Right, but the website is being used to scam customers and steal their information. So, that's not even the same thing. It's like Cloudflare protecting people that send out spam phishing emails that look like PayPal, etc. It's not just because the site was copied outright, though that's bad enough. It's about tricking customers entirely. It's literally fraud.
Cloudflare is not Batman.
(Edit to add: yes, I'm aware law enforcement is often useless when it comes to cybercrime. But that's what we need to fix, rather than encouraging private companies to act as vigilantes.)
One counter point that regularly comes up is that people have become cynical of the system and feel that it doesn't respond to their need fast enough or even in an easy and accessible manner. This is partly true. Laws and regulations still haven't caught up to the various things online platforms are trying at a fast pace. (And that's by design in mature democracies - politicians are supposed to observe the effect of something on a society before deciding the best way to legislate on it). And thus people are being forced to turn to the corporates instead to address their need.
I mean, who wouldn't prefer to just yell at Twitter or Facebook to take down a post compared to the convulated process of the judiciary to do it legally?
Thankfully, the governments around the world are finally starting to debate laws and regulations on Privacy, Right to Repair, etc. are starting to legislate on it.
I dont understand how US got to to this point, having tech companies making morale judgement and law enforcement on pretty much every issue.
This is not being snark, troll or whatever you what to call it. I am genuinely curious. How? Why? Did we arrived here.
At one point you thought this is some thing that are amplified by social media, and they are a small minority. You ignore Social Media. Then you see this even on HN, or some other specific / niche forum. And someday you meet people in real life who actually believe in it. That company should do the right thing. And these people are suppose to be smart, from an educational or pay grade scale.
Lets also not forget about fair use -- right now the TOS on Youtube and Twitch counts cases of legitimate fair use, like using a 10-20 second segment of a taylor swift song in a gaming montage, as an automatic DMCA strike. Slowly but surely they have eroded the definition of fair use to basically mean there is no such thing as fair use in practice. Complain about that shit instead?
Except that is what I see both on and off the internet. That is why I raised the question. Especially where there is a distinction between Hosting provider and transit provider. It would be more appreciated in this case to be writing to the site's host and not Cloudflare. ( Unless it is hosted on Cloudflare workers then we would have argue it differently ) Or as OP have pointed to the different about banks. It is all about different layer of stack, which people often seems to lump it all together.
DMCA is completely separate issues. But I do agree DMCA is being misused a lot.
Why? Because, money for the most part. If you can't see the money incentive then it's about control. And if you can't control yourself, compel those who can to do so, it's even cheaper.
Because the institutions that should have handled these responsibilities got broken down intentionally due to "starve the beast" libertarian ideology. Congress is gridlocked and plagued with cronyism, corruption and obstructionism for decades, and the fact that FPTP leads to extreme polarization doesn't help either.
Regarding law enforcement, the problem is similar - the fact that police unions are so powerful that they can threaten democratically decided reform projects (e.g. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-police-uni...) is maddening in itself.
The end result is a weird form of anarchism - trial by public, one may call it IMO... in the absence of government regulation - no matter if due to incompetence, old age of those in decision-making power or bribery - individual actors simply do whatever they want (aka makes the most profit for them), unless the pressure of the public in form of protest campaigns reins them in a bit.
Historically, the position of liberal/libertarian free market advocates has been that protecting and enforcing property rights is a core responsibility of the state - one of very few core responsibilities.
You can probably find some fringe opinions that would question even this limited role of government, but I think you're going to find it very difficult to demonstrate that this is a significant political force.
Underfunding or general ineffectiveness of the judiciary and law enforcement can be a consequence of many political and organsiational failures. You can find it in many countries around the world that could never be called remotely libertarian.
Oh thank you. That makes lots of sense.
Libertarian ideology famously pro-cronyism, corruption and obstructionism?
:)
If a stated principle conflicts with common behaviour, then you focus on the behaviour. People/organisations aren't incorrupt just because they claim to be.
American conservative politics is absolutely ridden with corruption, obstructionism, and cronyism.
Again, just because someone claims that they are incorruptible and only looking out for your best interests, it doesn't mean they actually are.
If they have a choice between people who overtly want to move more power to the state, and those who say they don't but sometimes do, they're going to pick the latter.
It used to be perfectly legal for companies to openly refuse to hire or serve black people, or even let them in the building.
Many people felt this was morally wrong, even though it was legal. And now we're talking about something that is illegal.
If your company freely does business with a company like this, would you really be surprised and shocked that people would also judge you for doing for business with them?
Wouldn't you expect a company to do the right thing and refuse to work with openly racist and/or criminal companies?
If a newspaper was printing false ads from a person impersonating a company and committing fraud, wouldn't you expect them to stop printing the ads?
If CF start to do that, then this is where it starts to look a lot like the legal process, so why reinvent something that already exists?
5 years ago I might have agreed that Cloudflare should intervene a lot more. Now I don't.
Can you expand on this a little more. What were your thoughts 5 years ago, what changed your mind?
The most immediate reason for that is of course that you grant them that right when you sign the customer agreement, the default one even containing:
> Additionally, we may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or suspend or terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all.
Besides, if a domain owner can switch to Fastly, Akami, Cloudfront or any other CDN, are we really solving this problem in the right place, or are we just giving Cloudflare extra responsibilities and powers that they shouldn't have?
> especially in light of the downsides of them having that responsibility/power being as large as they are.
No clue what you're referring to. They almost certainly already do this, they may just be doing it badly.
You just made that up and also failed to define what you deem "malicious content" at first place. What ethics framework are you even talking about?
It seems obvious that something phishy is going on, but that's for law enforcement to figure out. They can then instruct Cloudflare to take down the infringing site. It's not up to a random individual to tell Cloudflare to take down random sites, and it's not up to Cloudflare to decide on questions of law.
It's "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law", not "innocent until accused by a random dude on the internet".
If someone calls my office and tells me that one of our customers is doing something illegal, I will not, under any circumstance, forward that information to law enforcement. Why would I? All I have is an unproven accusation by someone I know absolutely nothing about! What, exactly, is stopping the person making the accusation from calling the police himself, instead of me? Why is he contacting me - is that because contacting the police would get him into legal hot water? If so, would it be wise for me to act as his unpaid proxy in this? No, of course not!
Again, we still don't even know if the person making the accusation is in fact the injured party, or guilty of the very fraud he is accusing the other website of! Why are you trusting him at all? You don't know either party, you don't know the websites, so what are you basing your preference on?
Uh, no I am not. It is illegal to landlock someone, this is a pretty common thing in rural areas.
Let’s say I purchase all of the property between person X and the highway. Well, he has to have access to it so I have to give him a right of way. But that doesn’t make me the police. He’s responsible for what he does, not me.
Or, if you think this is a grand idea, I think landlords should be responsible for crimes committed by tenants. If you make that a co-condition of these ridiculous IP laws they’d all be dead and gone in a week…
There are numerous accounts of illegal activity at hotels, hostels, government sanctioned housing, college rental properties, and any privately owned, leased property, but no one, ever has been held accountable for illegal behavior (like domestic violence, illicit drugs, underage drinking, etc), so why should a SaaS?
Meanwhile, it isn't even "in the public's best interest" for the hotel to act as law enforcement as the most they can do is evict the person from their one hotel, not actually stop them from doing whatever "illegal behavior" is taking place. (At this point, apologists for monopolies probably start arguing that this is why we are all better off if everyone is forced to use one or two providers, so that everyone can be forced to fall in line with whatever the new corporate vigilante justice rules are... sigh.) Law enforcement is empowered, trained, and equipped to actually do something, not the hotel staff.
And cloudflare isn't even doing that. They just shrugged and decided they would continue to collect profit off the criminal behavior and act as a brick wall for OP in this case. They don't have to be the law enforcement here, but they should be obligated to report this activity to law enforcement and let law enforcement do their jobs. OP will probably have to get a lawyer and spend a lot of money and time to force cloudflares hand to turn in the phisher, all while their business is being hurt directly, and that's just not right at all.
edit: spelling
Most web services do have strict restrictions on conduct. This is a far cry from vigilantism.
It’s messed up for Cloudfare to wash their hands of any responsibility here.
In the case of a crime being committed in a hotel room, the criminal is the nuisance. The hotel operator gladly participates with law enforcement to remove the nuisance. In the case of something as ridiculous as these plaintiff wedding dress makers claiming "intellectual property" over a white dress, the plaintiff is the nuisance, not the people they are accusing.
Your analogy amounts to a person having a private road, for which a random person comes buy proclaiming "hey there is meth lab up your road" from this you then jump to the conclusion that the person that owns the road now legally "knows" about the meth lab, thus if a methlab is found they are complicit.
I would find this to be very lacking from a legal standpoint that some random person yelling an accusation at you constitutes "informing" someone of a fact to whit they would then become legally liable.
No proof, evidence, or other actionable noticed has been given, so the owner can simply ignore you accusation and move along with their day, in fact legally that would be the best course because if they then investigated they could become complicit, but at the moment of accusation they are not
A car is manufactured and sold once to a customer, which then goes on a road rampage. (physical, discrete)
A website is continuously served and maintained by a provider to a customer, which then uses it for shopping scams. (virtual, continuous)
A spreadsheet serial key for an offline app is sold by the developer to a customer, which then uses it for embezzlement. (virtual, discrete)
Some legal questions: Is the manufacturer/provider liable? Did they know the product/service was purchased with the intent to harm? At what point can the manufacturer/provider be considered an accomplice? The product was sold already, what can they do about it? The service is still being provided, should they stop it?
I'm wondering how long until we see the physical, continuous scenario, exactly like the road rampage, but with a connected car. Should the manufacturer disconnect that car? Should they remotely disable it?
Very complex legal and ethical questions ahead in our times.
Is the landlord at 1308 Halifax liable when his tenants sell someone a counterfeit Ford?
If I may briefly stand on my soapbox: I'm starting to think analogies never help prove a point. No matter how relevant or true they might be, someone will pull some comparison out of the analogy and use that to detract from the main point being compared and expect that comparison to be a valid rebuttal, often to great popular success. Anybody else notice this?
It's very frustrating when they make a counterpoint to the analogy that doesn't actually correspond back to the original point.
HN is particularly bad for chains of increasingly surreal analogies, each of which the poster seems to think is a silver bullet. the analogies are some of the least useful content on the site, next to sarcasm.
Fight bad analogies with bad analogies. Show off how useless a tool they are.
> to great popular success
This is an HN audience issue, not an analogy one.
The userbase here tends to be technical, tends towards (or is at least dominated by) particular political positions, and seems to be much more literally-minded than other online communities.
This is not a comparable analogy, CF isn't selling each website you visit.
They are providing Privacy and Security via 100% automated tools.
Perhaps take it up with the registrar, or file a lawsuit against CF and the Reg and get a court ordered TakeDown. There are avenues of resolution for such disputes, if one is passionate enough to exercise them.
Hard to work that into a car analogy but what if a rental car is returned obviously with bank robbers and they want another one telling you they are going to rob another bank
If a bank manager went down to Hertz by themselves and demanded someone's information, they obviously wouldn't get very far. There are established legal processes to follow.
Just like the physical world, if you want to compel Cloudflare to identify one of their customers, you have to use the legal system.
I wish HN would introduce a "please no analogies that compare digital stuff with physical" rule because such things turn conversations into a mess
And no, I attack this method not because I don't agree with the conclusion of comment I was replying to, it's because I hate analogies.
How comparing cloudflare to ford and then saying "wouldn't that be ridiculous if Ford got sued if a criminal bought a car" can be accepted by anyone as a valid argument? Yes, it would be ridiculous but that's it
You get half your wish as wedding dresses aren't covered by any intellectual property laws except for big designer dresses which use Trademarks. Copying the dress design itself is expected and a regular part of the fashion industry.
Yes, it isn't optimal, but the advantages of hosters not carelessly taking down other sites makes hosting a few bad apples worth it.
Yeah. Copyright is nonsense in the 21st century where copying is trivial. It's holding us back.
In centuries past, if you wanted to infringe copyright at the same scale we do today, you'd need expensive stuff like printing presses and a viable business model that pays for the costs of running an industrial copying process. That's what made copyright enforceable: you'd need to be a major industry player in order to infringe copyright and such centralized operations are easy targets for litigation.
Now everyone's got computers that can make and distribute a virtually unbounded amount of copies of anything to anyone within the network and there's pretty much nothing people can do about that.
Did banks sue the Ford dealer for selling big V8 getaway cars to bank robbers? Or the city for operating the roads that they used to get away? Or the toll collector for letting the bank robbers cross a bridge after they paid the toll?
No, because any of those things would have been ridiculous.
At some point we as a society are going to have to get off this intellectual property high horse.
Maybe we should stop trying to protect things that are easy to copy like website designs and wedding dresses. The enormous effort to try and protect these things damages society more than the benefit that even a successful outcome might have for a rights holder.