I heard a great theory about this recently.

The hardest part of onboarding a new customer to Cloudflare is the bit where you need to switch over to having them manage DNS for you.

If you're under a DoS attack or similar, waiting for DNS changes to propagate is the last thing you want to have to care about!

Cloudflare's generous free tier is an amazing way of getting that funnel started: anyone who signs up for the free tier has already configured everything that matters, which means when they DO consider becoming a paying customer the friction in doing so is tiny.

Why exactly should arguably one of the MOST important parts of a state get exceptions to the law and transparency based on feelings?

Indeed. This is ABSOLUTELY not the first time we’ve dealt with a government agency (at the local, state, or federal levels) providing a copy of a public dataset to Ancestry.com and not to the general public. Our taxpayer-funded data keeps ending up solely behind a $300/year paywall. It’s not fair.

(Also, the stripped-down version of BIRLS that has been on the Ancestry website for a while now is much smaller and older.)

> This site feels icky and I’m not quite sure how to articulate why. What is the purpose of this service?

Sounds like genealogy, and a small fraction of the documents in a veteran's would probably be very helpful in fleshing out some basic details of their military service (especially given a fire destroyed many of the original copies of those documents).

The actual medical records part seems inappropriate, though.

> Why is it good for the public have access to detailed records of individual, recently deceased veterans? Isn’t this a gold mine for scammers? Is this project LDS affiliated?

It seems like it's a gap in FOIA. These records should be available, just not to everyone in the whole world (at least not before, say, 60 years after the veteran's death). It seems legitimate that an appropriately-close family member should be able to request them (similar to restrictions in requesting birth certificates).

Nice that these exist—but does anyone else absolutely abhor shell programming? The syntax is impossible to memorize, it’s incredibly easy to make mistakes, and debugging is a pain. I hate it more than C++ and AppleScript.