What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a company that provides a variety of internet services to make websites faster and more secure. Here are some of the key things they do:
Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN stores copies of a website across a network of servers around the world. This means that visitors to the site can be served content from the server that's closest to them, which can make the site load faster.
Security: Cloudflare offers a variety of security services, including protection against DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service attacks) and malware.It protects your website from SQL injection, and comment spam
In short, Cloudflare helps websites run faster, be more secure, and be more reliable.
According to W3Techs, 80.7% of all websites use CDN that rely on Cloudflare. According to Meta, 80.5% of websites that use a reverse proxy service use Cloudflare.
Some of the most popular sites in the world that use Cloudflare include:
Medium, Soundcloud, Apache, Nytimes, Nih, Mozilla, Vimeo, and Netflix.
So now you understand the role of cloud fare on the internet.
What does CloudFlare is doing with lava lamps?
what are lava lamps?
A lava lamp is a decorative lamp with a glass vessel that contains a colored wax mixture and a clear or translucent liquid. When the lamp is turned on, the heat from the incandescent light bulb in the base melts the wax and causes it to move randomly in the liquid, creating the appearance of lava.
How does Cloudflare secure the internet?
Random numbers are crucial for encryption, which is the process of scrambling data so that only authorized users can access it. CloudFlare protects websites and web services by acting as a gatekeeper in front of them. When you visit a website, the connection between your web browser and the website is encrypted using a padlock. This encryption is what keeps your data safe from hackers.
So what is the point of using Lava lamps here?
Computers are not naturally good at generating random numbers. Random numbers are unpredictable, and computers are designed to be predictable. To get around this, CloudFlare uses lava lamps. The video of the lava lamp is unpredictable because of the constantly changing flow of the lava. CloudFlare captures this video and uses it to generate random numbers. These random numbers are then used to create keys that encrypt the traffic that flows through CloudFlare's network.
In addition to lava lamps, CloudFlare also uses other sources of randomness, including a chaotic pendulum in their London office and a radioactive source in their Singapore office. The chaotic pendulum is made of three pieces that move unpredictably, and the radioactive source emits random particles. The video of these sources is also used to generate random numbers.
CloudFlare is not the first company to use lava lamps for randomness. A company called Silicon Graphics patented the idea in 1996, but the patent only lasted a couple of years. There are other, less flashy ways to generate random numbers, but lava lamps are a fun and effective way to do it.
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