5 ms·

Regardless of the political causes in question, it's nice to see that the CEO is being held accountable. And he seems to be a responsible person, judging by the

Regardless of the political causes in question, it's nice to see that the CEO is being held accountable. And he seems to be a responsible person, judging by the concern he expressed over his own actions. It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. It's much harder to explain why we really should stop and think before trying to enact vigilante justice. This is one of the reasons why; vigilante justice is hard to enforce equally and fairly, and raises the question of how impartial and fair the vigilante is.

gragas 9y ago
>It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. That seems to be the meme of the decade. Do you think all republicans are Nazis too? You're living in a bubble. Think for yourself.
icebraining 9y ago
This doesn't seem to be the CEO being held accountable, seems to be another group who wants to razzle-dazzle the court by taking his words out of context.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I'm not sure how it's out of context. Once you're on record as saying you decided to police content in one case, it becomes a lot harder to use "we don't police content" as a defense in another case.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    It's actually quite easy to defend, using another HN trope that somehow never appears in these threats: "Read 'Whataboutism' on Wikipedia".
    - Tech-Noir 9y ago
      Pointing out an apparent contradiction in policy - claiming one thing but doing another - isn't whataboutism. Whataboutism would be, for example, CF attempting to defend retaining dodgy/illegal sites by attacking ALS for its dodgy/illegal origins.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Except that's not Cloudflare's defense. Cloudflare's defense was "we're just a cache, not a provider, so we can't shutdown these sites, as they don't need us to work". And now ALS is grabbing the CEO's statement that they have booted the Daily Stormer off the Internet and going "aha, so you can shutdown sites". Which is a misleading interpretation - they still can't, they just know that in this case the Daily Stormer will be DDoS'ed to hell if they remove their protection.
    - 21 9y ago
      The other side is not asking Cloudflare to shutdown the sites, just to terminate their accounts and not provide service to them. https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assisting-pirate-sites-160823/ https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assist...
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Right, but Cloudflare's position is that they're not providers, they're just an intermediate, and therefore they forward DMCA takedown requests to the actual hosting provider. Not being able to shutdown the sites is a fact that helps establish their position as mere intermediates.
Clubber 9y ago
>It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. We fought the Nazis in 1941-1945. These guys aren't Nazis, they're angry, misguided white people trying to look tough. Why is this an important distinction? If we as a society are going to upend core values and norms, we need to have a damn good reason. If I were a cynic (which I sometimes am), I would say this guy was trying to ride a political wave and it is now biting him (and us) in the ass. DCMA takedown without a warrant is bad for everybody. It sounds like there is a decent chance he just squandered that to score a political point that no one will remember 6 months from now. Politics and business don't mix, regardless of how much of a "slam dunk" it seems.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  I'm a german who spent 6+ years of his school life continuously learning about nazis, lived for the first 25 years of his life in a town where i saw people in nazi attire on my way home or shopping every single day and always kept a key ring at the read, and is from a voting district that voted 20%+ for a party whose leadership explicitly hires neo nazis as security for demonstrations, a town where the lamp posts on the 200m way from my apartment to the shopping centers call for violence against foreigners. And i have to say: Those guys are nazis. They believe in fascism being the good and right way of the world. They hate people who're unlike them. Don't try to sugarcoat them.
  - olivermarks 9y ago
    The central issue here is 'content neutrality'. Prince the Cloudflare CEO is an attorney so he knew what he was saying when he disabled the dns. There are huge numbers of people with strong political beliefs of all persuasions out there, including the racist isolationist nationalists you have to co exist alongside. In the US society where free speech is enshrined in the constitution, it is a very slippery slope to suppress that right to speech. I grew up alongside lots of violent skinheads in the UK (and got knocked about by them unless I ran very fast). I am absolutely for protecting free speech, because for every apparently clear cut case of reprehensible online behavior - racism, child abuse, snuff videos etc - there is someone else with a legitamate voice who will be suppressed. Here is an example - syriangirl, who has been removed from Facebook. https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g Speking via youtube on a channel called russianinsider' The lifeblood of democracy is free speech. We've ignored extremist dialog for decades, if we suppress it we glamorize it and it goes underground, not away. Allowing free speech means the ability to argue with people about their views as 'rock against racism' in the UK during the 70's proved before the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism That popular movement was inclusive to all and celebrated the anomaly that English skins loved jamaican ska and reggae. It pulled people to together and humiliated the far right fringe...

gragas 9y ago

>It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. That seems to be the meme of the decade. Do you think all republicans are Nazis too? You're living in a bubble. Think for yourself.

icebraining 9y ago

This doesn't seem to be the CEO being held accountable, seems to be another group who wants to razzle-dazzle the court by taking his words out of context.

ghaff 9y ago
I'm not sure how it's out of context. Once you're on record as saying you decided to police content in one case, it becomes a lot harder to use "we don't police content" as a defense in another case.
- matt4077 9y ago
  It's actually quite easy to defend, using another HN trope that somehow never appears in these threats: "Read 'Whataboutism' on Wikipedia".
  - Tech-Noir 9y ago
    Pointing out an apparent contradiction in policy - claiming one thing but doing another - isn't whataboutism. Whataboutism would be, for example, CF attempting to defend retaining dodgy/illegal sites by attacking ALS for its dodgy/illegal origins.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Except that's not Cloudflare's defense. Cloudflare's defense was "we're just a cache, not a provider, so we can't shutdown these sites, as they don't need us to work". And now ALS is grabbing the CEO's statement that they have booted the Daily Stormer off the Internet and going "aha, so you can shutdown sites". Which is a misleading interpretation - they still can't, they just know that in this case the Daily Stormer will be DDoS'ed to hell if they remove their protection.
  - 21 9y ago
    The other side is not asking Cloudflare to shutdown the sites, just to terminate their accounts and not provide service to them. https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assisting-pirate-sites-160823/ https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assist...
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Right, but Cloudflare's position is that they're not providers, they're just an intermediate, and therefore they forward DMCA takedown requests to the actual hosting provider. Not being able to shutdown the sites is a fact that helps establish their position as mere intermediates.

Clubber 9y ago

>It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. We fought the Nazis in 1941-1945. These guys aren't Nazis, they're angry, misguided white people trying to look tough. Why is this an important distinction? If we as a society are going to upend core values and norms, we need to have a damn good reason. If I were a cynic (which I sometimes am), I would say this guy was trying to ride a political wave and it is now biting him (and us) in the ass. DCMA takedown without a warrant is bad for everybody. It sounds like there is a decent chance he just squandered that to score a political point that no one will remember 6 months from now. Politics and business don't mix, regardless of how much of a "slam dunk" it seems.

Mithaldu 9y ago
I'm a german who spent 6+ years of his school life continuously learning about nazis, lived for the first 25 years of his life in a town where i saw people in nazi attire on my way home or shopping every single day and always kept a key ring at the read, and is from a voting district that voted 20%+ for a party whose leadership explicitly hires neo nazis as security for demonstrations, a town where the lamp posts on the 200m way from my apartment to the shopping centers call for violence against foreigners. And i have to say: Those guys are nazis. They believe in fascism being the good and right way of the world. They hate people who're unlike them. Don't try to sugarcoat them.
- olivermarks 9y ago
  The central issue here is 'content neutrality'. Prince the Cloudflare CEO is an attorney so he knew what he was saying when he disabled the dns. There are huge numbers of people with strong political beliefs of all persuasions out there, including the racist isolationist nationalists you have to co exist alongside. In the US society where free speech is enshrined in the constitution, it is a very slippery slope to suppress that right to speech. I grew up alongside lots of violent skinheads in the UK (and got knocked about by them unless I ran very fast). I am absolutely for protecting free speech, because for every apparently clear cut case of reprehensible online behavior - racism, child abuse, snuff videos etc - there is someone else with a legitamate voice who will be suppressed. Here is an example - syriangirl, who has been removed from Facebook. https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g Speking via youtube on a channel called russianinsider' The lifeblood of democracy is free speech. We've ignored extremist dialog for decades, if we suppress it we glamorize it and it goes underground, not away. Allowing free speech means the ability to argue with people about their views as 'rock against racism' in the UK during the 70's proved before the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism That popular movement was inclusive to all and celebrated the anomaly that English skins loved jamaican ska and reggae. It pulled people to together and humiliated the far right fringe...