I don’t think it’s entirely crazy talk, I can also see how this could end up makibg other countries work better together, but the path there is narrow and trump, his adherents, and puppetmasters will be doing everything in their power to stop it happening. At least, everything short of not destroying their allegences and friendships.
Cloudflare don’t hoat sites, but they do end up being a ‘man in the middle’ attack on any site they proxy for, regardless of where that site is nominally hosted. That ends up exposing all traffic on those sites to a US corporation, and ultimately the US government. Considering that Cloudflare proxy somewhere between 19% and 40% of all websites, I think that’s pretty alarming.
The US IP address is for Cloudflare, who are acting as a front end for things like DDoS protection. A lot of lemmy servers use them, which is unfortunate, but there don’t seem to be any viable European alternatives.
You can check the details with the whois command. The relevant bit when querying for one of their addresses is:
NetRange: 104.16.0.0 - 104.31.255.255
CIDR: 104.16.0.0/12
NetName: CLOUDFLARENET
NetHandle: NET-104-16-0-0-1
Parent: NET104 (NET-104-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Allocation
OriginAS: AS13335
Organization: Cloudflare, Inc. (CLOUD14)
RegDate: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2024-09-04
Comment: All Cloudflare abuse reporting can be
done via https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse
Comment: Geofeed: https://api.cloudflare.com/local-ip-ranges.csv
Ref: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/ip/104.16.0.0
That’s how it’s going to have to be until the US administration starts to act reasonably, sorts out it’s agricutural system and generally shows that it’s a beneficial member of the global community for a good long time. I think the rest of us will have moved on by then, realigning alliances and generally making things better without them. The US and Russia will fight that with every dirty trick they have, and as a global community, we’ll have to be ready for that.