The voice of this article reminds me strongly of "you won't believe what happened next" crappy click-bait articles. I'm not sure why exactly but I think it has something to do with the weird tense it is written in.
The author probably meant 1st Amendment, but Zimmerman and the EFF also relied on 5th Amendment arguments. See, e.g., https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/gsulr/vol13/iss2/14/. While the 1995 press release from the EFF (https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/04/21-42) specifically mentions only the First Amendment directly, if you look at the list of arguments under "More specifically, the current export control process:", about half of them are Fifth Amendment or Fifth Amendment-adjacent defenses.
Well, yeah, that's what it says. But how exactly is "checking my browser" for 30 seconds or more (I gave up on it after that) supposed to prevent a DDOS attack?
It's just free advertisement for CloudFlare. They offer "free" DDoS protection to sites, and use this as a form of advertising too by showing this to any visitor that browses a "cloudflare protected" site that use some kind of improved privacy settings or privacy oriented browser extension on their browser. (They are the equivalent of the old "your xxx antivirus is protecting" you popups). The better the privacy settings, the more it will make you go through what is now infamous as the "Captcha hell".
(Ofcourse, they kindly offer you a "solution" to avoid this nagging - the Cloudflare Privacy Pass. Install the browser extension and sacrifice your privacy, and CloudFlare will not nag you).
I am from India, where many unsecure computers are often infected with malware, and often part of large bot networks. Thus, many indian IPs are already in blacklists or treated suspiciously. So I see this a lot. So much, that I just despise CloudFlare now (recently even recommended Netlify over Cloudflare to a client to have my petty revenge over them).
Seems likely that some of the details are wrong, too. I think it would have been a 1st amendment issue, not 5th. Also, I doubt the government backed off because they were worried he would become a martyr. Seems more likely that they knew they would lose.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 43.5 ms ] threadhttps://web.archive.org/web/20210517082014/https://www.micha...
WTF? What exactly is it about my browser that you want to check? And why is it taking so long?
(Ofcourse, they kindly offer you a "solution" to avoid this nagging - the Cloudflare Privacy Pass. Install the browser extension and sacrifice your privacy, and CloudFlare will not nag you).
I am from India, where many unsecure computers are often infected with malware, and often part of large bot networks. Thus, many indian IPs are already in blacklists or treated suspiciously. So I see this a lot. So much, that I just despise CloudFlare now (recently even recommended Netlify over Cloudflare to a client to have my petty revenge over them).