal organization's favorite tool for protecting fake stores from consequences.