[bratticus]

The Peakoil.com web site is now behind a layer called Cloudflare.

How on Earth can Cloudflare make money?

Well it's like this: they sell information about you.

CloudFlare Privacy & Security Policy

... In order for us to provide some of the services we do we may on occasion need to provide information you supply us to external parties. ... As visitors browse our web site, or your sites if they are protected by CloudFlare, we sometimes track them ... CloudFlare may aggregate data we acquire about you and the visitors to your site. ... we assemble this sort of data and provide it to external parties ...

[bratticus]

Who knows how they use the data. That's their secret. They are the nielsen ratings of the 21st century and you are the nielsen family.

I figured this out when I first wondered "how does http://tinyurl.com make money? There's no place for them to put an ad on a tinyurl link". Later I found out that every link click is marketable demographic data. Same for http://bit.ly http://is.gd etc. Plus there are tons of link shortners out there but only a handful of companies actually own them. Even custom-looking ones, for instance http://nyti.ms are owned by a third pary

The Times and Bit.ly Roll Out 'nyti.ms' Short Links

The New York Times introduced Twitter-friendly links starting with "nyti.ms" and powered by Bit.ly.

Cloudflare is a step up as the entire session not just a click has to go through them and can be digested for marketable demographic data.

[Ferretlover]

IMO, it is reasonable to assume that ALL websites collect data regarding the people visiting their websites.
I would also suggest that a large proportion of websites sell the data they collect.
IOW: If you use the Internet, nothing about your life will be secret for long.

[mos6507]

Which is why I am shocked and amazed at the incitement to violence/revolution that people so often express here. Beyond the moral argument, it's pretty stupid to say some of the things people say out in the open. This site's traffic and up-time may be in the crapper, but there isn't much security in obscurity.