You have no idea how ironic this comment is considering the history of Cloudflare. I remember going to a talk by their CEO at Defcon years ago when Scientology was being DDoSed and he was bragging about providing CDN services to the Anonymous hacker groups that were behind the DDoS. Cloudflare didn't seem to care about free speech for the Scientologists. There was even a huge discussion about whether performing a DDoS was itself a version of free speech or not (this was assuming people were volunteering their computers to join the botnet, as was the case with the scientology protests).

It's funny you mention the megaphone thing too, as that is an example of free speech. People do this regularly. The person with the megaphone has the free speech right to shout over the person next to him- at least in public.

> Sure, you might celebrate when that’s done to someone you dislike, but a lot less appealing if you imagine it done to a cause you agree with.

The slippery slop fallacy is called a fallacy for a reason. What kills me though is that people on this site aren't nearly as upset about Cloudflare taking down Switter and other sex worker websites as they are about Kiwifarms. It makes it hard to take the free speech argument seriously when the people making it only care about it when the sites they visit get taken down.

In public, sure, but a website is explicitly private property, so the megaphone-DDoS move would in this case be trespassing and harassment.

And the slippery slope is a real problem, no matter how much people call it a fallacy. As we’ve seen countless times in history, the distance from viewing some group as less deserving of freedom than you, and actively persecuting them is short.

Free Speech is more complicated than that, at least in the US. The Supreme Court held in Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center that simply being private property does not by itself allow the owners to restrict speech.

> Over two decades ago, our state Supreme Court concluded that a privately owned shopping center that attracts large numbers of people to congregate in order to shop and take advantage of other amenities offered by the shopping center is the functional equivalent of the traditional town center, which historically is a public forum where persons can exercise the right to free speech. ( Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center (1979)

Further, the Supreme Court has found that putting a website on the internet grants a wide variety of privileges to the people using it. Specifically speaking, the Supreme Court held that if websites such as Linkedin make pages publicly accessible they can't use the legal system to stop access of those pages that they don't like- specifically, they can't stop bots from scraping by suing to get them to stop.

So if we're talking free speech I'm not sure we can count a website as private property in the sense you're talking about, and whether it would even matter if we could.

You're conflating a number of points here. California's State Constitution provides a positive right to speech. The Pruneyard case, concerning protests in an open-air shopping center, was upheld due to the Court deciding that the State Constitution's right to positive free speech does not conflict with the negative right to free speech outlined 1st Amendment under certain conditions (i.e. only using common areas accessible to the general public, not protesting inside storefronts, etc.) While it theoretically applies to other states with positive free speech rights, so far, the Pruneyard case has, in practice, only applied to California. Even then, Pruneyard does not apply when it comes to regulating the time, place, or manner of speech and may be rendered irrelevant for supermarkets. (https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...). And, as a result of Section 230, I certainly doubt Pruneyard applies to content providers, if it ever had any.

In addition, what the Supreme Court found in HiQ Labs vs LinkedIn in regards to obtaining publicly available information says nothing about pinging a website too death until its offline. We're both quite capable in separating the two.

IANAL, but pretty sure that DDoS attacks don’t count as “free speech” of some sort.

Something needs to replace it - the closest is the canary I think - as long as X hasn’t happened I am not threatened. As long as the student I know is doing worse than me hasn’t been put on academic probation, I am fine.

Canaries are everywhere and real.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is implicitly morally corrupt or a member of some interest grooup, I have no clue what switter is and i'm sure many others don't either, kiwifarms has been on the media for the entirety of the last week.

Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard aren’t themselves DDoSing KF, though. They are just turning their backs. If KF wanted their continued protection, they could have stopped stalking and harassing people. But they didn’t, so here we are.

And of course I wouldn’t be happy if a website I support were DDoSed. It’s perfectly consistent to celebrate when a murderer gets convicted and be outraged when an innocent person does. There’s a difference between good and bad things!

No one’s saying they are. But Cloudflare enjoys a virtual monopoly on affordable and reliable DDoS protection, and that is a very unhealthy thing for the open Internet. If you operate an online business and your comptetitors can somehow convince Cloudflare to drop you, they can have you taken offline, permanently, by paying a pittance to have you DDoS'ed.

I don’t think you can fairly call them a monopoly. It took me like three minutes to come up with seven different competitors offering DDoS protection. And that’s just top-of-mind companies, without even doing research into anyone I might not know offhand.

- https://www.fastly.com/products/ddos-mitigation

- https://aws.amazon.com/shield/

- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ddos-protection/ddos-...

- https://www.akamai.com/solutions/security/ddos-protection

- https://cloud.google.com/armor

- https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloud-internet-services

- https://www.rackspace.com/response/rackspace-ddos-mitigation...

But how many of these will actually fend of a full-scale DDoS attack on your behalf without sending you a five- or six-digit bill for the trouble afterwards?

Haven’t researched all the options, but there must be some reason that DDoS targets all tend to use Cloudflare.

Probably their continued love of defending the worst parts of the internet that makes them feel at home there.

At some point this is just going to become their entire reputation and good luck renewing all of those enterprise accounts and attracting new staff.

People and organisations generally don’t want to be associated with this and don’t see it as some great moral cause they want to get behind.

IBM, Rackspace and various other smaller players are just Cloudflare resellers.

Also, DDoS is a crime. Saying racist things isn't. We shouldn't blur the line here.

That probably depends a lot of the country. Both are illegal here in France (for racism, if it's insulting or hateful in particular)

If that counts, there are a bunch of reddit subs that are dedicated to hating Muslims, fat people, Indians, the religious(which as a Muslim is just full of casual racism and Muslim hate). No one seems to care. I don't know why we don't get these responses for minority issues. Racism has been a problem on the internet since the beginning and there is never such a push as these issues.

Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group.

Kiwi Farms absolutely incited imminent criminal activity (harassment, among other things) and made lots of specific threats against specifically targeted people and groups.

This is a false equivalence.

> when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group

Aren't these already crimes? Isn't the "hate crime" charge just a way to enhance the sentencing for someone thus convicted? And isn't the original charge required for this enhancement? Thus, mere "hate speech" in and of itself cannot be a crime?

> Kiwi Farms absolutely incited imminent criminal activity

According to you and some twitter threads. I'm not comfortable accepting this prima facie, though.

> This is a false equivalence.

Does Section 230 not apply to Kiwi Farms? Is Kiwi Farms actually guilty of crimes here, or is it specific forum users? If so, why are there no efforts to go after the users but just go directly to banning the entire site?

1. Yes, those are already crimes. You were making the claim that hate speech is never illegal. I was clarifying that there are caveats that take what would otherwise be free speech and turn them into actual crimes.

2. You don’t have to accept it prima facie. Go read the forums, they’re still up on Tor. Fair warning, I have, and they’re horrid.

3. Not when the mods and owners of KF are engaging in the very same. I do not know if law enforcement is looking into individual users or KF itself, but that’s not what we’re discussing. We are discussing the rights of a private company to not give a platform to a group of people they believe are committing or engaging in potentially criminal activity. CF doesn’t have to prove it. If CF is wrong, KF is welcome to find support elsewhere. Good luck.

Huh? I didn’t say hate speech was illegal. I said hate speech when it progressed to inciting crime was illegal.

(I edited the parent comment to include the word “never” to clarify my position)

Inciting harassment might be someone telling everyone to order pizzas and send them to an address. It wouldn't be posting a picture of someone's house with no context. While that might facilitate harassment, it doesn't actually incite it.

Agreed. And? KF actively encouraged and supported the former.

Can you provide any proof for your claims about advocating for imminent criminal activity? Ie something that would pass the Brandenburg test?

I’m not interested in going to KF again because I don’t want to read all their horrid shit (too much of that the past few days), but you are welcome to, while it is still up on Tor. Moon was a frequent participant, and KF’s stated goal was to abuse and dox and threaten people and their families and their friends until they drive someone to commit suicide.

Have you read through it? I have. I don’t want to do it again.

Sounds like we’re not going to come to a conclusion here, which is fine.

It is impossible to prove a negative. So the burden of proof is on the accusers, in this case.

To some extent, but "I haven't even looked" is a very tepid defense.

Well, I crawled a LOT of pages when it was up. Havent found any examples.

And as the claims are usually about it being widespread, it should be very easy to provide at least one example.

Companies are not prosecutors of crimes. They're entities acting in a society. The whole point of my comment is that there is already a clear line and by removing Kiwi Farms from circulation this way, rather than by government edict, we are observing it.

I am not saying people should be allowed to DDoS anyone, including Kiwi Farms, from a legality perspective. Illegal things are still illegal.

I am saying that companies which provide protection services shouldn't extend them to Kiwi Farms because they are societally not worth protecting.

Thats right - the fire departments should just stop protecting the houses of people you dislike so folks can burn them down in peace.

Fire departments are government agencies. I don't know how to be clearer about this: Government doesn't get to discriminate based on speech. Private entities do.

But you can't have it both ways. You can think firefighters should be a public entity run for the public good, or you can think firefighters ought to be private entities, and therefore that they should have discretion about who they provide service to. It'd be nonsense to say "they're private, except when they do things I don't like."

In the US, the way we apply this to private corporations is by calling them "utilities" and subjecting them to stringent regulation.

So do you support Cloudflare and other such companies being recognized as public utilities, like phone or electricity? Because that's what you're asking for, and honestly, I might take you up on it, even if this is the price. You just may not like what other regulations they might end up subjected to.

Many hospitals in the US are private entities.

They are absolutely forbidden to refuse emergency care to stabilize, and forbidden to turn away a woman in labor. By law. No matter how private they are, if they are open they must provide care or arrange for it to be provided.

Similar regulations cover many private businesses - only some of which are utilities.

Use whatever word you want, but Cloudflare is not regulated in the same way that a hospital is, and hospitals are not only regulated around who they can refuse service to. Regulations extend to the way that they advertise, which insurance they have to accept, what standards they have to follow in providing service, etc...

Banks are private companies too and they're regulated in regards to who they can turn away as a client. I would hazard a guess that Cloudflare isn't eager to be regulated in the same way that a bank is.

Keep in mind that for both hospitals and banks, the restrictions about what customers they can turn down are not as far-reaching as the 1st Amendment and public service restrictions are. What people are asking for with Cloudflare (don't take down a site's protection unless a court tells you to) is even stricter regulation than what a bank or a hospital has.

Can you think of any private entity where they're not allowed to turn down service to any customer unless they're first ordered to by a judge?

For what its worth, I disagree with your statements but you are engaging in good faith and I appreciate the back and forth.

Frankly, you are embodying desired HN behavior more than I am.

Cheers.

If this site and its users were transported back to the 50's, they would be begging ma bell and the baby bells to ban the phone calls of people they dislike. "They are too dangerous!" and "They are harming XXXXXX communities!"

If the alternative to this mob rule is regulation, then yes bring it on.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Voltaire. Today he would be castigated and crucified by well-meaning fools.

Did you know that regulators like the FCC frequently apply rules to the communications they regulate?[1] And that they do it based on a public-input formal rulemaking process?[2]

Phone companies are not exempt.[3][4]

You're essentially arguing against free speech as a concept just so that you get the outcome you want. You aren't going to escape from living in a society that sometimes finds things you're OK with objectionable. It's just a matter of who gets to pull the lever.

I don't honestly understand why Kiwi Farms, of all things, is the thing that's worth saving from this... but even if it were something I personally loved, there's not a way to. You can have the government regulate speech, or you can have society regulate it. There's never going to be a perfect free-for-all, and there shouldn't be.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr... [2] https://www.fcc.gov/about-fcc/rulemaking-process [3] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CFR-2012-title47-vol3/CF... [4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/223

Guess what happens with private fire departments

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39516346