There are few things more quintessentially modern than trying to learn something useful from the internet and being immediately told, in no uncertain terms, to sod right off. Such was the fate of your humble correspondent this week, whilst attempting to access what Atlas Obscura grandly bills as a guide to the world’s biggest sporting event. The result? A face full of Cloudflare and a Ray ID that reads like something a paranoid robot would tattoo on its forearm.
The World’s Biggest Sporting Event, Apparently Classified
Atlas Obscura, for the uninitiated, is a wonderful website dedicated to the strange, the hidden, and the marvellous corners of our world. It is not, to anyone’s knowledge, a nuclear facility. And yet, in trying to read their guide to the world’s biggest sporting event — widely assumed to be the FIFA World Cup, or possibly the Olympics, depending on how patriotic you’re feeling — this writer was blocked, flagged, and effectively escorted from the digital premises by a bouncer named Cloudflare.
The error message was magnificently unhelpful. It suggested that the “action just performed” had “triggered the security solution.” The action in question was, for the record, clicking a link. A single, innocent, mouse-click. Apparently, in 2024, this constitutes suspicious behaviour.
Cloudflare: Guardian of Sporting Knowledge
Cloudflare, for anyone blissfully unaware, is a web security and performance company that protects millions of websites from cyberattacks, malicious bots, and — evidently — curious readers with a mild interest in global athletics. Furthermore, it is entirely possible that this writer’s IP address had previously been used by someone performing SQL injections, though the most technically complex thing attempted recently was ordering a pizza online.
The message helpfully offered the option to email the site owner. One imagines this email arriving in an inbox somewhere in New York, causing mild bewilderment and a brief internal meeting about whether the British public poses a credible threat to sports journalism.
Meanwhile, the guide itself — tantalisingly titled, magnificently inaccessible — presumably contains all manner of fascinating information about stadiums, traditions, and the curious local customs one encounters when attending the world’s biggest sporting event. Hidden behind a digital velvet rope. Like a very exclusive club where the dress code is “not a SQL command.”
A Brief and Entirely Speculative Guide to the World’s Biggest Sporting Event
Since the original article remains locked away in Cloudflare’s digital vault, we have taken it upon ourselves to fill the void. The world’s biggest sporting event — whether it’s the Summer Olympics or the World Cup — typically involves an enormous number of humans descending on one country, queuing for things, paying seventeen pounds for a small beer, and experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions that no therapist could have prepared them for.
Consequently, the practical advice tends to be consistent regardless of the sport: book accommodation approximately four years in advance, learn three words in the host nation’s language (“please”, “thank you”, and “where is the toilet”), and accept that public transport will be both heroic and catastrophic simultaneously. These are universal truths. No security certificate required.
Furthermore, one should always pack a waterproof. Even in Qatar. Especially in Qatar, frankly, if only for existential comfort.
The Internet: A Reliable Source of Nothing in Particular
The whole sorry episode does raise a genuinely interesting question about the modern information landscape. We have, at our fingertips, access to the sum total of human knowledge — and yet the internet frequently responds to our curiosity with a shrug, a security certificate, and a Ray ID that means absolutely nothing to any normal person.
However, we soldier on. Because the world’s biggest sporting event — whatever form it takes, wherever it’s held, however many times Cloudflare tries to stop us reading about it — will always be worth celebrating. Even if we have to celebrate it entirely in the dark, armed only with speculation, a VPN, and a deep, abiding suspicion that somewhere, a robot thinks we’re up to no good.
Read the original story at Atlas Obscura.
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