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.
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?