How A Wall of Lava Lamps Is Protecting The Internet

How this unique technology keeps hackers at bay

Grant Piper
4 min readMar 21, 2024
(Wikimedia Commons / CC0)

Lava lamps were once popular bedside attractions, but those days are long gone. Today, the humble lava lamp seems to have more in common with the waterbed than anything else. They were cool once, but now you’re a weirdo if you still have one. (I used to have a number of different lava lamps as a child, and when I brought up the idea of getting another one for nostalgia’s sake, my wife gave me a withering glare.) What most people don’t realize is that simple lava lamps are working tirelessly to keep the internet safe from hackers. There is a good chance that your favorite website is being kept safe by the soothing glow of lava lamp bubbles.

Lava Lamp Security

(Cloudflare)

Cloudflare is responsible for roughly 20% of the internet’s primary internet traffic. Cloudflare is a web hosting company that manages thousands of different websites. (Medium is a website hosted by Cloudflare.) That means that Cloudflare is responsible for billions of hits of web traffic, many of which could be potentially malicious. In order to deter hackers, Cloudflare has developed an…

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Grant Piper

Professional writer. Amateur historian. Husband, father, Christian.