These people who want to revoke DDoS protection for groups they don't like are essentially promoting terrorism. Why else would they fight so hard to remove DDoS protection, if not because they simply want those attacks to succeed?
They're attacking KiwiFarms for their agenda of trying to drive people to commit suicide.
I also can't go shoot up suspected criminals, that's called vigilantism and is criminal. Even if I knew they did it.
Let's say KiwiFarms was entirely hosted/located in a shed in the middle of nowhere. Someone walks up to it and sets it on fire. Should the local fire department put it out? Assume it's not going to spread to other buildings/etc.
> Let's say KiwiFarms was entirely hosted/located in a shed in the middle of nowhere.
A shed in the middle of nowhere, so let us suppose the nearest government supported fire department is a two hour drive away, and so KF hires a private for-profit firefighting company. With that modification to patmcc's comment, what is your response now?
If KF farms hires a private for-profit firefighting company, and then political activists commit arson against KF, should the private for-profit firefighting company put out the fire? Or does your political ideology oblige firefighters to side with arsonists?
The point was your lecture on fire fighting services was irrelevant to the context.
> I am suggesting they are comparable to a private for-profit firefighting company. Can you respond to this? If KF farms hires a private for-profit firefighting company, and then political activists commit arson against KF, should the private for-profit firefighting company put out the fire?
I did respond. I said the analogy had negative value. Continuing to mutate the analogy is just more evidence of it.
> Or does your political ideology oblige firefighters to side with arsonists?
It's a monopoly funded by taxes obligated to serve everyone?
> While not a democratically elected government, they use governance all the same.
This is meaningless.
I did not say it was a government service, I said a platform functions a lot like a government service, especially when multihoming is limited due to switching costs.
You said it was like a government service is typically provisioned. And the costs of switching governments dwarf the costs of switching online services.
> I can see you're not interested in discussion at this time. No worries, we all have those days.
The same to you.
What evidence is there for this? I haven't kept up with the website recently, is Null telling people to harass people to death?
> What I fear more than losing my site, being sued, or dealing with police is living in a world where fat eunuchs can groom little boys into castrating themselves and nobody is allowed to say anything about it.
Wow very neutral site with no agenda here
This might be well the case. I am not one of their users nor am I educated in this matter, so I'd like to know too. When somebody makes this claim, as has been made multiple times in the threads here, with demands to therefore remove kikifarms from the internet, I think it is reasonable to ask for at least some evidence of such a claim.
Josh Moon then playing "Fire" ("I am the God of hellfire and I bring you fire") is in extremely bad taste and outright vile. I can very well see this as gloating.
And yet, it does not prove kiwifarms direct involvement. It's a short extract from a stream he did. Playing devil's advocate for a second, it for example might very well have been a response to media at the time already claiming he/kiwifarms was to blame for the suicide and therefore a rather misguided attempt to poke fun at what he might have considered unfair reporting.
If the person burning the Rumsfeld photo contributed to his death then I might say they were gloating too.
I could easily find hundreds of such posts, but I don't want to waste my time if you wouldn't consider them.
Edit: to be clear, "allowing content" does not entail "endorsing content" per my original reply.
I'd leave a comment about your own profiles but I think they speak for themselves...
> There is nothing wrong with that
This is the claim and response I am responding to.
Should someone be providing HRT to children? Generally no. Has the child been prescribed that medication, and the parents are refusing, unable to, or actively preventing the child from getting that medication? Absolutely!
If this was in relation to insulin, antibiotics, or any other generally accepted medical prescription, the individual would be lauded. Because of transphobia and ignorance, sites like kiwifarms are being targetted by a bunch of relentless shitweasels who are hiding behind Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Expression, something which Cloudflare is under absolutely no legal requirement to provide.
I don't want tech companies to become the arbiters of free speech, but I also don't think companies are obligated to provide services to a website owned by a person who gleefully celebrated the suicide of a victim of harassment.
Now that I am not an employee there anymore, one thing I am absolutely thrilled to say is that the Fastly approach with a Good Neighbour policy is awesome, and that alone (among many awesome things over the 5 years I was there) makes it a better company to work for than CloudFlare.
There isn't a complete picture here. In this particular case, Keffals shared that she was supporting alternate paths to get HRT, and providing support for folks who were legally blocked from receiving gender affirming care due to laws passed by a government largely captured by right wing politicians.
Given the complexity of pursuing HRT, it's not unreasonable to reach the conclusion that a child in those circumstances being denied care is largely related to a lack of parental support, or from being actively prevented from getting treatment that doctors were clearly providing (since the government had to ban medical treatment in order to stop it).
If the government bans some form of medical treatment and Keffals is trying to bypass this ban then this obviously would raise questions of legality.
I'll treat you as though you're honest, but I might point out this is a dishonest person's favorite argument.
Here's the common answer in Twitter thread form: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089253502461952...
As for the Twitter thread I've heard plenty of similar arguments before but I'm not a particularly big believer in them. Lots of people have very awful company (take for example Hollywood actors associating with predators) but that doesn't particularly mean that they are promoting or in agreement with the actions of their company.
Which is why I continued on with addressing the argument.
> Lots of people have very awful company (take for example Hollywood actors associating with predators)
False equivalency I'd say. Yes, the entertainment industry as a whole SUCKS. But if you think about it for even a second, you'll realize there is a difference between being an actor and being an open Nazi.
Yes and KiwiFarms is not investigative journalism - they're harrassing and doxxing private individuals with clearly personal malicious intent. The key part of investigative journalism is the "investigative", which there is no evidence of on KiwiFarm's part. No attempts to hold power to account, to expose serious breaches of power - just a horrid, all-consuming hatred and failure to respect other people's right to exist.
For _actual_ investigative journalism, see https://www.icij.org/
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
I’m not telling strangers, in-person or online, my address.
But "throwawayacc2" doesn't get that same meaning.
Ideas need no name. Argue the idea, not the human behind it.
Or failing that, perhaps consider relocating to China or Russia. You will find their attitudes to internet anonymity more to your liking.
But what if there was a website that told strangers your address associated with your handle?
You shouldn't make new accounts for this sort of thing you know - cowards who hide from perfectly legal doxxing and "investigative journalism" in defense of such "harmless" actions come across as sus. Why should you be ashamed of your opinion - you are entitled to free speech right?
But we don't live in a perfect world. It's a pretty weak response to say "this should not be their problem" - because, for a bunch of reasons, it is their problem.
There are bigger, harder questions along the lines of "how do we as a society deal with this kind of issue." Cloudflare does not need to solve the general case before it deal with the specific actions of this specific website - and the desire to solve the general case is not a defense against confronting the specifics.
> The federal law concerning cyberstalking is 18 U.S.C. § 2261A(2). It provides that it’s unlawful for any person to engage in a course of conduct through electronic communication that makes another individual reasonably fear death or serious bodily harm to themselves or another (including a pet or service animal). The behavior may also be illegal if it causes or could cause “substantial emotional distress.” A course of conduct means two or more acts suggesting that the individual has or will continue the behavior.
https://www.duimiamilawyer.com/blog/2020/12/is-there-a-feder...
The decision of investigators to turn a blind eye to it over the past decade is curious.
"Police exist, therefore nobody except the police is allowed to do anything about anyone's bad behavior" is a terrible argument.
There's no reason to think that just because police exist people can't do anything about other people's bad behavior though. For example, when someone says something you don't like you aren't allowed to silence them because that violates their rights, but you are allowed to use your own rights to speak out against them and what they've been saying.
Crimes should be dealt with by our legal systems, but there are plenty of other ways to deal with things that simply offend us.
and they collude secretly with corporations to advance their powers mutually https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/emails-show-amazon-rin...
I don’t ask someone to shoot their own foot to protect myself
My understanding of that website is that it is moderated based on the philosophy of "look, don't touch". Your statement runs contrary to this...
I think such a posture would encourage some to commit "false flag" SWAT-ing as a means to silence those they disagree with.
SWAT-ing is a very serious crime, and if they are "top suspects" as you claim, I expect LE would be robustly investigating them.
Thoughts?
I wouldn't have a problem with them discussing other people among themselves, but including addresses and phone numbers and such is such a bad faith "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you ha ha ha" that I wouldn't mind seeing them burned down on principle.
I don't know if I would describe a DDoS attack as "digital terrorism", but it is annoying and hard to stop on an individual level because of the design of the internet.
DDoS attacks would still occur if we used a routing protocol other than BGP. It's not created by BGP, it's created by the fact that the Internet is end-to-end oversubscribed.
What you need is something like a whitelist-by-public-key or hashcash or something.
in my experience most of the time it's due to:
- boredom ("gotta nuke something")
- revenge for being banned/fragged/...
- extortion ("ban this person I don't like, or else")Only if it's sufficiently political. Lots of DDoS is not. And that bar gets higher for an attack that's minimally violent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cybert...
The premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives.
The National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization of legislators created to help policymakers in the United States with issues such as economy and homeland security defines cyberterrorism as:
The use of information technology by terrorist groups and individuals to further their agenda. This can include use of information technology to organize and execute attacks against networks, computer systems and telecommunications infrastructures, or for exchanging information or making threats electronically.
--
Just taking the first two, they could easily be extended to Kiwifarms, where information on individuals is compiled and shared in public fashion and discourse revolves around how such people deserve to be harrassed. I haven't been following the Keffals episode in particular but Kiwifarms already had a reputation for facilitating and fostering personal harassment.
No, it's not. Not everything that's bad is terrorism.
Terrorism is specifically about using violence. Don't water down terms.
>the premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cybert...
No. Don't blur this line or you not only lose credibility, you descend into absurdity.
1. Terrorism is not a judgment of the target but of the action.
2. The OP classified DDoS as terrorism.
3. DDoSing Nazis is thus terrorism.
By parity of reasoning, I pointed out that murdering a Nazi is still murder, regardless of the fact that the target was a Nazi. The nature of the target is immaterial to the classification of the action taken against them.
This is begging the question.
DDoS is not terrorism. Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims."
Inconveniencing a people, by taking down a website is not violence or intimidation.
Without that tenant, everything you've argued on this thread is a moot point.
Keep in mind who you're defending here. The site in question doxxes trans people so they can be harassed and sent death threats. That IS terrorism.
But even under your definition I fundamentally disagree that this instance of it doesn't fit. It is an unlawful attack on infrastructure with clearly political aims against a service used by civilians, it is clearly being used to intimidate hosts to drop them so that the DDOS doesn't create more collateral damage for their other customers as well.
It's fine to agree with terrorism, one man's terrorist is another freedom fighter and all that, but I doubt most people would agree that it isn't terrorism.
The intent of the DDoS in question is very clearly a form of intimidation. DDoS in general does cause real economic harm and not merely inconvenience.
> Keep in mind who you're defending here.
That's irrelevant. Murdering Nazis is still wrong and illegal.
> The site in question doxxes trans people so they can be harassed and sent death threats. That IS terrorism.
If it were they would have been charged. You're imputing intent and actions without sufficient evidence, because if that evidence existed we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Extra-judicial actions of this sort, no matter how plausibly justified, are not how society works. We have laws and a justice system because mob "justice" is wrong.
As the article says, "... [not providing services based on moral character] is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities."
Assholes and trolls are still going to exist regardless of what any platform does.
You can’t have what you want by trying to pressure cloudflare, it won’t make a positive difference. Do something real instead of advocating for something toothless and symbolic.
People need to get it through their head that speech is not violence, words are not weapons. Your Exquisite Analogy about how speech laws should Akshually reflect gun laws or martial laws doesn't work, never worked, and never will.
Every single argument against free speech is a general argument against living in any kind of large networked society. Your problem is not the tools the harrasser uses, your problem is the harrasser themself, the tools they use is the same tools used by dissidents and freedom fighters to "harrass" the oppressive governments they are rebelling against.
We went through this entire tiresome arguments before with the debates around cryptography and anonymity, people just keep Missing The Point. Yes, building backdoors into encryption standards and harvesting data without users' permission will allow you to catch The Big Bad Pedos, but it will also allow Putin and Ibn Salman unprecedented power to catch their own type of enemies. "Oh, we just want to do bad things to the bad guys only" no, you can't, believe me, you can't and you won't, every single thing you advocate for can and will be used against you.
"Nazism is bad" EOM
That wasn't so hard, was it?
I do not want corporations acting as government regardless of whose side they are on.
I do not want to normalize or encourage such regulation by corporation.
If some behavior is so bad, advocate for a law against it or for the enforcement of that law.
If it is not so bad, let it exist even if you don't like it.
The whole thing about rule by the people is that having individuals or small groups that get to arbitrarily make rules and enforce them is bad. Monarchy and despotism is bad, whether or not you like what they're doing.
Despotism by corporation is just as bad and shouldn't be encouraged. It's not different because you're trying to get them to arbitrarily create rules that agree with you.
we need to be able as a society be able to and be unafraid to say when things are clearly bad.
Sadly, "disagrees with me" is considered bad and called vile insults these days.
Yes, it pretty much is. Over here it's against the law to futher it. What's wrong with enshrining this principle in the actual law, that 1) affects the whole society, not just users of one particular corporation, 2) it's enforcement is dispensed by an actual court, not a PR department pushed by a twitter mob?
>What if the US government believes it's totally ok to murder trans people?
It doesn't. You don't need an adjective between murder and people.
Also, harassing someone to the point of suicide isn't murder, it can be manslaughter.
No new laws are needed. Go bother your local DA or US attorney or legislative representatives to get charges filed for the actual harassment and the conspiracy to harass that lead to what should probably be manslaughter charges.
Make actual differences and actually hold the people who do these things accountable.
Don't go cheerleading for Cloudflare to do something meaningless that wouldn't and won't stop any of this in the future.
Do you think you understand something they didn't? Were they naive? Are you perhaps more intimately connected to the evils of Nazism than they were? Maybe they didn't understand that an entire country could fall to the evils of Nazism if they were not stamped out aggressively?
Or. Maybe they understood these things even better than you. And maybe they believed freedom of speech is even more anti-Nazi than banning Nazis.
You already do. And that's actually a good thing. It means that in free societies like the USA, these companies are free to choose to do (or not do) business with whomever they choose. They are not free from the market reacting to those decisions, though.
This is a different issue than a social network doing moderation and spam prevention on its own platform.
It is not Cloudflare's job to protect Twitter or wherever else from a forum of assholes.
...but they're not free from public reactions to their choices.
I don't want to force cloudflare to be a public utility, but it is probably bigger and more dominant than any company needs to be, like many others it should be broken up into smaller pieces.
I’ve been seeing this confusion more and more recently, probably because of the size and omnipresence of corporations.
I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts or simply ignorance, but the distinction has to be emphasized. Corporations and public services are completely different beasts, with different legislations, incentives, etc.
Not having the legal obligations of a utility, while acting like one (i.e., getting to pull the "neutrality" card in the face of public pressure to drop nazis) is not okay.
Isn't this what gets said everytime Twitter bans someone?
Cloudflare is allowed to offer services to people you don't like.
Nazis shouldn't get a website, even if the law permits it, and everyone has a moral obligation to fight fascism.
If you would restrict one then you restrict both. The freedom is absolute or it does not exist for anyone except the current favored group.
It's like laws on the treatment of prisoners of war - we don't have those rules because we love our enemy, it's because we want our brothers to not be tortured.
[1] because their business scales very well, so they'd prefer to be considered reliable, so that competition doesn't have that available as a differentiator; any attempt at applying content-dependent rules either uses lots of heuristic automation or is reactive in response to Twitter storms, neither of which is predictable and reliable
Thankfully, that's not true at all. About 16% of all sites use Cloudflare (80% of 20%)
“Cloudflare is used by 79.8% of all the websites whose reverse proxy service we know. This is 19.1% of all websites.”
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare
>This is not the same as saying "posting on Twitter is a civil right"
It's pretty much the same thing, yes.
In that they are both organizations made up of human beings providing important services to the general public, they are the similar. I think that's the similarity that was being emphasized by the analogy.
The analogy still works if you imagine private firefighters (the kind you might contract for a farming operation) instead of public firefighters.
An organization is more specific than a "group."
They both provide services to the general public, i.e. they are indiscriminant in who their clients are. This is different from, say, a corporate law firm that might decide to take just a handful of cases at a time and be selective about it.
And finally, their services are important, as in livelihood-saving. Of course, firefighters are sometimes life saving, so a better analogy would be firefighters working for agri-business, but "firefighters" still fits better than, say, "AMC theaters" because of the importance of the service offered.
A gas station has a moral obligation to sell gas without discriminating by race, etc. A gas station does not have a moral obligation to sell gas to arsonists.
I'd be suspicious if a gas station made a press release about how they'll sell gas to anyone but also donate to charity to "make things even". Sounds like they want arsonists to know where they can buy gas.
Something similar to basic Cloudflare but run as a public service by the government that is free to all might be a good thing to have. If there are majorly amoral actors that use it we should be going after them for their crimes (from a legal sense) which other parts of the government can of course aid with.
Until the government decides your content no longer deserves protection because of your politics or religion or whatever.
This is the same problem as government "regulating" social media companies and forcing them to publish certain kinds of speech against their will, which people also seem to want. Inevitably it boils down to an end-run around the First Amendment, as it gives government direct control over speech at a far greater scale than any corporation, backed up by a monopoly on violence.
Simply being popular is not having a de-facto monopoly.
Seeing how vital the Internet is for participation in society, it is my opinion that the baseline for "duty to serve" is that everyone has the right to a modicum of hosting and the ability to have their site accessible. That means a FQDN, SSL certificate, and network connectivity.
Should it be a legal requirement? I'm not yet convinced. But I don't think CF is wrong to host orgs they morally oppose.
Just don't justify whatever decision you make by conflating public and private services.
Do we consider stuff like DNS, BGP to be public service? I mean, Cloudflare can affect everyone who uses Internet.
Isn't it, though?
I see people are still desperately clinging to this "websites aren't public services" narrative but as the years go by it's becoming increasingly clear that it just isn't entirely true.
The whole logic behind the "it's a private space/service so they can deny service to whoever they want" argument is that, if a user is denied service, they can seek service from an alternative provider elsewhere, usually without much difficulty. If the other providers also don't want to provide the service, fair enough. But this isn't really the case in the modern web because you often don't have alternatives. If you are denied service by cloudflare, you can't just go to another cloudflare down the street. Same with many other major online services that are effectively monopolies in their field.
... Why not? Fastly, AWS, CDN77, Google, etc all still exist.
Even ignoring the fact that none of them have a free plan, they all cost significantly more than cloudflare's base paid plan and almost certainly provide less. I can't even see Fastly's prices without signing up.
Nope. Do we elect the board? Do they charge mandatory taxes in the currency only they can emit and will they have an armed force arest you if you don't pay?
> But this isn't really the case in the modern web because you often don't have alternatives.
Facebook and Google really are a monopoly in the West and that's a problem with must deal with. Cloudflare, thankfully, is far from being a monopoly anywhere but in our tech bubble.
Illinois has to allow the Nazis to march: they are the government.
You don't have to allow nazis into your private party, nor do you have to publish their books.
You, as an individual, and corporations as entities are emphatically not the government.
The US Government has laws in place like this because those were written as founding principles and interpreted in certain ways by our legal system over time. That's only it. But it's all calvinball in the end. Congress could strike the 1A from the constitution, or all our courts could start ruling against the 1A tomorrow. We're just making it up as we go. Now this would likely result in a mass uprising, but that's besides the point.
The only reason why this is a thing right now is because CloudFlare(a) is in a position to stop digital protection of Kiwi Farms (and thus force them to fully own the consequences of their speech), and (b) has explicitly chosen not to do anything about it, much to the chagrin of myself and a whole lot of other people. My belief, as is the belief of others, is that Kiwi Farms are violating their TOS and should be removed. That's it. CloudFlare, like Calvin when playing Calvinball, is deciding to make it up as they go, and we aren't happy about that.
The first point may be technically true but the second doesn't leave room for the possibility that CF might have a more absolutist approach to free speech in which case they find it more immoral to remove content/protections from one of their customers that the content itself. Since neither you nor I work at CF, we probably have to take them at their word in this press release. Trying to adjudicate what violates their TOS, what is immoral for them to do, or what is good/bad for their business from the outside is a foolish exercise.
There was a time the ACLU defended neo-nazis and it wasn't because they agreed with them. Just another aside, if you feel this strongly about CF, then don't patronize them if you are in the position to not have to use their services, but I'd avoid taking a moral stand only when its expedient to do so if you otherwise don't live with that level of conviction (presumably you didn't stay at Microsoft for 6 years because you aligned with them morally).
My position is this. That is not a good stance to take. And people should now use their wallet to influence Cloudflare's leadership to reconsider their extreme position. The small part I can play in that today is already underway, so it's not just words on hacker news, no.
Do you think people should vote with their wallet in regards to the ACLU? What about the idea of public defenders generally? Should society not be footing the bill to be provide legal defense to hate crime offenders/rapists/etc?
Your characterization that their position is extreme is also dishonest. It's been the MO for American citizens/corporations/institutions and ingrained in 20th/21st century American jurisprudence to take a neutral stance when it comes to providing a service or defending rights. It's, frankly, one of the last few admirable things about our society.
You can promote an activist mindset if you'd like, but you should also consider that your opinion is only shared by a vocal minority and the fracturing of commerce into parallel economies won't benefit you or the communities you care about the way you think it will. I'm not sure what I need from CF, but after reading your comments/opinions on the issue, I'm inclined to just order shit from them now.
Here is a more direct question: why is it a good idea for a company to exercise censorial power if the content is not otherwise illegal? Reminder that we are talking about companies that run infrastructure not something like Twitter that hide behind BS "community guidelines"
> CloudFlare (a) is in a position to stop digital protection of Kiwi Farms
So too is Illinois to stop police protection of Nazi activists. I ask again, why SHOULD one organization protect speech and another shouldn't, given our agreement that any specific laws/amendments do not dictate what SHOULD happen?
Now that we've established that nothing matters, the reason is because a lot of us feel that Cloudflare should do something about it.
You personally find it ethical to systemically take a stance on the exact same speech in some situations and not in others for what you yourself describe as arbitrary and meaningless distinctions. Why?
If counter protestors show up and shout over the Nazis, Illinois is not morally required to silence the counter protestors so the Nazis can speak.
And if Nazis want to gather on private land, Illinois is not morally required to force the private landowner to permit that.
The morality of equality is compromised by the practical execution of law. It’s legal for a cop to pull a gun and force you to the ground; it’s not legal for you to do that to me (or vice versa). So we place constraints on when the government can apply those special powers.
For what it's worth, you can't be just a little bit Nazi.
It's like poop in ice cream: if you have ten tons of ice cream and an ounce of poop, if you mix them together, you've just created ten tons of poop.
In that case your argument fails, because there are regulations for how much rat feces are permitted in processed food, and just FYI, it's NOT zero.
Islam is incompatible with tolerance. Women's rights, depictions of Muhammed, etc.
If we accept the paradox of tolerance you must either be anti-Islam or the paradox is broken.
The fix is not new and is older than the paradox of tolerance: your rights end where mine begin. You have a right to write and speak what you will - I have a right to not listen. I do not have a right to stop speech I find offensive. Islam has a right to exist and take offense, but it may not use violence or law to get it's way.
Per the existing law, but given the Constitution can be changed, should they have to allow? Arguing they have to because the law currently prevents them from doing otherwise seems a different argument than it being good for government to have such restrictions because the benefits are worth more than the detriments (or vice versa).
> I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts or simply ignorance
Also, my guess is ignorance. Cloudflare is essentially restoring a platform on the internet that is difficult to get and keep for small creators. Their posts on this topic strike me as the super libertarian types who take no issue with privatizing public services.
I see more than one political group purposefully conflate this in order to push their own agendas.
For example, when a private company says that won't tolerate hate they claim "free speech" infringement but when government silences a critic they don't like it's "law and order."
in a post that further goes out of its way to say, "look at these morally good things we're doing (Galileo and Athenian) that aren't themselves part of the abuse process, and then has their logos as two of the three images in the article body? Okay, sure, this may not strictly be marketing material insofar as it's not an ad the marketing team purchased, but c'mon, did ya'll put those in place to help explain the abuse process or because they're nice "but look, we also do good things!" window dressing on an article you think otherwise may not have the best reception?
Yes, they market some other things they do.
> Another automated moderation system that checks for certain keywords? Ask the LGBTQ people banned from Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Google/etc. if those systems really work all that well.
This is so, so true. Both automated and human review systems often times don't handle or protect minority users well.
(Reasonable Disclosure: I still terminated my services with CloudFlare over this.)
Even paying victims can't fix all harms. Never mind donating to someone else.
I'm sure their LGBTQ+ employees will appreciate that when they get doxxed, swatted, and harassed every hour of the day and night because they're providing critical resources to the groups doing so.
Their position probably really does come from genuine belief in principles of anti-censorship and free speech, but the version that LGBTQ+ people are gonna hear from them is that every death threat, every picture of them taken without their knowledge, every coordinated campaign of harassment, every SWAT officer pointing a gun at their face when they wake up, every suicide after years of abuse, has the full backing and support of a multi-billion dollar corporation, and there's nothing they can do about it. And they're kinda right.
If that doesn't work make the part you don't like illegal. Enshrine something like the "right to be forgotten" stuff into law and make them take down threads if the people they refer to don't want them up.
I know it's hard to word something like a "right to be forgotten" without making it to broad and a tool for abuse of chilling speech but it seems worth the effort if the consequences are this dire.
If you would stop derailing the conversation with unfeasible solutions.
If you want an example for such targeting though, Liz Fong-Jones has a thread on Kiwifarms because she's outspoken and worked at Google (and thus being seen as more influential / more of a threat). The thread has also significantly slowed down after she left Google.
Read: to put a target on the back of anyone making an abuse report about the website.
If not Cloudflare, then someone else, that's the reality of it. We do not live in a world of no harm and never will we. All we can do is manage it.
When has this ever been a valid excuse for bad behavior?
Cloudflare loves to call back on the law when defending Kiwifarms, but then equate themselves to a public utility.
If the law intended for it, DDoS protection would be a public utility or at least a protected class of service that can't refuse customers. And if you say that it should be and the law is just lagging behind (and I'd tend to agree with you), I can say the same thing about the technical legality of a website that enabled and (indirectly) incentives doxing, harassment or even swatting (except on Kiwifarms, people might technically have a case for defamation, but good luck getting that prosecuted).
Why not? That particular service seems a lot like a volunteer fire brigade.
If they get rid of Kiwi Farms, ultimately it's not going to fix the problem. They're going to find a new, harder to harass vendor for CDN. Cloudflare's detractors are going to find a new website to talk about.
If you're talking about all websites that do this kind of thing, I have my doubts about how this would look in practice. Take down websites that use hate speech? Work to debunk hateful myths would likely get caught in that. Suspend websites that get X number of reports? Congrats, you've given botnets a far more effective tool for DDOS. Don't suspend those websites until a human analyzes them? That'd be ideal, although it seems like that's the system they have. Those humans appear to be instructed to only intervene when Cloudflare itself is the one causing harm. Kiwi Farms is hosted elsewhere using Cloudflare as a CDN.
This is a good thing. It raises the barrier of entry to do what they want to do. They will likely provide a worse service as well.
How so?
It will be harder to get protection, so fewer sites will be able to succeed.
> Our decision to disable access to content in hosting products fundamentally results in that content being taken offline, at least until it is republished elsewhere. Hosting products are subject to our Acceptable Hosting Policy. Under that policy, for these products, we may remove or disable access to content that we believe: [...] Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public.
Assuming we all agree that KF is reprehensible, the question is where is the line of moral obligation to stop supporting them. In the most reductive case, you could argue that anyone selling food or water to white supremacists is supporting white supremacy. Or that firefighters who put out a fire at a white supremacist's house are supporting white supremacy. But I don't think people generally consider that to be providing support, whereas they would consider, say, hosting a conference and paying white supremacists to speak at it as supporting white supremacists. So where is the exact line where it becomes "support"? It's ambiguous.
Cloudflare is in an unenviable position of being exactly on the line where moral obligation rests, further complicated by providing different products around hosting and DDOS mitigation. IMO, there is a clear distinction between hosting content and providing DDOS mitigation services, as the article suggests. And just as you wouldn't want your electric company unilaterally deciding that you were a white supremacist and cutting your power, I agree with CF's stance that they shouldn't be making extrajudicial decisions about which customers to use their DDOS protection.
This, incidentally, is why the term "racism" (and similar supremacist terms) must be understood to refer to embedded social structures that may include honest, and often honorable, people unwittingly perpetuating them and not just being mean to the target. So, the question you are in effect raising is how Cloudflare can be ANTI-transphobic and not simply trans-supporting, and whether it has a moral or other obligation to do so. To me, it's a very easy answer with an extremely difficult execution.
When you speak of honorable people unwittingly perpetuating racism, do you really mean grocery stores that don't perform ideological purity tests on their customers?
The harm of kiwi farms is centralized and immediate and obvious, the harm of centralized control is insidious, long-term, and surprises you without warning once you establish the precident years later.
Someone said The Daily Stormer and 8Chan are online today.[1] But this would mean Cloudflare can stop doing business with Kiwi Farms without limiting speech.
How is it the opposite?
Whether Cloudflare is hosting the content or mitigating DDoS attacks against it, they bear some responsibility for the content being accessible. I see no good reason for them to have different policies between their hosting and DDoS mitigation services if they actually care about not propagating the content they refuse to host.
> This policy seems to only apply to content that they host.
Yes, which is exactly what the parent commenter was saying.
Or do they? The CEO said CDN isn't hosting. But it fits the common definition.
I don't think that discussion can reasonably happen on this forum, but I think there are interesting philosophical positions that are valid that we should put against one another.
This is a false equivalence, because fire departments are public utilities provided and regulated by the state. Cloudflare is a private business. If Cloudflare was democratically elected by its constituents, and it was accountable and answerable to them, then I would agree with them that they have a responsibility to make their services available to all of their constituents, subject to the due process of law.
But they aren't a public utility, and they don't get democratically elected. Cloudflare is a private business, and it exists to capture the surplus value of keeping more websites online and marketing their security products to more corporations. They can do business with whoever they choose to. And they choose to do business with Kiwifarms. Honestly: in effect, Kiwifarms functions as a free success story for Cloudflare's sales folks—"Look at how many people hate this website, and yet they're still online, thanks to Cloudflare!". I think that's probably the reason that Cloudflare's support of Kiwifarms rankles so much with people who are victims of the website—the fact that Kiwifarms is still online is Cloudflare working exactly as intended, but amorally.
> For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation service we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them
Okay, you donated the fees, but why continue to accept the money from the site that opposes LGBTQ+ rights in the first place? Cloudflare still got to keep the benefit of increased revenue, and a larger customer base, and the world still got worse. Did the donation they make actually offset the harm done to the world by keeping that site (whatever it is) online? It seems unlikely.
> In addition, I think it's touched on but Cloudflare is huge. Even if they changed their mind on terminating amoral customers, how would that go down? Another automated moderation system that checks for certain keywords?
No, it would go down, ideally, the same way it does today and the same way it did for the Daily Stormer and 8chan. Terminating services for customers like Kiwifarms is a big decision, and it's one that shouldn't be made lightly, and frankly: there just aren't that many harassment websites that are as big and as long-lived as Kiwifarms. I can maybe think of one or two others off the top of my head. I'm okay if Cloudflare decides to terminate one or two of the biggest, most important harassment sites using their platform per year—doing something is better than doing nothing.
I'm sorry, I'd only ever heard of Kiwifarms yesterday. I am also okay with that, but I do genuinely believe there will always be a next one. People forget they made the exact same comments before caving on 8chan and the Daily Stormer. As these incidents get closer together I predict we're reaching that 1-2 site a year rate. If I can backpeddle a little on my parent comment, I far less care about any of these specific websites than the implications of Cloudflare not giving the big "We hate to do this" speech beforehand.
Oh, but wait, CloudFlare HAS the resources to validate and act, since they know whose fees to send to rights organizations.
And as for being the fire department? Excuse me? They are a company that exists to make money, not a public service beholden to a specific, lawfully mandated social contract. Their first point is a false equivalency and they can go fuck themselves for even bringing that up.
This statement from them is PR fluff.
Paradox of tolerance. You must be _intolerant_ to these intolerant people or they will fuck up everything for everyone. Cloudflare is letting cancer of society erode public trust, just like every other hyper scale tech company, because businesses exist to make money.
Part of the reason for my position as stated above and throughout the thread. I believe that SPECIFICALLY at Cloudflare's scale, they have more control than most governments in the realm of speech. Therefore, they are MORALLY (not legally) required to enact the same social contract. I believe any alternative where they break that social contract will have unintentional repercussions for minority groups.
To have my position changed, I would need to be convinced those repercussions wouldn't happen in practice.
How much do you think Cloudflare donated for the 3 suicides caused by Kiwi Farms in the recent years?
Suicides that are awful, and were caused by Kiwi Farms. The quote I used clarified that Cloudflare's aim is to not profit from abhorrent behavior.
I'm curious what you think the "balancing" donation/action/whatever cloudflare could do to counteract the very real harms kf causes are?
This isn't a political action group that takes donations and lobbies. It's a site where people's personal information is offered up to anyone who wants it, knowing that many of those people want to do harm with it. The owners and moderators know all of this and both allow and encourage it.
I think this kind of "but we donate!" approach is both an admission that they enable harm, and a completely inadequate to the situation here.
Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcement. But this has been going on for years and nothing has been done, in spite of many efforts being made and many people literally going into hiding due to harassment from this site.
So how is cloudflare going to make this one right to their ERG?
I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan.
> Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcement. But this has been going on for years and nothing has been done, in spite of many efforts being made and many people literally going into hiding due to harassment from this site.
This is the specific contradiction I'm trying to avoid. It feels incredibly odd to me to look at a coordinated campaign of harassers and think "it should be easier for organized groups of people to control the conversation". You can look at my comments in this thread or in others, I'm totally cool every time hateful shitbags are taken off the internet and I fight back when they're defended. I'm just not in favor of any broad policy that puts one organization in control of speech.
I didn't say it was? I don't see why the fact that cf is paying for their ddos protection instead of kf paying for it themselves is really relevant to the enablement of harm.
Honestly that makes it even worse: in the other situation, cf is taking money from a bad actor and funneling it towards a good one (both allegedly). Here cf is paying expenses (probably in the marketing line of their expense sheet) to keep kf accessible, including storing, replicating, and distributing their content, doxes and all.
> This is the specific contradiction I'm trying to avoid.
I think this is a contradiction of your own making? The problem people have isn't that the targets of kf are being "silenced" in some Renaissance ideal sort of way. It's that they are put in a position of fearing for their own lives and the lives of the people around them. There's no contradiction here unless you think the people who want the site to stop are secret free speech absolutists.
Anyways, while we're talking about perfect worlds where police actually do anything about stuff like this and no one has to resort, in my perfect world the internet doesn't break because cf does, and cf isn't even in a position to arbitrate speech. But we can't always get what we want.
This is literally the only thing I'm advocating for. I'm a trans woman that openly speaks about my and others' experiences. Trust me when I say, codified systems for reporting abuse are themselves the target of the same abuse. I've gotten the "Sorry, we're leaving this up" from reporting anti trans content on Facebook. I've had comments saying sex != gender reported/removed so many times, a Reddit account I used straight up isn't allowed to comment anywhere anymore. All the YouTube shit you hear conservatives whine about straight up just scans the autogenerated transcript for any mention of political phrases like "LGBT" or sexually explicit language like might come up in discussing my transition. All these reasons are why I'm fine with Kiwi Farms coming down but I don't think Cloudflare should change their stance on avoiding it in almost all situations.
The donation thing is that Cloudflare refuses to profit off of this and is therefore incentivized to avoid such customers. Companies are always going to pick the path of greatest profit so engraining morality in that path is better than not doing it.
Trust me when I say I'm aware and that I have very specific reasons to feel the way I do.
But the thing is that cf absolutely is profiting off this. They provide this service to make themselves indispensable, to make themselves an attractive product for people to use. By holding the line here, they will drum up plenty of business that's really happy about their stance, even if it only toes the line kf crosses with impunity.
The goal of the campaign against cf (and anyone else providing them services) is to make it less profitable to provide services to kf. This is the only tool left in the capitalist world we live in.
What cf is doing here is less like advocating for free speech and more like the social version of providing a free open smtp relay. They obscure the true cost of doing something reprehensible.
And they do it at great financial expense completely by choice, because it likely drums up more business for them than it costs.
> For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation service we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them. We don't and won't talk about these efforts publicly because we don't do them for marketing purposes; we do them because they are aligned with what we believe is morally correct.
These are the two strongest points for me. The former is one I already believed, and the latter makes me more hopeful as someone in that specific minority community.
In addition, I think it's touched on but Cloudflare is huge. Even if they changed their mind on terminating amoral customers, how would that go down? Another automated moderation system that checks for certain keywords? Ask the LGBTQ people banned from Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Google/etc. if those systems really work all that well. All too often person A implying that X group deserves violence skirts the system, while the actual text calling out Person A's beliefs from an advocate is considered hate.