Or worse. Since I have no way to know beforehand who I would be dealing with, this is actively dangerous - what if the mobster running this site is having a bad day and choses to retaliate ?
Also what a stupid fucking policy that is. Even if you are not legally compelled to block content, what is the point of actively helping distibute harmful content?
What they are doing is worse than just saying "We are not a hosting provider" - because while what is true, they are actively distributing content that is hosted elsewhere while hiding who is hosting it.
One can easily write an email to [email protected] and usually these people do not want garbage on their networks. CF is making it impossible to do notify them, and they refuse to implement an alternative procedure.
I still do not understand the moral position of profiting off of enabling criminal scum, when it would be so easy not to...
Platforms must be responsible for the content they are hosting, broadcasting, and publishing.
One to one communications between two people exchanging ideas and having a private discussion is different from mass broadcasting.
> One to one communications between two people exchanging ideas and having a private discussion is different from mass broadcasting.
The highway is used both by those visiting their friends and those doing mass deliveries. Is it the job of the highway maintenance crew to control for what purpose their network is used?
I would like to know if the above analogy stands.
The highway maintenance crew is akin to the person installing racks for CloudFlare.
Like seriously, is there a single person on the planet that's going to defend online scams? It's immoral, it's illegal, it benefits no one and harms thousands. And it's not like it's very hard to detect and block either.
At this point I'd still like the internet companies doing partial policing of content. At least they'll achieve something.
The sooner developers realize that Cloudflare is not saving the Internet the better.
I wonder if someone with malicious intent could set up a site designed to generate complaints (how exactly would be an exercise for the reader), put it behind Cloudflare, and purposely use the information in the forwarded complaints to harass, abuse, dox, or otherwise harm people.
But that's exactly what CF does. They forward your abuse complaints to the abuse contact of the IP address hosting the content.
At the moment, they have a very clear rule. If they stop providing services to obvious spammers, they will create lots of grey areas, and they will also implicitly make a judgement that the client they still serve are _good_ in some way, and an enterprising lawyer or muckraker might exploit that.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Misuse of trademarks is a thing.
I agree, however, that CF's policies are applied arbitrarily.
Yeah, and that's the difference, isn't it? 8kun might not condone any of these things, officially, but it very much enables and desires them.
This kind of discourse is seen as the "price of freedom", its presence a demonstration of absolute tolerance and blind faith in freedom of speech. Facebook, reddit, MySpace and Twitter are more strictly moderated and impose actual terms of service on their users' freedom of expression.
But of course this also means the people most motivated to join networks that offer guarantees of free speech absolutism are those whose discourse is not tolerated by these mainstream alternatives. And their presence will almost guarantee an absence of "normies" who don't run into the limits of their freedom of speech on the moderated networks much and feel uncomfortable around the former group.
Heck, the only reason 8chan ever became large enough to be widely known was because 4chan evicted Gamergate. And 4chan isn't exactly known for its strict moderation and suppression of political views.
It seems to me that if they want to be in this business they have to deal with these liabilities and complications, not hide behind some vague "our hands are tied" language.
If their argument is "we only retransmit what we get, with caching" then they are in the same place liability-wise as the phone providers ("We only retransmit what we et, with caching").
In other words, a common carrier.
Hosting is different. For exmaple, Youtube is not liable for what their users upload. They comply with takedown notices because they host the content, not the user.
Cloudflare is just a huge company actively ignoring abuse complaints and somehow they are getting away with it. It even helps their PR to a certain market segment.
They even still host kiwifarms, a board that is primarily known for its vicous harassment of people and is known to have driven multiple innocent people to suicide.
I consider CloudFlare a bad actor at this point and I wish the other big names around them would too. They are subsidizing crime with VC money.
20 years ago the transit providers of the internet would have spotted Cloudflare for what it is, and cut it off.
However, I do agree - privacy unveiling like that should require a judge's order.
It's just that the procedure is so useless that it might as well not exist.
You are missing the point of the complaint, which is that it's a private decision to hold that policy. Maybe it was a bad idea to use the word "line", but the intent still stands unadressed.
Everyone except those that are too right wing.
You can agree with Cloudlare not providing services to those sites as much as you want, but you cannot pretend that Cloudflare hosts everyone equally. They cannot use that as an excuse to not deal with spammers.
All I'm saying is that we won't know until they come under pressure again
That's also true of people who haven't murdered anyone yet, though.
Whom do you trust more? The person who did something and vowed to never do it again, or the person who didn't vow anything? I tend to prefer the former.
When it comes to service providers, I would tend towards your direction. They did a thing that had conflicting ethics on each side, weighed the outcome and their ethics, and then made a hard decision for the future. What they did could be reversed, too, and didn't cause much permanent damage.
Murdering someone is very permanent and should take a lot more initial consideration.
By ignoring the content they serve, they rid themselves of the necessity to analyze and judge what they serve. Not only would this require a brain the size of a planet and the expense of running it, but also would inevitably conflict with someone else's judgments, and bring various PR woes.
They don't analyze the internals of their traffic the way internet backbone providers don't analyze the internals of the traffic they pass around.
I frankly find this position superior: imho it does more good by preventing censorship than harm by serving good-intentioned and bad-intentioned customers alike.
As someone that tried reporting spam sites because they were using content scrapped from my website, I'm not surprised.
Cloudflare has a policy that they will not stop providing their IP hiding/reverse proxy services to anyone, regardless of complaints. The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it.
They say "we're not a hosting provider" as if that's an excuse that they can't refuse to offer their service. I'm sure many spam websites would go away if they couldn't hide behind Cloudflare.