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I don't like 8chan as a website, but I'm still not a fan of this move. Feels like no one online wants to just provide a 'dumb pipe', and always want to act like

• IanCal 7y ago
  > If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. I think it's key that in this case cloudflare are actively between you and 8chan. The phone provider is the most reasonable comparison, were you able to switch provider. I wouldn't be hugely shocked if one phone company out of several options (which when you call the line occasionally puts their branding in your face) dropped you if you were running a line that read out terrorist manifestos. I'd be surprised if something similar hasn't happened. > Because at the moment, it seems any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related. This is, what, the second time cloudflare have done this? That's a far cry from any controversy.
  • nopcode 7y ago
    What’s wrong with hosting a manifesto? Getting insight into the state of mind of such an individual seems valuable, no?
    • r3bl 7y ago
      Maybe to you and me, but we're not its target audience. Its target audience is other 8chan users, some of which might be just a step away from committing such atrocities themselves.
      • coldtea 7y ago
        And not seeing the manifesto will stop them, right? Sounds like a genius plan. Don't ban easy access to guns, don't change a crazy individualistic/every man for themselves/violence loving culture. Just hide the manifestos, that should work. (Cue the "one doesn't prevent us doing the other" answers).
        • r3bl 7y ago
          Where did I claim it's the only thing needed to stop a person like that? You gotta start somewhere. This is a nice and easy way to do that's completely within the reach of the tech community. There are no laws requiring that, just a sign of a good will. If it were up to me, Cloudflare would block at least 30 other websites, starting with Gab. Unfortunately, it takes a shooting or two for them to realize that they have a problem with a client of theirs.
          • coldtea 7y ago
            >Where did I claim it's the only thing needed to stop a person like that? Nowhere, but I already covered that. I wrote "(Cue the "[doing this] doesn't prevent us doing the other" answers)".
        • LargeWu 7y ago
          It's not just the manifesto. Places like 8chan are positive feedback generators for this kind of extremism. Every time one of these events happen it fuels the sort of unofficial contest to see who can be the next one, to be the next hero/martyr of the community. Easy access to guns is certainly a problem, but easy access to these radicalization factories is also a significant component that needs to be addressed.
• toyg 7y ago
  > because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply This actually happens in Europe, typically when authorities decide squatters should not be tolerated. TBH, services like Cloudflare should be free to operate as they please. A publisher is simply not entitled to a CDN. If there is a demand for specific niches, a supply will eventually emerge, like it has for porn.
  • bubblewrap 7y ago
    Sure, they are free to operate as they please. And people are free to dislike the way they operate.
    • coldtea 7y ago
      Plus people are also free to want to change the law and make it non-free for them to operate as they please.
      • Koshkin 7y ago
        And there goes freedom.
        • bart_spoon 7y ago
          By this definition, any law destroys freedom. Every nation on the planet already operates on the premise that certain personal freedoms are regulated or restricted for the sake of societal harmony and progress. The "slippery slope" arguments either ignore the fact that we already make the same compromises all the time, or assumes all such compromise is wrong, which is a viewpoint that is so unrealistic or extreme that, at best, will never ever have support from more than a sliver of the population and will never be realized.
        • coldtea 7y ago
          Well, we also don't have the freedom to murder or steal (and numerous others besides, like letting our dog crap all over the street, employ child labor, even if "consensual", and so on) So there's that.
• folbec 7y ago
  As a private company, as long as they are not a monopoly or a quasi monopoly(), they can do what they want, no restriction. () My personnal definition is a minimum of 4-6 participant in any market with at least 5%-10% share each (Exemple : France has some of the lowest mobile telephony fares in the world, because there are 4 "biggish" providers (one is over 50%), and they are often trying to merge "to regain pricing power", luckilly they have so far failed. 3 can somewhat manage a cartel, 4 seems to be much harder.).
  • shard972 7y ago
    oh yep im sure cloudflare is under 10% market share and there are plenty of other competitors that are just biting at the chomp to host 8chan
• jarfil 7y ago
  > real life utilities Online services are not utilities, it's not like an ISP without competition in their area was to refuse them service. There are plenty of alternatives to CloudFlare, they're just usually not as cheap or easy to use.
• qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
  “I may disagree with what you say but will defend with you your right to say it.” - Voltaire
  • king_magic 7y ago
    Those always sounded like noble, wise words. And maybe they once were. But in age when white supremacy/fascism/nazism/strongman-leader-ism is rising again, I’m no longer sure I agree with them.
    • coldtea 7y ago
      Because Voltaire's age was so peaceful and didn't have those things? (Voltaire didn't said it exactly, it's a later quote. But he said words to the same effect, and it's by itself a good quote).
      • king_magic 7y ago
        Voltaire didn’t live in a time of algorithmically influenced news cycles. Things have changed a bit. He might no longer be right.
        • mcv 7y ago
          Aside from that, there's an important difference between expressing an opinion, and creating an atmosphere and culture of hate and/or violence. There are things you're not allowed to say because they endanger lives, like threatening people, blackmailing people, or slandering people. Spreading intolerance and hatred directed at specific demographic groups has also been shown to endanger those people, so banning that is absolutely defensible.
      • ryanmercer 7y ago
        >Because Voltaire's age was so peaceful and didn't have those things? Voltaire wasn't a youth bullying youth to the point that they killed themselves. Voltaire wasn't a man sitting in his living room sexually harassing and shaming women in an organized effort after they are selected as a target by some random person online for blocking them after receiving dick pics. Voltaire wasn't encouraging anonymous strangers on the internet to make death threats to high profile persons.
• vgaldikas 7y ago
  These scums don't deserve water let alone internet access. I don't understand this free speach absolutism. If we can't agree that encouraging people to commit killings should not be allowed then what the fuck
  • LargeWu 7y ago
    Agreed. The sort of radicalization that's going on at 8chan and the like serve no legitimate public interest. Think I'm wrong? Then explain to me why this sort of online domestic terrorism academy is good for the public. Explain how any single person improves the world by participating in it.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• nopacience 7y ago
  As a private company, cloudflare is in the right to cut any clients at any time if the contract allows.
• maxehmookau 7y ago
  "any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related" No, no, no. Let's not put this in the box of "any controversy". This is not that. This is people using an online forum to breed their hatred of a race of human being which led to more than one mass-shooting event and one of the providers who played a part in supporting them said enough was enough. White supremacists/Nazis are bad. There isn't a subjective measurement of "badness" when it comes to white supremacy. It is bad. They have proven themselves to be bad. Society needs to stop being so tolerant of intolerance.
• cletus 7y ago
  > Imagine if real life utilities did this. You don't have to imagine it. Literally all of these things happen. Examples: - Utilities restricting or even cutting off crypto miners (eg [1]) - Your phone service has prohibited uses that will get your service disconnected (eg see Section 8, Use of the Service in [2]). - Getting water cut off is more difficult but not impossible, I imagine. Some places will cut you off for not paying your bill. Many don't as it's an essential service. I imagine if you resold a residential water supply for commercial purposes, you may well get cut off. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/bitcoin-mining-new-york-electricity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/bitcoin-mining-n... [2] https://legal.hughesnet.com/VoiceServiceAgreement/index.cfm https://legal.hughesnet.com/VoiceServiceAgreement/index.cfm
  • rtkwe 7y ago
    The issue in [1] in a lot of cases was that the region had such cheap electricity because they were buying a defined amount of electricity from a cheap source but had a very expensive rate for going over that amount so the BTC miners were coming in and massively inflating everyone's rates but not otherwise really contributing to the region economically, unlike the Alcoa plant that originally got them that low rate a BTC miner barely employees anyone locally.
  • Ajedi32 7y ago
    Sure, but none of those have anything to do with the ideological beliefs of the person or organization they're providing service to. Those are all reasonable restrictions designed to prevent one customer from negatively impacting the quality of service the company provides to their other customers. What Cloudflare is doing here is a different thing entirely.
  • Pigo 7y ago
    Something tells me online Antifa resources won't be affected just because one of their members committed a horrible atrocity in Dayton, OH shortly after El Paso.
    • foozed 7y ago
• yosamino 7y ago
  > Imagine if real life utilities did this. If because someone used your property for offensive purposes, the water company cut off the water supply, or the electricity company refused to provide electricity, or your phone provider cut off service or what not. That would be ridiculous, yet it's exactly the situation we're in with internet services. No one wants to just be a utility. These are flawed comparisons, because water and electricity flow from the utility towards the consumer. If water worked like the internet, and the utility was just a "dumb pipe" that would mean you could pee in my drinking water - I would hope they would disconnect you. And you can be sure that if you mess with the power coming to your house they will disconnect you, too. If we use the example of a distributed water supply, Cloudpipe would be the company that said: > yeah sure someone shit in the drinking water coming from my pipes, but I'm not going to tell them to stop, nor tell you who did it so you can tell them yourself.
  • Ajedi32 7y ago
    Flawed comparison. Nothing 8Chan did or possibly could do would result in service disruption to other Cloudflare customers.
    • creyes 7y ago
      Unless any of the people who were killed in El Paso were Cloudflare customers
      • Ajedi32 7y ago
        Sure, but you could say exactly the same thing about a water or electrical utility.
        • jshowa3 7y ago
          It doesn't matter. Cloudflare is a private company, and as a private company, they have a right to discontinue any service with anyone as long as it isn't some sort of discriminatory act based on a protected class. Considering that 8chan has a proclivity to be a haven for mass shooters, the site needs to be excessively curtailed regardless of whether they're affecting the businesses services directly or not just for the sole fact that they don't seem to police the people or content that are on the site. For example, do you think a business shouldn't fire an individual after he committed a murder of some person who isn't affiliated with the company?
• Allower 7y ago
  Its more like someone screaming fire in a crowded building with a megaphone and Rent-a-center just took back their megaphone.
• boomlinde 7y ago
  > Imagine if real life utilities did this. Instead of making me imagine the entire premise of your argument, maybe reason for why Cloudflare's services should be regulated as a utility, and convince me that it is at all comparable to drinking water and electricity. Personally, on a list representing my hierarchy of needs, CDNs and clean drinking water end up on the opposite far ends.
• awinder 7y ago
  The dumb pipe is DNS + ip routing. No one wants to share or sell their smart pipes (CDN, analytics, cloud platform, etc.) into a powder keg. > Imagine if real life utilities did this TV & Radio platforms have declined to provide amplification to numerous fringe ideas / platforms over the years. As a direct "knowledge/information utility" that corollary carries the most weight for me. But again, DNS is the real "utility" or "road" to me here -- Cloudflare et al are hotels along the road, and private property holders have declined to house people since the inception of private property. There's nothing to prevent 8chan from delivering it's message; but they may have to be careful with their biz. relationships, which is a lesson they should have been learning for years.
  • Ajedi32 7y ago
    Why is a CDN a "smart pipe" but DNS is not? That seems like a rather arbitrary distinction to me. Is the internet not a "knowledge/information utility"? Do CDNs not provide critical protection against DDOS attacks? How then does denying service not "prevent 8chan from delivering it's message"?
    • awinder 7y ago
      CDNs are not the only way to provide protection against DDOS, they're a packaged offering combining multiple technologies but there's nothing preventing you from running geolocated servers, on multiple providers, with ddos mitigation you buy/build yourself. Blocking at the DNS layer (through multi-party action I guess) is going to be an insurmountable hurdle. Wanting cloudflare or any other company to offer you prerolled infrastructure as a right is ludicrous. This distinction is anything but arbitrary.
      • Ajedi32 7y ago
        Maybe not strictly insurmountable. But building your own massively distributed infrastructure capable of resisting DDOS attacks is expensive. Perhaps prohibitively so, depending on the size of your budget. You could just as easily argue that since DNS blocks can technically be overcome by directing users to a specific IP address, or by using an alternate name server infrastructure like Namecoin, that DNS isn't critical. In my opinion, the distinction is rather blurry.
• magpi3 7y ago
  > Feels like no one online wants to just provide a 'dumb pipe', and always want to act like a pseudo publisher trying to dictate what's allowed and what isn't. Sites like 8chan, Hacker news, etc are publishers, and I think it's reasonable if the service providers that disagree with their content don't want to do business with them. A proper analogy (IMO), would be if a newspaper was printing hate speech and the company that prints the newspaper refused to do business with them. That would be perfectly acceptable, and has nothing to do with the government protected free speech. People aren't robots (or dumb pipes) after all, and if they don't want to enable/support what they see as a morally reprehensible enterprise with their work that is their right. > any controversy at all means losing access to anything internet related Giving a platform for manifestos that are propagating violence and mass shootings should not be dismissed as "any controversy at all." It feels like you are trying to minimize what happened here.
• not_a_cop75 7y ago
  It seems like having a known honeypot to capture conversations of would be evil doers would be much better than to further force them underground into the likes of Tor. Who is going to be able to mine conversations for advanced warnings once they are there? Also, the silencing of dissidents seems like the wrong move in general for all internet companies. The truth can tolerate being harassed, bashed and unliked. What it does not seem to do so well with is a regime that does not tolerate the free flow of ideas. I'm okay with the very worst people posting on youtube and twitter. Those platforms can require an extra login to determine who is so interested in these videos. The removal of videos on the basis of dislike does not seem to be the solution. I'm not even certain that demonetizing them is the right answer, because even that can create a money trail for police and detectives to follow.
  • mempko 7y ago
    No, but it will be harder for the children to see it. Because a lot of those people there are children (under 18). By increasing the friction, you reduce the audience.
  • noob_slayer 7y ago
    Yeah, the cloudflare blog didn't make much sense. At one point it basically talks about how great it is that it got advanced warning that could potentially be acted on, then pretty much says, "oh, but we don't want to know ahead of time next time".
  • LargeWu 7y ago
    8chan has been a known commodity for a long time. If it was such a valuable source of intelligence, why aren't these attacks being stopped?
• jtr_47 7y ago
  I understand the point you are making. However lets take a look at the following: Cloudflare is U.S. corporation providing services to other people and companies. You have to be a member in order to use their services, so you are tied to their terms. This basically a "private" club you are joining Cloudflare is not beholden to uphold the Constitution of the USA. They are beholden to their shareholders and the laws of the USA in order to operate as a Corporation. Cloudflare can do what ever it wants. People and Companies do not have to use cloudflare. Boycott them, do not recommend them ever. Now if the USA had some kind of non-profit, Nationwide Municipal ISP (fibre), for instance, the US Public Library system could be a good choice. They could offer some basic services and at the same time be the location that would protect speech/text (based on the Constitution). It's not perfect, but it's something to consider & you wouldn't be kicked off because somebody doesn't like what you are saying/producing. Or there should be a law in the USA, stating that companies doing business in the USA cannot refuse service if they find the clients content to be offense and protected under the Constitution of the USA Peace
• soneil 7y ago
  I always find the utility comparison an interesting one. If the water supply was poisoned, would you expect the utility company to cut your supply until it could be cleaned? If they could cut it off closer to the source of the poison so you weren't affected, would you prefer that? You don't expect 1000V from your electricity company. You don't expect arsenic from your water utility. You expect the fcc no-call list to be honored. Very few utilities are truly dumb pipes. (Not trying to draw the obvious comparison between 8chan & arsenic. Just that I think when we're holding "dumb pipes" up as a holy grail, it'd be worth remembering that the holy grail is a myth.)
  • Ajedi32 7y ago
    I don't understand how any of that relates to what Cloudflare is doing here. 8Chan isn't poisoning the water supply or back-feeding 1000V into the electrical grid; they're just making normal use of Cloudflare's service just like any other customer. Are you implying that ISPs are sending arsenic down my pipes when they service my request to load a web page from 8Chan? In that case, I'd argue that the websites I choose to visit are entirely my decision, and my ISP denying my request to connect to 8Chan would not improve their quality of service to me in any way.
    • soneil 7y ago
      I was more aiming at the dumb pipe analogy than this specific instance. Kinda "be careful what you wish for". When people say they want the internet to be a Utility, they overlook a lot of what they're asking for. They're not dumb pipes, they're heavily controlled, regulated, measured & metered infrastructure. Making the internet a utility would have far, far more effect than adding consumer protections to the last mile.
• patentatt 7y ago
  I think slippery-slope-type arguments are they, themselves a slippery slope. What if nobody ever again acts on their moral courage because they’re afraid of hypothetical bad actors abusing that precedent? Oh My! [clutches pearls] Not everything is relative, you’re not smart or ethical because you can make up hypotheticals to oppose any action. You’re just a nihilist with no grounding in reality and no value system. It’s ok to say something is bad, and then act against that bad thing. /rant Edit: and when you do fall into that relativist trap, the bad guys win because they don’t care about any of it. They don’t worry about slippery slopes, or unintended consequences. Overthinking and other various mental masturbation by good people let’s bad people win.
• dwild 7y ago
  I believe it's alright as long as the product isn't necessary and just value-added. In the case of Cloudflare, that's pretty clear that it's just value-added. In the case of water supply, electricity, phone, internet service, etc... it's not just value-added, you can't function without those, there's no alternative.
• rajacombinator 7y ago
  > Imagine if real life utilities did this. Coming soon to a wrongthinker near you.