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Indeed, it is the purpose of a court to follow due process, but not of a private entity. From CloudFlare's business standpoint, your decision makers should seri

by cft 11y ago

Indeed, it is the purpose of a court to follow due process, but not of a private entity. From CloudFlare's business standpoint, your decision makers should seriously weigh the reputation damage that this (perfectly legal) "willful negligence" attitude provides: a marketing director of your competitor pointed out that "CouldFlare is protecting most booters" in a phone call with me.

stcredzero 11y ago
Indeed, it is the purpose of a court to follow due process, but not of a private entity. Laws and courts constitute a minimum or a "floor" standard for civic and commercial behavior. A society that has due process in its laws and on its books, but whose civic and commercial institutions all exhibit draconian knee-jerk behaviors is succeeding at being benevolent and just to the same extent that the Jim Crow south enfranchised black people. The comparison is unpleasant, but it is operationally correct. Laws on the books are only a skeleton. Values and principles have to be enacted by the flesh of civic and commercial society to be meaningful to people. The values embodied by the laws on the books have also to be alive in civic society, or else they are not truly meaningful. It's not enough for only the government and courts to embody humanist and democratic values. Civic and commercial society has to embody them too. (Ask yourself, are you a part of civic and commercial institutions and intellectual movements that embody humanist and democratic values? Or are they authoritarian and withhold justice and free speech from those the group deems "unworthy?")
- pjlegato 11y ago
  The idea that private individuals and businesses ought to conform to a prescribed set of moral values dictated by "society" is the very definition of "totalitarianism," no less because you give them nice-sounding names like "humanist and democratic," nor less because you attempt to create an emotional linkage of the reverse case to racism. Are people free, independent actors, or are they merely cogs in some vast social machine, constrainted to operate in their private lives and businesses according to the arbitrary dictates of some self-appointed group of sermonizing moralists?
  - alanwatts 11y ago
    >Are people free, independent actors, or are they merely cogs in some vast social machine, constrainted to operate in their private lives and businesses according to the arbitrary dictates of some self-appointed group of sermonizing moralists? False dichotomy.
    - pjlegato 11y ago
      It's not. Given that there exist moralizers who propose that everyone ought to have to follow a certain set of values, you can either: A) accept their authority and adopt their moral schema, or B) reject their authority. There are no other options. All other possibilities are subsumed by one of these two, in one way or another.
      - stcredzero 11y ago
        >> False Dichotomy > A) accept their authority and adopt their moral schema, or B) reject their authority. There are no other options. All other possibilities are subsumed by one of these two, in one way or another. Maybe you need to Google "False Dichotomy?"
        pjlegato 11y ago
        Rather than simply insulting me, you could perhaps propose exactly what the other options are, besides those two, that you think I'm missing here. I will then either accept that you are correct and admit that I was wrong, or else show how the additional options you propose are actually subsumed into one of the two options that I've named above.
        stcredzero 11y ago
        You can take the dialectic and synthesize an encompassing model. No authority need be accepted. No particular model need be wholly accepted. I can agree, for example, that certain forms of expression can make some people uncomfortable and exclude them from participation, yet not agree with the proposed dictate that all professional groups must now shun anyone who has ever defended such forms of expression. However, if the context of tolerance is expanded beyond such a narrow formulation, then my conclusion is that those forms of expression should also be defended and we should refrain from punishing the actors retroactively. (Even as we ask people to refrain from them in certain contexts.) You can expand such a discussion into emotional, psychological, and historical realms, as well as those of personal experience. It's always possible to expand the context of a discussion, since it's impossible for a person to understand every context at once. I did this once with my ex-girlfriend's right-wing Christian mom. She was willing to listen to the plight of a previous ex-girlfriend's family and it changed her outlook. I've also seen it happen with a homophobic woman from rural Oklahoma who became best friends with a gay activist man. It doesn't mean you have to agree on everything, but there is an exercise of self-awareness around the ease with which one human can "dehumanize" another in their own mind. Civil society is generally better served by civic discourse and less well served by shunning and actions usually shown to "the enemy." In fact, the root of social injustice is generally the propensity of people to do this in their minds. ("othering") I hope that is a good demonstration.
DanielDent 11y ago
Do I want to see booters online? Of course not. But if CloudFlare were to shut them down without due process, that would damage their credibility - to the point where I would feel uncomfortable doing business with them. I'm sure there's a group of people where CloudFlare's stance is damaging to their reputation. But there's also a group of people where any other stance would damage CloudFlare's reputation. Think also from the customer standpoint: people who need DDoS protection are people who are having their site shutdown without due process (by criminals who launch DoS attacks). When the company you hire to fix the problem becomes part of the problem, it's not good - and they would be part of the problem if they offered a 'send us an email and we shut down our users' denial of service attack vector.
- kbuck 11y ago
  Either way, CloudFlare is a part of the problem. They're either protecting booter services (thus necessitating your use of DDoS protection in the first place) or terminating the booter sites without "due process". It's relevant to mention that CloudFlare already does terminate a class of sites without "due process": malware hosts. What makes malware hosts that much worse than booters? Answer: CloudFlare's IPs can get blacklisted for it.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    Is it of comparable difficulty to reliably empirically establish 1) malware hosting and 2) operating a booter site?
    - kbuck 11y ago
      I'd say yes: if you visit a purported malware URL and you are served malware, then it is a malware site. If you visit a purported booter site URL and it advertises booter services, then it is a booter. If the booter sites start trying to hide their identity, fine, I can see not removing that without proof. That will also severely injure the booter's signup rate, though.
  - yoo1I 11y ago

by cft 11y ago

stcredzero 11y ago

Indeed, it is the purpose of a court to follow due process, but not of a private entity. Laws and courts constitute a minimum or a "floor" standard for civic and commercial behavior. A society that has due process in its laws and on its books, but whose civic and commercial institutions all exhibit draconian knee-jerk behaviors is succeeding at being benevolent and just to the same extent that the Jim Crow south enfranchised black people. The comparison is unpleasant, but it is operationally correct. Laws on the books are only a skeleton. Values and principles have to be enacted by the flesh of civic and commercial society to be meaningful to people. The values embodied by the laws on the books have also to be alive in civic society, or else they are not truly meaningful. It's not enough for only the government and courts to embody humanist and democratic values. Civic and commercial society has to embody them too. (Ask yourself, are you a part of civic and commercial institutions and intellectual movements that embody humanist and democratic values? Or are they authoritarian and withhold justice and free speech from those the group deems "unworthy?")

pjlegato 11y ago
The idea that private individuals and businesses ought to conform to a prescribed set of moral values dictated by "society" is the very definition of "totalitarianism," no less because you give them nice-sounding names like "humanist and democratic," nor less because you attempt to create an emotional linkage of the reverse case to racism. Are people free, independent actors, or are they merely cogs in some vast social machine, constrainted to operate in their private lives and businesses according to the arbitrary dictates of some self-appointed group of sermonizing moralists?
- alanwatts 11y ago
  >Are people free, independent actors, or are they merely cogs in some vast social machine, constrainted to operate in their private lives and businesses according to the arbitrary dictates of some self-appointed group of sermonizing moralists? False dichotomy.
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    It's not. Given that there exist moralizers who propose that everyone ought to have to follow a certain set of values, you can either: A) accept their authority and adopt their moral schema, or B) reject their authority. There are no other options. All other possibilities are subsumed by one of these two, in one way or another.
    - stcredzero 11y ago
      >> False Dichotomy > A) accept their authority and adopt their moral schema, or B) reject their authority. There are no other options. All other possibilities are subsumed by one of these two, in one way or another. Maybe you need to Google "False Dichotomy?"
      - pjlegato 11y ago
        Rather than simply insulting me, you could perhaps propose exactly what the other options are, besides those two, that you think I'm missing here. I will then either accept that you are correct and admit that I was wrong, or else show how the additional options you propose are actually subsumed into one of the two options that I've named above.
        stcredzero 11y ago
        You can take the dialectic and synthesize an encompassing model. No authority need be accepted. No particular model need be wholly accepted. I can agree, for example, that certain forms of expression can make some people uncomfortable and exclude them from participation, yet not agree with the proposed dictate that all professional groups must now shun anyone who has ever defended such forms of expression. However, if the context of tolerance is expanded beyond such a narrow formulation, then my conclusion is that those forms of expression should also be defended and we should refrain from punishing the actors retroactively. (Even as we ask people to refrain from them in certain contexts.) You can expand such a discussion into emotional, psychological, and historical realms, as well as those of personal experience. It's always possible to expand the context of a discussion, since it's impossible for a person to understand every context at once. I did this once with my ex-girlfriend's right-wing Christian mom. She was willing to listen to the plight of a previous ex-girlfriend's family and it changed her outlook. I've also seen it happen with a homophobic woman from rural Oklahoma who became best friends with a gay activist man. It doesn't mean you have to agree on everything, but there is an exercise of self-awareness around the ease with which one human can "dehumanize" another in their own mind. Civil society is generally better served by civic discourse and less well served by shunning and actions usually shown to "the enemy." In fact, the root of social injustice is generally the propensity of people to do this in their minds. ("othering") I hope that is a good demonstration.

DanielDent 11y ago

Do I want to see booters online? Of course not. But if CloudFlare were to shut them down without due process, that would damage their credibility - to the point where I would feel uncomfortable doing business with them. I'm sure there's a group of people where CloudFlare's stance is damaging to their reputation. But there's also a group of people where any other stance would damage CloudFlare's reputation. Think also from the customer standpoint: people who need DDoS protection are people who are having their site shutdown without due process (by criminals who launch DoS attacks). When the company you hire to fix the problem becomes part of the problem, it's not good - and they would be part of the problem if they offered a 'send us an email and we shut down our users' denial of service attack vector.

kbuck 11y ago
Either way, CloudFlare is a part of the problem. They're either protecting booter services (thus necessitating your use of DDoS protection in the first place) or terminating the booter sites without "due process". It's relevant to mention that CloudFlare already does terminate a class of sites without "due process": malware hosts. What makes malware hosts that much worse than booters? Answer: CloudFlare's IPs can get blacklisted for it.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  Is it of comparable difficulty to reliably empirically establish 1) malware hosting and 2) operating a booter site?
  - kbuck 11y ago
    I'd say yes: if you visit a purported malware URL and you are served malware, then it is a malware site. If you visit a purported booter site URL and it advertises booter services, then it is a booter. If the booter sites start trying to hide their identity, fine, I can see not removing that without proof. That will also severely injure the booter's signup rate, though.
- yoo1I 11y ago