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:
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
whoiscommand. 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/104.16.0.0Thank you. So that’s why you ‘see’ an US IP address while the physical server may be located anywhere, e.g. in Germany.
By looking at their Wikipedia, I’ve already found out that Cloudflare doesn’t do hosting.
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.