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One is a tool that can be (and is being) used for all sorts of good purposes; run by mostly volunteers and whose entire reason for existence is not policing the

by yoo1I 11y ago

One is a tool that can be (and is being) used for all sorts of good purposes; run by mostly volunteers and whose entire reason for existence is not policing their network, because that would defeat the entire purpose of the endeavor. The other one is a for-profit organization who's CEO's rationalization for taking money from internet scum is that if he doesn't take it, someone else will [0]. And to be clear, you are not quoting their abuse policy correctly. They say they will MITM phishing and malware sites to insert warning banners and take down childporn. They will however not tell a scammer "Hi, please take your business elsewhere" based on some misguided "CloudFlare will save the internet"-fantasy. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/thoughts-on-abuse/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/thoughts-on-abuse/

Godel_unicode 11y ago
Both are services which are used by a variety of people for both good and nefarious reasons. To paint TOR as the white knights of the internet is at best incredibly naive. There is a good reason that most mature security operations groups maintain blocklists of TOR exit nodes (in case it's not clear, that reason is the amount of alerts triggered by traffic from those nodes, relative to any other set of addresses). Below is a direct quote from the article you have cited. It refutes your underlying premise, namely that cloudflare is in it for the money and doesn't care. The knee-jerk reaction that corporations take money for services, therefore they're evil, needs to die in fire. """ LulzSec and other problematic customers tend to sign up for our free service and we don't make a dime off of them. When they upgrade they usually pay with stolen credit cards."""
- yoo1I 11y ago
  Maybe my previous post might have not been especially nuanced for the sake of illustration. The point is: Tor is trying to provide a useful service that requires it to be very hard to block abuse, yet as you say: the publish their list of exit nodes and everyone is free to block them. CloudFlare on the other hands, could extremely easily respond to abuse requests the same way that almost every other legitimate network service provider responds to them: investigate abuse by their users and terminate malicious users. You misunderstood: corporations taking money for services is excellent. Corporations continuing to provide service for criminals even after they've been notified of, and have acknowledged that they are hosting problematic customers mixed in with their legitimate customers is extremely problematic. They're not evil, they have responsibility.

by yoo1I 11y ago

Godel_unicode 11y ago

Both are services which are used by a variety of people for both good and nefarious reasons. To paint TOR as the white knights of the internet is at best incredibly naive. There is a good reason that most mature security operations groups maintain blocklists of TOR exit nodes (in case it's not clear, that reason is the amount of alerts triggered by traffic from those nodes, relative to any other set of addresses). Below is a direct quote from the article you have cited. It refutes your underlying premise, namely that cloudflare is in it for the money and doesn't care. The knee-jerk reaction that corporations take money for services, therefore they're evil, needs to die in fire. """ LulzSec and other problematic customers tend to sign up for our free service and we don't make a dime off of them. When they upgrade they usually pay with stolen credit cards."""

yoo1I 11y ago
Maybe my previous post might have not been especially nuanced for the sake of illustration. The point is: Tor is trying to provide a useful service that requires it to be very hard to block abuse, yet as you say: the publish their list of exit nodes and everyone is free to block them. CloudFlare on the other hands, could extremely easily respond to abuse requests the same way that almost every other legitimate network service provider responds to them: investigate abuse by their users and terminate malicious users. You misunderstood: corporations taking money for services is excellent. Corporations continuing to provide service for criminals even after they've been notified of, and have acknowledged that they are hosting problematic customers mixed in with their legitimate customers is extremely problematic. They're not evil, they have responsibility.