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This link and the two answers within demonstrate something important, broader than the DNS related issue at hand. Both make implicit assumptions. One assumes t

This link and the two answers within demonstrate something important, broader than the DNS related issue at hand. Both make implicit assumptions. One assumes the worst of Cloudflare and thinks “what’s the worst reason Cloudflare could have for doing this. How do they profit off this?” And the other assumes that Cloudflare has good intentions. Neither answer is technically wrong. Both flow logically from their initial assumptions. But it shows how different our conclusions can be depending on where our initial biases lie. For the person who believes the first answer and says “prove to me that Cloudflare isn’t doing something nefarious”, it’s not possible. The analysis is correct and can’t be challenged unless the initial assumption is challenged. And for people who strongly believe that Cloudflare has bad intentions, nothing can be done to change their mind. In this example it’s Cloudflare but it applies to any person or organisation that we feel strongly about.

cheschire 7y ago
The second one is not an assumption, it's Cloudflare's official position. For a person who is against Cloudflare, I feel like this would only serve to reinforce the confirmation bias as there's seemingly no person except a Cloudflare employee willing to step up and defend the action. So, yes, good observation.
- nindalf 7y ago
  Arguably, no one except a Cloudflare employee could know the reason why they took this decision. A random person speculating “maybe they did this for privacy reasons” doesn’t strike me as better than Cloudflare saying “we did this for privacy reasons”. And while the second answer is a statement, not an analysis the rest of what I said holds. You will only accept their statement as the truth if you assume good intent of them.
  - 113 7y ago
    Corporations operate for profit.
    - tedk-42 7y ago
      Indeed - but there are other ways to make money than to sell of your personal information to the highest advertising bidder.
      - jgrahamc 7y ago
        Such as, in Cloudflare's case, selling our service (the DDoS protection, the caching, the firewalling etc.) to companies that pay for that service because it helps them. While at the same time working to preserve people's privacy with things like giving out SSL for free, pushing for eSNI, running a public DoH server, building a service that makes sure all data from your phone to us is encrypted etc. etc.
        denton-scratch 7y ago
        "like giving out SSL for free" The market rate for standard SSL certs is zero.
        jgrahamc 7y ago
        It wasn't in 2014 (https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal-ssl/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal-ssl/) when we launched it.
        cnst 7y ago
        It's been shown that Cloudflare's DoH service is a lot ado about nothing, and is actually worse for privacy, not better: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071022 Likewise for 1.1.1.1 — when taking into consideration the local caching appliances that the ISPs have invested in, the lack of ECS would make the clients go all the way through the internet for the same content that's already cached locally by the ISP for users of all other decent resolvers — this will only contribute to increased costs for the individual ISPs, extra latency for users, and more competitive advantage of your products due to you diminishing the technological advantages of your competitors, without regard to the actual user experience of the users, or the reliability and scaling of the internet infrastructure at large. Not to mention that such Netflix/YouTube usage, when going directly through transit providers and through the whole internet, would also subject the users to a greater chance of surveillance at large compared to users of resolvers that would access local copies on the caching appliance.
  - yc12340 7y ago
    Nah, I will assume it as truth only when it makes sense.
    - nindalf 7y ago
      And whether it makes sense depends on your initial bias. Make sense?
  - cm2187 7y ago
    You are assuming companies make decisions for a single reason.
  - thrwway4298 7y ago
    >A random person speculating “maybe they did this for privacy reasons” doesn’t strike me as better than Cloudflare saying “we did this for privacy reasons”. you are saying the accessor function getX() which returns a value of X but you don't trust it, you think it's giving you crap, should not be treated any differently depending on whether the getX() function even has access to X or has absolutely no such access. (For example if the value of x isn't even on the same network partition as the getX() function you don't trust.) You're saying if you don't trust it, it doesn't matter if the function itself even has access to X or doesn't. In one sense that might be true, but in another sense that seems silly. If getX itself has access to X, you can try to determine whether it is giving it to you. if getX doesn't have any access to X, then it doesn't really matter what it's doing, its process is irrelevant. so to me there's a huge material difference. We can try to judge the process by which getX() returned Cloudflare's motivations. What steps did it perform to return that value? What's the code? etc. huge difference. that knowledge is somewhere in the company.
    - krageon 7y ago
      To summarise, your position is that what Cloudflare says is more trustworthy because they know the truth. You do not really address the fact that they are not required to say the truth, or that when the truth is harmful for their public image they are directly incentivised to not speak the truth. The only way you do address this is by saying that this is something that needs investigating. I would posit that the grandparent has done this already, and come to the sensible conclusion: There is less reason to trust someone incentivised to lie than there is to trust someone who knows nothing. Aside from that trust, we have to evaluate the validity of statements. Given prior knowledge, for Cloudflare in the bad case the likelihood of a valid statement approaches zero. For the random yelling things as they pop into their mind, it is completely unknown.
      - thrwway4298 7y ago
        My position is only that there's a difference. In some sense we could treat it as though it's just garbage, but it's worth investigating. For example if it was written by an outside PR person who has no access to the people who made the decision, that also changes things. It's not so pure. For example an outsider here on HN who says "A close relative of mine works at cloudflare on the team that made this decision, and he confided in me..." -- then again you have to somehow judge if this is true or not, but it is worth treating it differently from someone writing "I don't have any insider information and this is pure speculation, but maybe..." I mean it just doesn't make sense to treat these cases as exactly the same. I wanted to give another example. say you don't trust the gps coordinates you're being given when you make an API call on a device. would it make sense to treat it exactly the same as making the API call on a device that doesn't even have a gps module, such as a microcontroller without gps or wifi/cellular access or anything that can be a proxy for gps? if there's a physical module and you don't trust the output, at least you can investigate. it doesn't make sense to treat it exactly the same as if the information isn't even on the same device. it depends on the details of the process that's giving you the output you don't trust. What's the process by which getX returns its output? What's the process by which Cloudflare employees make statements about their motivations (which they do have access to)? These are questions we can investigate. if we find that the statements are written by a PR agency who hasn't even stepped in their building and has no contact with the teams they're lying on behalf of, that's a possible result too. but it's worth looking into.
nabla9 7y ago
You have to look at Cloudflare user agreement's and texts that describe their relationship to their customers. https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/ https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/ and https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-privacy/privacy-policy/privacy-policy/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-priv... You can only held companies accountable for the laws and explicit written promises and legally binding agreements. Currently the price companies pay for privacy violations is low. If a company like Cloudflare writes down all the privacy promise in legally bind manner and puts themselves into legal and financial liability that is above the norm for breaking the contract intentionally it can increase trust. Companies can do much more than they do now. They can put explicit bounties for whistle blowing them and revealing privacy violations. They can hire trusted third parties to do privacy audits and handle whistle blowing.
- wildduck 7y ago
  > They can hire trusted third parties to do privacy audits and handle whistle blowing. All software seems to need that now days.
- pnako 7y ago
  None of that is legally binding if you don't have a contract with them.
  - nabla9 7y ago
    Click-wrap agreement and browse-wrap agreement are both contracts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browse_wrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browse_wrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap
    - cobbzilla 7y ago
      But you must actually “click” or “browse” for it to be enforceable, right?
      - 7y ago
Crinus 7y ago
This response reminds me of this meme: https://randysrandom.com/wp-content/uploads/right-wrong.jpg https://randysrandom.com/wp-content/uploads/right-wrong.jpg Neither answer may look technically wrong, but only one reflects what is actually happening here. That we don't know which exactly based on that specific data doesn't mean that both are equally valid.
- nindalf 7y ago
  Yes and if we really really cared about this, we’d launch an investigation. But we don’t care that much. We just want to scroll this thread a bit, come to a conclusion about Cloudflare and move on to the next HN thread. Given that we’re going to spend only a couple of minutes on this, it’s easy to figure out which answer we’re going to agree with - the one that confirms our previous belief about Cloudflare.
- robinson7d 7y ago
  That meme’s sort of funny in a meta way because presumably the person who actually drew the number (the comic artist) drew it as both a 9 and a 6, so in that one particular case they actually are both right. The sentiment of the red message is great though.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

cheschire 7y ago

The second one is not an assumption, it's Cloudflare's official position. For a person who is against Cloudflare, I feel like this would only serve to reinforce the confirmation bias as there's seemingly no person except a Cloudflare employee willing to step up and defend the action. So, yes, good observation.

nindalf 7y ago
Arguably, no one except a Cloudflare employee could know the reason why they took this decision. A random person speculating “maybe they did this for privacy reasons” doesn’t strike me as better than Cloudflare saying “we did this for privacy reasons”. And while the second answer is a statement, not an analysis the rest of what I said holds. You will only accept their statement as the truth if you assume good intent of them.
- 113 7y ago
  Corporations operate for profit.
  - tedk-42 7y ago
    Indeed - but there are other ways to make money than to sell of your personal information to the highest advertising bidder.
    - jgrahamc 7y ago
      Such as, in Cloudflare's case, selling our service (the DDoS protection, the caching, the firewalling etc.) to companies that pay for that service because it helps them. While at the same time working to preserve people's privacy with things like giving out SSL for free, pushing for eSNI, running a public DoH server, building a service that makes sure all data from your phone to us is encrypted etc. etc.
      - denton-scratch 7y ago
        "like giving out SSL for free" The market rate for standard SSL certs is zero.
        jgrahamc 7y ago
        It wasn't in 2014 (https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal-ssl/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal-ssl/) when we launched it.
      - cnst 7y ago
        It's been shown that Cloudflare's DoH service is a lot ado about nothing, and is actually worse for privacy, not better: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071022 Likewise for 1.1.1.1 — when taking into consideration the local caching appliances that the ISPs have invested in, the lack of ECS would make the clients go all the way through the internet for the same content that's already cached locally by the ISP for users of all other decent resolvers — this will only contribute to increased costs for the individual ISPs, extra latency for users, and more competitive advantage of your products due to you diminishing the technological advantages of your competitors, without regard to the actual user experience of the users, or the reliability and scaling of the internet infrastructure at large. Not to mention that such Netflix/YouTube usage, when going directly through transit providers and through the whole internet, would also subject the users to a greater chance of surveillance at large compared to users of resolvers that would access local copies on the caching appliance.
- yc12340 7y ago
  Nah, I will assume it as truth only when it makes sense.
  - nindalf 7y ago
    And whether it makes sense depends on your initial bias. Make sense?
- cm2187 7y ago
  You are assuming companies make decisions for a single reason.
- thrwway4298 7y ago
  >A random person speculating “maybe they did this for privacy reasons” doesn’t strike me as better than Cloudflare saying “we did this for privacy reasons”. you are saying the accessor function getX() which returns a value of X but you don't trust it, you think it's giving you crap, should not be treated any differently depending on whether the getX() function even has access to X or has absolutely no such access. (For example if the value of x isn't even on the same network partition as the getX() function you don't trust.) You're saying if you don't trust it, it doesn't matter if the function itself even has access to X or doesn't. In one sense that might be true, but in another sense that seems silly. If getX itself has access to X, you can try to determine whether it is giving it to you. if getX doesn't have any access to X, then it doesn't really matter what it's doing, its process is irrelevant. so to me there's a huge material difference. We can try to judge the process by which getX() returned Cloudflare's motivations. What steps did it perform to return that value? What's the code? etc. huge difference. that knowledge is somewhere in the company.
  - krageon 7y ago
    To summarise, your position is that what Cloudflare says is more trustworthy because they know the truth. You do not really address the fact that they are not required to say the truth, or that when the truth is harmful for their public image they are directly incentivised to not speak the truth. The only way you do address this is by saying that this is something that needs investigating. I would posit that the grandparent has done this already, and come to the sensible conclusion: There is less reason to trust someone incentivised to lie than there is to trust someone who knows nothing. Aside from that trust, we have to evaluate the validity of statements. Given prior knowledge, for Cloudflare in the bad case the likelihood of a valid statement approaches zero. For the random yelling things as they pop into their mind, it is completely unknown.
    - thrwway4298 7y ago
      My position is only that there's a difference. In some sense we could treat it as though it's just garbage, but it's worth investigating. For example if it was written by an outside PR person who has no access to the people who made the decision, that also changes things. It's not so pure. For example an outsider here on HN who says "A close relative of mine works at cloudflare on the team that made this decision, and he confided in me..." -- then again you have to somehow judge if this is true or not, but it is worth treating it differently from someone writing "I don't have any insider information and this is pure speculation, but maybe..." I mean it just doesn't make sense to treat these cases as exactly the same. I wanted to give another example. say you don't trust the gps coordinates you're being given when you make an API call on a device. would it make sense to treat it exactly the same as making the API call on a device that doesn't even have a gps module, such as a microcontroller without gps or wifi/cellular access or anything that can be a proxy for gps? if there's a physical module and you don't trust the output, at least you can investigate. it doesn't make sense to treat it exactly the same as if the information isn't even on the same device. it depends on the details of the process that's giving you the output you don't trust. What's the process by which getX returns its output? What's the process by which Cloudflare employees make statements about their motivations (which they do have access to)? These are questions we can investigate. if we find that the statements are written by a PR agency who hasn't even stepped in their building and has no contact with the teams they're lying on behalf of, that's a possible result too. but it's worth looking into.

nabla9 7y ago

You have to look at Cloudflare user agreement's and texts that describe their relationship to their customers. https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/ https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/ and https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-privacy/privacy-policy/privacy-policy/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-priv... You can only held companies accountable for the laws and explicit written promises and legally binding agreements. Currently the price companies pay for privacy violations is low. If a company like Cloudflare writes down all the privacy promise in legally bind manner and puts themselves into legal and financial liability that is above the norm for breaking the contract intentionally it can increase trust. Companies can do much more than they do now. They can put explicit bounties for whistle blowing them and revealing privacy violations. They can hire trusted third parties to do privacy audits and handle whistle blowing.

wildduck 7y ago
> They can hire trusted third parties to do privacy audits and handle whistle blowing. All software seems to need that now days.
pnako 7y ago
None of that is legally binding if you don't have a contract with them.
- nabla9 7y ago
  Click-wrap agreement and browse-wrap agreement are both contracts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browse_wrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browse_wrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap
  - cobbzilla 7y ago
    But you must actually “click” or “browse” for it to be enforceable, right?
    - 7y ago

Crinus 7y ago

This response reminds me of this meme: https://randysrandom.com/wp-content/uploads/right-wrong.jpg https://randysrandom.com/wp-content/uploads/right-wrong.jpg Neither answer may look technically wrong, but only one reflects what is actually happening here. That we don't know which exactly based on that specific data doesn't mean that both are equally valid.

nindalf 7y ago
Yes and if we really really cared about this, we’d launch an investigation. But we don’t care that much. We just want to scroll this thread a bit, come to a conclusion about Cloudflare and move on to the next HN thread. Given that we’re going to spend only a couple of minutes on this, it’s easy to figure out which answer we’re going to agree with - the one that confirms our previous belief about Cloudflare.
robinson7d 7y ago
That meme’s sort of funny in a meta way because presumably the person who actually drew the number (the comic artist) drew it as both a 9 and a 6, so in that one particular case they actually are both right. The sentiment of the red message is great though.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]