14 ms·

On the one hand, I like the idea of a free, open, and distributed internet, where no one company or government has the power to control what is distributed or d

by Lazare 7y ago

On the one hand, I like the idea of a free, open, and distributed internet, where no one company or government has the power to control what is distributed or discussed. As the great John Gilmore said, more aspirationally than accurately even then: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." On the other hand, we don't live in that world, and I don't know how well it would work in practice if we did. In this world, corporations and governments have enormous power. Cloudflare has made it clear that it will use that power in a fairly limited and restrained way, but it will use it as it sees fit. Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for.

sysbin 7y ago
>Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for. Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions and where denial of service attacks become used against these hosting providers. Losing protection from anti-ddos service(s) becomes a process to eliminate the unpopular opinions being expressed. I think this is dangerous recourse and even if there are competitor services like cloudfare. There are limits in services available and state actors can understand this problem. Then make it impossible for unpopular opinions to be expressed by either orchestrating what's needed to get the anti-ddos services to resent their customers or by other means. Me personally, I'm alright with 8chan being deleted from the internet but I don't think that will even solve the problem. People with poor quality of life will continue being radicalized and do these acts of revenge in their eyes against a system that made them live in pain (somehow unjust to their views). I think we just need to improve quality of life for people equally without leaving some people left behind because of whatever circumstances. Otherwise people feel the need to leave with sometimes a couple bangs.
- untog 7y ago
  > Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions Maybe it won't! I feel like every time a controversial site gets shut down message boards are flooded with slippery slope arguments, but by and large I haven't seen it ever transpire.
  - sysbin 7y ago
    Yours & my lifetime are limited. How many controversial topics can we recall that we lived through and where they became accepted overtime? What medium was used at the time and was it the popular communication method for the time. I'm sure historically there was a similar fight with what mediums were available at the time. Burning books or just killing someone who speaks out. The internet can be the only method nowadays where people with little finances can make a loud enough voice be heard and there are still unpopular views I'm worried won't ever get accepted if people are not being cautious about throwing away measures. That's why the slippery slope argument is worth me typing. Even if maybe it won't!
  - kart23 7y ago
    I'd argue reddit is a decent example. They banned some very hateful subs, and then later started banning subs because they 'were not good for advertising' see r/waterniggas.
    - untog 7y ago
      That's not a slippery slope, though. That's Reddit banning subs for two different reasons. I'd they banned subs for hateful content then changed the definition of "hateful content" to include things advertisers object to then it would be. But if they're publicly stating that they're doing it because of advertisers then it's not really related.
      - tidepod12 7y ago
        Any time reddit says they are removing something due to "hateful content", it's just PR speak for "we got some media/advertiser backlash for this content so we are removing it". Reddit was notoriously infested with white supremacist subs, jailbait subs, pics of dead people subs, and more, and they were all brought up to the admins many times, and the admins never took any action on this hateful content until CNN et al started writing articles about it. It's not entirely unlike this situation with Cloudflare, really. These companies talk a big game about their principles and morals, but at the end of the day the only principle they strictly adhere to is the principle of public backlash.
- sagichmal 7y ago
  It is disingenuous to describe white supremacy as "an unpopular opinion".
  - sysbin 7y ago
    I think unpopular opinions from life experiences are what gravitates people to whatever categorization and or label is placed upon them. Btw, the only reason I feel the needs to share my thoughts is because I have an unpopular opinion myself. Assisted death should become available for people that desire it. There are some sites I view that have resources for people that are ending their life and these sites suffer denial of service attacks. They started using cloudflare recently.
  - internet_user 7y ago
    It's certainly not an unpopular opinion at all.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      On Twitter “white supremacist” is synonymous with “white person”.
tyre 7y ago
This feels like a misunderstanding of the word freedom. Freedom in speech means that I can say what I want. It does _not_ mean that a hosting company has to host it or that a CDN has to optimize it or that a search company has to rank it or that an ad-network has to monetize it. Each of those players is free to do what they think is best with their time, resources, etc.; which often includes thinking of what "the public" will think of them doing (or not doing) a thing. Freedom does not mean that I have the "right" to be heard or the "right" to be amplified—either as much as the next person or at all. The net, as in a network of computers, is quite close to free. Being a part of a society is not. Ted Kaczynski was not arrested for writing manifestos beyond the pale of normative capitalism from a self-built cabin in Montana. He was arrested for sending bombs. The moment one person freely decides to harmfully affect others, those others can do something about it. It seems much of the hand-wringing about freedom—when we talk about the internet and corporations—is that extremist speech does not have access to the same megaphone, the same means of monetization (and therefore survival). And that…well that's what living in a society is all about. Are there bad parts about tech as we see it today? Absolutely! But it hardly seems like the problem is "not enough shit is allowed on the internet." I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  Should that mean a power company can cut off your power because they don't like what you've said? Should that mean the water company can cut your water off for criticizing them? Should that mean that a bank can refuse to give you a loan, because you said something bad, even if your credit is more than acceptable? ------------------------------- Remember this: its the extremist that the law is made around. And soon enough, the law will be wrapped around non-extremists and used as let another tool of influence and control. The worst part is that anyone who speaks against this sort of law is seen to be defending the extremists, and is seen as a despicable person - yet the criticizers never stop to think about the average Joe and Jane.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Power and water companies operate as public utilities for a reason. Cloudflare is not a public utility, nor should they be. Banks can absolutely decide not to do business you, for any reason that's not explicitly forbidden (protected classes, etc.)
ignoramous 7y ago
Cloudflare is committing itself to do as they are told by the governments, in the spirit of upholding the law [0] on govts' behalf (despite under no obligation to do so), if they deem fit. Whether this makes them reasonable, time will tell. Full marks to Cloudflare for so eloquently addressing this and covering themselves with as much grace as they could muster. If one reads between the lines, censorship is coming. This isn't different from what jgrahamc said a few months back in the news [1]. Signals a new era for Cloudflare, going from protector to arbitrator [2], for better or for worse. [0] for instance, it was and still is a crime to be a minority in some countries. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774347 [2] Not an expert, but it'd be nice if they allowed 30 to 90 day time period before termination, rather than doing it overnight?
- Jwarder 7y ago
  > still is a crime to be a minority in some countries. Do you have examples in mind? I have no doubt that this is the case, but I can't think of any examples.
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia and in spirit, persecution is a world wide phenomenon.
- thephyber 7y ago
  > Signals a new era for Cloudflare, going from protector to arbitrator They kicked off The Daily Stormer 2 years ago. I'm not sure anything changed today.
FourScore 7y ago
So you're willing to give unchecked control of online discourse to a private corporation?
- IntelMiner 7y ago
  As opposed to...what, exactly? A government funded Reddit? Which government would fund it? How would it be run?
  - noobermin 7y ago
    That is perhaps not a bad idea. If not government funded, a non-profit, like c-span.
  - Cakez0r 7y ago
    The government could fund educational programs to teach people to think critically about the content they see on the internet, then they wouldn't have to censor it.
    - mythrwy 7y ago
      The government already provides 12 years of (somewhat) compulsory education. Critical thinking skills still seem to be a rarity.
- edna314 7y ago
  Do we really need to talk about closing down a site where people encourage each other to kill other people (no matter who does it)? Why is it so important that there are no exceptions to freedom of speech? Seriously, I just don’t get how the purity of the concept of freedom of speech can be so important that it beats common sense.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    "Do we really need to talk about closing down a site where people encourage each other to kill other people" Oh, so you are in favor of shutting down all army related sites? Well, many pacifist would probably agree ..
ChainOfFools 7y ago
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." As if "The Net" is a perfect, neutral, self-supporting entity that behaves with mathematic predictability rather than a projection of the chaotic human society on which its existence depends. There is a widespread habit among futurists and technologists, perhaps arising from an appreciation for semantic economy and the anonymizing instinct to downplay associations between oneself and one's assertions, to use the passive voice when concocting reductive maxims of this sort. I believe many of the moral blind spots of technocratic thinking are connected to the peculiar tendency - revealed by this passive voice framing habit - to overlook or outright dismiss the role that human inputs play in the complex systems futurists propose as solutions to human problems.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  This is extra funny because in general anyone's internet access is trivially easy to take down with just a bunch of well sent and crafted routing control packets. Internet was not designed in an adversarial model.
- feanaro 7y ago
  I don't think this statement is ignoring human input. It's extrapolating the result based on what we have observed about the interaction of the technology and the participating humans so far, viewing them as a single system. The passive voice is in recognition that an individual has almost no control over this system as a whole.
raxxorrax 7y ago
We lived in that world until media pushed mentally ill people to the front. Look at the graphs reporting on racism and the surge of terror. They basically revived nationalistic movements for clicks. Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  > Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings. That is interesting, but just saying that it is so doesn't lend any credibility to the conclusion. If there is ample evidence, surely you should be able to present it?
  - CompanionCuuube 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_effect
- thephyber 7y ago
  > Look at the graphs http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
tripzilch 7y ago
But the power that Cloudflare has, is being one of the only services to offer protection against modern DoS attacks. If you're a somewhat controversial site (be it right extremist or LGBTQ or sex worker forum) you are going to be suffering these attacks. And then Cloudflare is your only option, or suffer being DoS-ed off line constantly. Correct me if I am wrong, but Cloudflare is the only serious option against heavy modern DoS attacks, right? Cause if you can go somewhere else, then sure Cloudflare do it's thing. But if you can't ... then that is way too much power for a random company to hold the gate over any kind of controversial group, anywhere on the political, cultural or global spectrum. Because we really needed another US corporation with runaway power, that'll balance things.

by Lazare 7y ago

sysbin 7y ago

>Given that, this seems like a reasonable exercise of that power, and that's about the best we can hope for. Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions and where denial of service attacks become used against these hosting providers. Losing protection from anti-ddos service(s) becomes a process to eliminate the unpopular opinions being expressed. I think this is dangerous recourse and even if there are competitor services like cloudfare. There are limits in services available and state actors can understand this problem. Then make it impossible for unpopular opinions to be expressed by either orchestrating what's needed to get the anti-ddos services to resent their customers or by other means. Me personally, I'm alright with 8chan being deleted from the internet but I don't think that will even solve the problem. People with poor quality of life will continue being radicalized and do these acts of revenge in their eyes against a system that made them live in pain (somehow unjust to their views). I think we just need to improve quality of life for people equally without leaving some people left behind because of whatever circumstances. Otherwise people feel the need to leave with sometimes a couple bangs.

untog 7y ago
> Maybe, this event may become the precedent for all future hosting providers of unpopular opinions Maybe it won't! I feel like every time a controversial site gets shut down message boards are flooded with slippery slope arguments, but by and large I haven't seen it ever transpire.
- sysbin 7y ago
  Yours & my lifetime are limited. How many controversial topics can we recall that we lived through and where they became accepted overtime? What medium was used at the time and was it the popular communication method for the time. I'm sure historically there was a similar fight with what mediums were available at the time. Burning books or just killing someone who speaks out. The internet can be the only method nowadays where people with little finances can make a loud enough voice be heard and there are still unpopular views I'm worried won't ever get accepted if people are not being cautious about throwing away measures. That's why the slippery slope argument is worth me typing. Even if maybe it won't!
- kart23 7y ago
  I'd argue reddit is a decent example. They banned some very hateful subs, and then later started banning subs because they 'were not good for advertising' see r/waterniggas.
  - untog 7y ago
    That's not a slippery slope, though. That's Reddit banning subs for two different reasons. I'd they banned subs for hateful content then changed the definition of "hateful content" to include things advertisers object to then it would be. But if they're publicly stating that they're doing it because of advertisers then it's not really related.
    - tidepod12 7y ago
      Any time reddit says they are removing something due to "hateful content", it's just PR speak for "we got some media/advertiser backlash for this content so we are removing it". Reddit was notoriously infested with white supremacist subs, jailbait subs, pics of dead people subs, and more, and they were all brought up to the admins many times, and the admins never took any action on this hateful content until CNN et al started writing articles about it. It's not entirely unlike this situation with Cloudflare, really. These companies talk a big game about their principles and morals, but at the end of the day the only principle they strictly adhere to is the principle of public backlash.
sagichmal 7y ago
It is disingenuous to describe white supremacy as "an unpopular opinion".
- sysbin 7y ago
  I think unpopular opinions from life experiences are what gravitates people to whatever categorization and or label is placed upon them. Btw, the only reason I feel the needs to share my thoughts is because I have an unpopular opinion myself. Assisted death should become available for people that desire it. There are some sites I view that have resources for people that are ending their life and these sites suffer denial of service attacks. They started using cloudflare recently.
- internet_user 7y ago
  It's certainly not an unpopular opinion at all.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    On Twitter “white supremacist” is synonymous with “white person”.

tyre 7y ago

This feels like a misunderstanding of the word freedom. Freedom in speech means that I can say what I want. It does _not_ mean that a hosting company has to host it or that a CDN has to optimize it or that a search company has to rank it or that an ad-network has to monetize it. Each of those players is free to do what they think is best with their time, resources, etc.; which often includes thinking of what "the public" will think of them doing (or not doing) a thing. Freedom does not mean that I have the "right" to be heard or the "right" to be amplified—either as much as the next person or at all. The net, as in a network of computers, is quite close to free. Being a part of a society is not. Ted Kaczynski was not arrested for writing manifestos beyond the pale of normative capitalism from a self-built cabin in Montana. He was arrested for sending bombs. The moment one person freely decides to harmfully affect others, those others can do something about it. It seems much of the hand-wringing about freedom—when we talk about the internet and corporations—is that extremist speech does not have access to the same megaphone, the same means of monetization (and therefore survival). And that…well that's what living in a society is all about. Are there bad parts about tech as we see it today? Absolutely! But it hardly seems like the problem is "not enough shit is allowed on the internet." I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.

crankylinuxuser 7y ago
Should that mean a power company can cut off your power because they don't like what you've said? Should that mean the water company can cut your water off for criticizing them? Should that mean that a bank can refuse to give you a loan, because you said something bad, even if your credit is more than acceptable? ------------------------------- Remember this: its the extremist that the law is made around. And soon enough, the law will be wrapped around non-extremists and used as let another tool of influence and control. The worst part is that anyone who speaks against this sort of law is seen to be defending the extremists, and is seen as a despicable person - yet the criticizers never stop to think about the average Joe and Jane.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Power and water companies operate as public utilities for a reason. Cloudflare is not a public utility, nor should they be. Banks can absolutely decide not to do business you, for any reason that's not explicitly forbidden (protected classes, etc.)

ignoramous 7y ago

Cloudflare is committing itself to do as they are told by the governments, in the spirit of upholding the law [0] on govts' behalf (despite under no obligation to do so), if they deem fit. Whether this makes them reasonable, time will tell. Full marks to Cloudflare for so eloquently addressing this and covering themselves with as much grace as they could muster. If one reads between the lines, censorship is coming. This isn't different from what jgrahamc said a few months back in the news [1]. Signals a new era for Cloudflare, going from protector to arbitrator [2], for better or for worse. [0] for instance, it was and still is a crime to be a minority in some countries. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774347 [2] Not an expert, but it'd be nice if they allowed 30 to 90 day time period before termination, rather than doing it overnight?

Jwarder 7y ago
> still is a crime to be a minority in some countries. Do you have examples in mind? I have no doubt that this is the case, but I can't think of any examples.
- ignoramous 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia and in spirit, persecution is a world wide phenomenon.
thephyber 7y ago
> Signals a new era for Cloudflare, going from protector to arbitrator They kicked off The Daily Stormer 2 years ago. I'm not sure anything changed today.

FourScore 7y ago

So you're willing to give unchecked control of online discourse to a private corporation?

IntelMiner 7y ago
As opposed to...what, exactly? A government funded Reddit? Which government would fund it? How would it be run?
- noobermin 7y ago
  That is perhaps not a bad idea. If not government funded, a non-profit, like c-span.
- Cakez0r 7y ago
  The government could fund educational programs to teach people to think critically about the content they see on the internet, then they wouldn't have to censor it.
  - mythrwy 7y ago
    The government already provides 12 years of (somewhat) compulsory education. Critical thinking skills still seem to be a rarity.
edna314 7y ago
Do we really need to talk about closing down a site where people encourage each other to kill other people (no matter who does it)? Why is it so important that there are no exceptions to freedom of speech? Seriously, I just don’t get how the purity of the concept of freedom of speech can be so important that it beats common sense.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  "Do we really need to talk about closing down a site where people encourage each other to kill other people" Oh, so you are in favor of shutting down all army related sites? Well, many pacifist would probably agree ..

ChainOfFools 7y ago

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." As if "The Net" is a perfect, neutral, self-supporting entity that behaves with mathematic predictability rather than a projection of the chaotic human society on which its existence depends. There is a widespread habit among futurists and technologists, perhaps arising from an appreciation for semantic economy and the anonymizing instinct to downplay associations between oneself and one's assertions, to use the passive voice when concocting reductive maxims of this sort. I believe many of the moral blind spots of technocratic thinking are connected to the peculiar tendency - revealed by this passive voice framing habit - to overlook or outright dismiss the role that human inputs play in the complex systems futurists propose as solutions to human problems.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
AstralStorm 7y ago
This is extra funny because in general anyone's internet access is trivially easy to take down with just a bunch of well sent and crafted routing control packets. Internet was not designed in an adversarial model.
feanaro 7y ago
I don't think this statement is ignoring human input. It's extrapolating the result based on what we have observed about the interaction of the technology and the participating humans so far, viewing them as a single system. The passive voice is in recognition that an individual has almost no control over this system as a whole.

raxxorrax 7y ago

We lived in that world until media pushed mentally ill people to the front. Look at the graphs reporting on racism and the surge of terror. They basically revived nationalistic movements for clicks. Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings.

boomlinde 7y ago
> Not wanting to reverse cause and effect but there is ample evide ce that the call for censorship massivle accelerated occurrences like shootings. That is interesting, but just saying that it is so doesn't lend any credibility to the conclusion. If there is ample evidence, surely you should be able to present it?
- CompanionCuuube 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_effect
thephyber 7y ago
> Look at the graphs http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

tripzilch 7y ago

But the power that Cloudflare has, is being one of the only services to offer protection against modern DoS attacks. If you're a somewhat controversial site (be it right extremist or LGBTQ or sex worker forum) you are going to be suffering these attacks. And then Cloudflare is your only option, or suffer being DoS-ed off line constantly. Correct me if I am wrong, but Cloudflare is the only serious option against heavy modern DoS attacks, right? Cause if you can go somewhere else, then sure Cloudflare do it's thing. But if you can't ... then that is way too much power for a random company to hold the gate over any kind of controversial group, anywhere on the political, cultural or global spectrum. Because we really needed another US corporation with runaway power, that'll balance things.