Also, I find it hard to believe that a legal team would all of a sudden decide 3 days after they publically announce they wouldn't remove security services from a customer that one customer who has basically been the same for god only knows how long needs to have those services removed. I honestly, would be surprised if the original announcement hadn't already had input from legal. So if legal thought this customer was so bad, why wouldn't they have it done before they publically say they won't do it.
I think the twitter mobbing of CloudFlare worked.
And about that decision, he said this:
> Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
> Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
This is kind of dubious as a basic ethical position (if you think it’s bad just don’t do it) but note that it’s not entirely ridiculous as if it’s legal, others can and will pressure you to do it. Whereas if you cede the right to do a thing, you can’t be coerced by an angry mob to do it.
>Whereas if you cede the right to do a thing
Perhaps we shouldn't be hurrying to get rid of freedom of association.
Truth is he likes the money, and the power. That's why he has it.
The usage of weev's the trial is also pretty absurd and manipulative, given that his trial wasn't really related to the daily stormer, but about hacking, so much so that the EFF[0] defended him.
[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/weevs-case-flawed-begi...
>The usage of weev's the trial is also pretty absurd and manipulative, given that his trial wasn't really related to the daily stormer, but about hacking, so much so that the EFF[0] defended him.
Pretty sure most smart people have already distanced themselves from the EFF at this point, so that's not very convincing.
EFF, despite getting repeatedly called out by several top experts, spent years pushing downright dangerous disinformation via their "secure messaging scorecard". Not exactly a trustworthy organisation.
It was also a bizarre choice to defend weev, both from a legal and moral point of view. tptacek explained it well at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5978686
Then why link the slurs at all to accompany the argument?
> It was also a bizarre choice to defend weev, both from a legal and moral point of view. tptacek explained it well at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5978686
On that same page you linked there are about as many people in favor as against, tptacek's word is not the law regardless of his competency, and it sure wasn't as uncontroversial as you make it out to be.
It would be silly to say there are definitely no Nazis in a company above a certain size. It's easy to fire them as soon as you know about them, but a lot of shitheads know to fly under the radar, so you can't really proactively hunt them out.
As a CF customer, I am far more concerned with a policy or precedent of capriciously cutting off customers than a policy of defending "bad" customers.
So yes, they worried about their income.
Cloudflare is a public company. I can tell you from being in a position to know this at a small company, but the "vendor review / procurement process" that happens to acquire a new service is non-trivial and usually offers several checkpoints to make sure that you're only onboarding vendors that meet strict criteria. One of those criteria is "not being embroiled in an obviously bad PR scandal easily revealed by a basic Google search."
CloudFlare is public and that means that their shareholders have the final say, not the individual customers. If shareholders see that CloudFlare's revenue is declining or that key customers are leaving, and there's an obvious reason why that's happening, well, that's the answer to who has the most say.
The whole operational plan that @SleepingGiants had during the Trump administration was to systematically identify corporate links and associations, and to highlight them to PR and legal teams who knew how this worked. "Cancellation" works not because individuals are easily moved by emotional arguments. It works because most companies answer to shareholders, and most shareholders care about value and growth. The company has a fiduciary duty to drive value for shareholders. When those stars align, obvious reasons why value is being artificially capped don't become "hard decisions." They become easy ways to increase value.
There are very few companies that can successfully hold an ideology. When they do hold an ideology, that ideology is usually aligned with some market force. Apple advertises privacy as its ideology because it's seemingly aligned with shareholder value. The ideology becomes expensive or even net-negative commensurate with the value being driven.
I don’t know how popular this is, or at least how popular it should be.
Conviction is based on the extremely high bar of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is the standard for depriving a person of their liberty.
Society rightly does not operate at that standard. Conviction was never meant to be a proxy for whether you ought to do business with somebody.
Think about killers who “got off on a technicality,” where everyone knew they were guilty. Or open criminals who for whatever reason were unable to face a jury, like many mass shooters. It just doesn’t make sense to say “well the courts never formally convicted them so we have a duty to defend them.”
Sorry if this is long-winded. I am just alarmed by this trend of equating legal standards with social standards.
It simply made Cloudflare's position untenable - they are not piratebay but need customers.
Reason: twice I sent messages directly to appropriate teams at (large-companies) with something like "are you aware of what your ceo is doing at (link)" which was followed by the team sending a new response and ceo disappearing from that conversation.