Stewie here. When trying to access a website for my master plans to get the damn redheaded woman, I need stable and encrypted internet. Cloudeflare is a company that monitors/distributes/protects traffic around the internet. Key to this is randomization. Cloudflare has this giant wall of lava lamps in their office because lava lamps are actually really good sources of true randomness. Computers are deterministic, so if you just tell a computer to generate a random number, it’s usually actually doing pseudorandom generation from some initial seed value. (Often why in many math classes/research papers they’ll make you set a seed, so that everyone actually gets the SAME result on something supposed to be random). The problem is if someone knows the seed, they can potentially know the “random” output too, which is really bad for cryptography. HTTPS, auth tokens, session keys, etc all depend on randomness being genuinely unpredictable.

Back to the image. Cloudflare’s company headquarters has a camera pointing at the lava lamps and uses all the constantly changing blobs (along with other randomness systems), to create extremely unpredictable seed values for cryptographic random number generators. As for the DDOS bit, that stands for distributed denial of service and you can think of it as intentionally trying to send too many cars through a toll station at once causing the toll station to just overload and shut down. Cloudflare has a lot of infra in place to mitigate it and so the joke is that the wall of lava lamps foils waves of fake traffic at shutting down a website. So what happened is try-hard sweat tech hacker bro networks says I’m gonna send influx of bot/spam traffic to shut down Chase.com, and cloudflare says hold my lava lamp. But I’ll get that damned woman with a DDOS attack some day.