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This would have been better if it was a joke. Big welcome to our new moral police, now encoded in two bits of a vanity IP address! Not a word spared for what ki

This would have been better if it was a joke. Big welcome to our new moral police, now encoded in two bits of a vanity IP address! Not a word spared for what kind of content is filtered, how they evaluate websites, any kind of appeals process... they did manage to portray it as helping the COVID-19 pandemic relief, though. Edit: I missed this text: > In the coming months, we will provide the ability to define additional configuration settings for 1.1.1.1 for Families. This will include options to create specific whitelists and blacklists of certain sites. You will be able to set the times of the day when categories, such as social media, are blocked and get reports on your household's Internet usage. Regardless, I am still opposed to this service, and opposed to all forms of internet censorship and spyware. CloudFlare is already really bad for the internet, and this isn't helping their case.

benatkin 7y ago
Any domain that hosts user uploaded content is gonna be banned, unless they're big like twitter or facebook. This is the worst. I'm glad I never gave Cloudflare a dime.
junaru 7y ago
Policing content is nothing new for Cloudflare, the 8chan events showed just how easily they succumb to public pressure.
- meowface 7y ago
  After the second or third (people debate if the third originated there) white supremacism-motivated mass shooting was announced on one of their many "National Socialist" boards shortly before it took place, with the owners refusing to do anything about it, removing them as a customer is more than understandable. The original creator (Hotwheels) had vehemently disavowed and condemned the site and its owners at that point. Aside from the business impact of tons of customers and the media (rightfully) condemning Cloudflare, and all the potential legal implications, dropping them was the only ethical thing to do. I'm a staunch defender of free speech and opposer of censorship, but when people are being mass-murdered, with more people at risk of being mass-murdered in the future, it's no longer just about speech. At the time of the mass shootings, the majority of boards and posters on the site were supportive of or affiliated with violent extremism and domestic terrorism, and their admins made no efforts to curb that (even if they didn't endorse it). Show me a single US or European company who would still provide infrastructure/networking for them after that point. Considering their only two incidents of stepping in were that and The Daily Stormer, I'd say they probably have one of the best track records when it comes to freedom of speech and acting as a neutral traffic carrier.
tazjin 7y ago
Agree - my initial reaction to this was "oh no", or to quote someone from IRC "millions of kids can now learn how to configure DNS". FWIW, it seems like 1.1.1.3 doesn't block sites like Twitter where a lot of the kink community moved after Tumblr shut down.
- ballenf 7y ago
  If you think of this as putting Playboy and Penthouse on the top shelf of the magazine rack behind an opaque cover more so than locking them inside a drill-proof, pick-proof safe, maybe it makes more sense? (You know, back when they still had print editions.) It just seems obvious that making porn slightly harder to get to than disney.com is a smart move if you're a parent. Make it so that a typo in a URL doesn't splash hardcore porn in one click. And sure there are lots of ways to accomplish this. Cloudflare is just providing one more and I personally like that. Even as a techie, I really hate doing network stuff at home and will be taking a close look at this at least after the configuration options become available. I currently use AdGuard's DNS offering that blocks many surveillance IPs plus adult content. Will have to compare offerings. I totally understand the critique of this from the political war zone they're diving into, but not from a "it's not perfect so it's stupid" perspective.
- taborj 7y ago
  > to quote someone from IRC "millions of kids can now learn how to configure DNS". That's why you set up your router/pihole to do DNS hijacking. Any DNS request gets rerouted to the DNS server of your choosing.
  - kart23 7y ago
    Theres an easy way to get around this too, firefox has the option to do dns over https, encrypting your dns queries, and if you force encrypted SNI, theres no way your DNS queries are getting hijacked and the router cannot see what sites you are visiting. And no, this doesn't require someone to be technical, and a kid could do it easily. Whats even more interesting is that schools and other public internet places can no longer block certain websites or content, and logs are no longer effective since even the website address is encrypted. You can stop ESNI by disabling https altogether, but obviously that wouldn't be a reasonable solution. Source: my dad did this on the home router.
derefr 7y ago
Police? No, in this scenario, that’d be your parents. It’s configurable what it blocks (or it will be, and this product is just the MVP of that product): > In the coming months, we will provide the ability to define additional configuration settings for 1.1.1.1 for Families. This will include options to create specific whitelists and blacklists of certain sites. You will be able to set the times of the day when categories, such as social media, are blocked and get reports on your household's Internet usage. Also, re: “how they evaluate websites”—most websites explicitly opt into being considered “adult content” by these filters, either by submitting themselves to the filter, or by adding meta tags to their pages to declare either specific content warnings, or a category of some age-rating taxonomy (usually a country-specific one repurposed from that country’s film/TV rating system, but crawlers make do.) Unlike malware, “adult content” is not adversarial to the ecosystem it’s a part of.
- ddevault 7y ago
  Sorry, I missed this quote. I've edited my comment accordingly.
- dzhiurgis 7y ago
  > Unlike malware, “adult content” is not adversarial to the ecosystem it’s a part of. I have my browser crash at least once a month when viewing such content.
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    What browser are you using? Ever since firefox 3.6 or so I never had such an issue.
johnwheeler 7y ago
Don’t use it. Problem solved. You’re being a moral policeman too.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  Just talking about it here is policing in your world? I thought police were about enforcement, not bilateral conversation with intellectual respect. What are police in your metaphor? Someone who has any conversation on policy? And what’s with the “I don’t want to hear you complain, just go away if you don’t like it” attitude?
  - avianlyric 7y ago
    I guess it depends on the type of police you interact with. UK policing is built on community consent. Law enforcement is part of their duty, but so is having a discussion about what the community want’s enforced and how. It’s not unusual for UK police to kindly ask you to not do something and go home, and only escalate to handcuffs if you continue to ignore them.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - threatofrain 7y ago
      Aren't you talking about the difference between nice and mean police? They are still there to enforce. Since UK police can be so nice, is there a difference between UK police telling you to stop doing something, and a HN person doing the same online?
      - avianlyric 7y ago
        I would still disagree with that. Enforcement is part of their role, but not their entire role. You can absolutely tell a police officer to piss off, and if you’re not doing anything illegal there’s nothing they can or will do. Police officers don’t just get involved in crimes. They also have a huge role in discouraging asocial (but completely legal) behaviour. The idea that policing can only be done with enforcement and a stick is completely false. With regards to your point regarding a HN person on the internet. They’re on the internet, not in front of me, that’s a much bigger factor than if they’re a police officer or not.
Forge36 7y ago
How is this different than openDNS?
- waynecochran 7y ago
  I use OpenDNS ... did you ever get a decent answer to this?
threatofrain 7y ago
Deleted statement.
- anamexis 7y ago
  They did launch this product on another address (1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3).
- jgrahamc 7y ago
  We haven't changed anything about 1.1.1.1. This is on 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jasode 7y ago
>Regardless, I am still opposed to this service, and opposed to all forms of internet censorship I'm genuinely confused as to where your complaint is coming from. Isn't this Cloudflare DNS server "opt in" for families? Why would voluntary filters be censorship? Censorship is more "top down" (e.g. government) that you can't opt out of. Likewise, I just "opted into" into NextDNS a few days ago to block ads so I didn't have to set up a Raspberry Pi-hole. Is NextDNS "censoring" ads? Well yes, because that's what I want.
- ddevault 7y ago
  A "family" is not a single entity. It's not voluntary for those who are being blocked.
  - gcthomas 7y ago
    It is not voluntary for my children to leave their phones downstairs and go to bed at a bedtime I picked myself, but I think that's OK. It is entirely commonplace for a family to impose restrictions on its children — anything less is neglect.
    - ddevault 7y ago
      Bullshit. If you resort to coersion, it's quite the opposite of neglect. And it's not going to work - it is extremely easy to find porn if that's what your kids want to find, and there is nothing you can do about it.
      - gcthomas 7y ago
        The second half of your comment is true, and I don't think anyone has claimed otherwise so the strength of your assertion is unnecessary. On the first half, children need boundaries set for them. And unless you are yourself a child rebelling against parental rules, you will find yourself on the barely populated side of the argument.
        7y ago
leephillips 7y ago
How is a service, that you are completely free to use or not, any kind of “police”? This could be useful solution for a household with children, or with several naive users on Windows machines: one central mechanism to keep malware away from them. If you don’t like it, how does it affect you?
- kick 7y ago
  If you see children as humans rather than as dogs or non-sentient creatures, they will be forced into this without consent by authority figures.
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    Wait till you find out that children are forced into many things without their consent, from attending school to being grounded in their rooms. It's like a mini-North Korea, right?
    - kick 7y ago
      This comment was in response to a comment that asked how this was forcing people into things. Regardless of how you see it, it's literally doing that. Sure, it may not be the most grievous occurence of it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, in fact, policing.
      - macspoofing 7y ago
        >it's literally doing that. Literally like North Korea. Right? I'm going guess you don't have kids. Correct? >Sure, it may not be the most grievous occurrence of it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, in fact, policing. Only if you hate language and you purposely warp definition of commonly understood words and concepts to support your conclusion or ideology. Raising children by imparting morals, and providing structure and constraints is NOT authoritarian policing. Those are two different things. And though children certainly are humans (who actually claims otherwise?), they are not endowed with the same societal rights and responsibilities that adults are. This is why you can ground a child, but not an adult. Most people understand this distinction instinctively. You, on the other hand, have some trouble there.
meowface 7y ago
If they had added this to 1.1.1.1 itself, I'd agree this would be a huge overreach, but they're just adding some additional options for those who choose to manually set their resolvers to one of the new ones. I personally wouldn't use any of the filtered ones, but lots of companies provide free resolvers with blocklists like these. I don't really see how anyone could be fine with the existing 1.1.1.1 resolver but have a problem with this announcement. (If they were also against the original 1.1.1.1 resolver, then I can at least understand their being opposed to all of them.)
lma21 7y ago
honest question, why do you care how they evaluate 'porn' websites? as long as we're still capable of switching between 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8, what's wrong with providing this additional service? it really doesn't have to be a joke...
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  Because it is very likely that governments (such as the UK) will attempt to force all traffic to the censored one by law.
- neop1x 7y ago
  Because it tells governments it is possible to do. Years later we may start seeing devices with DNS servers hard-codded to this. And also because blocking like this is not very effective. You can't block every "harmful" website on the internet, plus there are various proxies. And what is "harmful" anyway, who decides? This also brings questions - are there already blocking something on 1.1.1.1 or will they propagate some blocks from 1.1.1.3 back to their main server? Any blocking is very wrong and may cause freedom reduction in the future.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
msla 7y ago
They block GLAAD but not Stormfront. That's all you really need to know.

benatkin 7y ago

Any domain that hosts user uploaded content is gonna be banned, unless they're big like twitter or facebook. This is the worst. I'm glad I never gave Cloudflare a dime.

junaru 7y ago

Policing content is nothing new for Cloudflare, the 8chan events showed just how easily they succumb to public pressure.

meowface 7y ago
After the second or third (people debate if the third originated there) white supremacism-motivated mass shooting was announced on one of their many "National Socialist" boards shortly before it took place, with the owners refusing to do anything about it, removing them as a customer is more than understandable. The original creator (Hotwheels) had vehemently disavowed and condemned the site and its owners at that point. Aside from the business impact of tons of customers and the media (rightfully) condemning Cloudflare, and all the potential legal implications, dropping them was the only ethical thing to do. I'm a staunch defender of free speech and opposer of censorship, but when people are being mass-murdered, with more people at risk of being mass-murdered in the future, it's no longer just about speech. At the time of the mass shootings, the majority of boards and posters on the site were supportive of or affiliated with violent extremism and domestic terrorism, and their admins made no efforts to curb that (even if they didn't endorse it). Show me a single US or European company who would still provide infrastructure/networking for them after that point. Considering their only two incidents of stepping in were that and The Daily Stormer, I'd say they probably have one of the best track records when it comes to freedom of speech and acting as a neutral traffic carrier.

tazjin 7y ago

Agree - my initial reaction to this was "oh no", or to quote someone from IRC "millions of kids can now learn how to configure DNS". FWIW, it seems like 1.1.1.3 doesn't block sites like Twitter where a lot of the kink community moved after Tumblr shut down.

ballenf 7y ago
If you think of this as putting Playboy and Penthouse on the top shelf of the magazine rack behind an opaque cover more so than locking them inside a drill-proof, pick-proof safe, maybe it makes more sense? (You know, back when they still had print editions.) It just seems obvious that making porn slightly harder to get to than disney.com is a smart move if you're a parent. Make it so that a typo in a URL doesn't splash hardcore porn in one click. And sure there are lots of ways to accomplish this. Cloudflare is just providing one more and I personally like that. Even as a techie, I really hate doing network stuff at home and will be taking a close look at this at least after the configuration options become available. I currently use AdGuard's DNS offering that blocks many surveillance IPs plus adult content. Will have to compare offerings. I totally understand the critique of this from the political war zone they're diving into, but not from a "it's not perfect so it's stupid" perspective.
taborj 7y ago
> to quote someone from IRC "millions of kids can now learn how to configure DNS". That's why you set up your router/pihole to do DNS hijacking. Any DNS request gets rerouted to the DNS server of your choosing.
- kart23 7y ago
  Theres an easy way to get around this too, firefox has the option to do dns over https, encrypting your dns queries, and if you force encrypted SNI, theres no way your DNS queries are getting hijacked and the router cannot see what sites you are visiting. And no, this doesn't require someone to be technical, and a kid could do it easily. Whats even more interesting is that schools and other public internet places can no longer block certain websites or content, and logs are no longer effective since even the website address is encrypted. You can stop ESNI by disabling https altogether, but obviously that wouldn't be a reasonable solution. Source: my dad did this on the home router.

derefr 7y ago

Police? No, in this scenario, that’d be your parents. It’s configurable what it blocks (or it will be, and this product is just the MVP of that product): > In the coming months, we will provide the ability to define additional configuration settings for 1.1.1.1 for Families. This will include options to create specific whitelists and blacklists of certain sites. You will be able to set the times of the day when categories, such as social media, are blocked and get reports on your household's Internet usage. Also, re: “how they evaluate websites”—most websites explicitly opt into being considered “adult content” by these filters, either by submitting themselves to the filter, or by adding meta tags to their pages to declare either specific content warnings, or a category of some age-rating taxonomy (usually a country-specific one repurposed from that country’s film/TV rating system, but crawlers make do.) Unlike malware, “adult content” is not adversarial to the ecosystem it’s a part of.

ddevault 7y ago
Sorry, I missed this quote. I've edited my comment accordingly.
dzhiurgis 7y ago
> Unlike malware, “adult content” is not adversarial to the ecosystem it’s a part of. I have my browser crash at least once a month when viewing such content.
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  What browser are you using? Ever since firefox 3.6 or so I never had such an issue.

johnwheeler 7y ago

Don’t use it. Problem solved. You’re being a moral policeman too.

threatofrain 7y ago
Just talking about it here is policing in your world? I thought police were about enforcement, not bilateral conversation with intellectual respect. What are police in your metaphor? Someone who has any conversation on policy? And what’s with the “I don’t want to hear you complain, just go away if you don’t like it” attitude?
- avianlyric 7y ago
  I guess it depends on the type of police you interact with. UK policing is built on community consent. Law enforcement is part of their duty, but so is having a discussion about what the community want’s enforced and how. It’s not unusual for UK police to kindly ask you to not do something and go home, and only escalate to handcuffs if you continue to ignore them.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    Aren't you talking about the difference between nice and mean police? They are still there to enforce. Since UK police can be so nice, is there a difference between UK police telling you to stop doing something, and a HN person doing the same online?
    - avianlyric 7y ago
      I would still disagree with that. Enforcement is part of their role, but not their entire role. You can absolutely tell a police officer to piss off, and if you’re not doing anything illegal there’s nothing they can or will do. Police officers don’t just get involved in crimes. They also have a huge role in discouraging asocial (but completely legal) behaviour. The idea that policing can only be done with enforcement and a stick is completely false. With regards to your point regarding a HN person on the internet. They’re on the internet, not in front of me, that’s a much bigger factor than if they’re a police officer or not.

Forge36 7y ago

How is this different than openDNS?

waynecochran 7y ago
I use OpenDNS ... did you ever get a decent answer to this?

threatofrain 7y ago

Deleted statement.

anamexis 7y ago
They did launch this product on another address (1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3).
jgrahamc 7y ago
We haven't changed anything about 1.1.1.1. This is on 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jasode 7y ago

>Regardless, I am still opposed to this service, and opposed to all forms of internet censorship I'm genuinely confused as to where your complaint is coming from. Isn't this Cloudflare DNS server "opt in" for families? Why would voluntary filters be censorship? Censorship is more "top down" (e.g. government) that you can't opt out of. Likewise, I just "opted into" into NextDNS a few days ago to block ads so I didn't have to set up a Raspberry Pi-hole. Is NextDNS "censoring" ads? Well yes, because that's what I want.

ddevault 7y ago
A "family" is not a single entity. It's not voluntary for those who are being blocked.
- gcthomas 7y ago
  It is not voluntary for my children to leave their phones downstairs and go to bed at a bedtime I picked myself, but I think that's OK. It is entirely commonplace for a family to impose restrictions on its children — anything less is neglect.
  - ddevault 7y ago
    Bullshit. If you resort to coersion, it's quite the opposite of neglect. And it's not going to work - it is extremely easy to find porn if that's what your kids want to find, and there is nothing you can do about it.
    - gcthomas 7y ago
      The second half of your comment is true, and I don't think anyone has claimed otherwise so the strength of your assertion is unnecessary. On the first half, children need boundaries set for them. And unless you are yourself a child rebelling against parental rules, you will find yourself on the barely populated side of the argument.
      - 7y ago

leephillips 7y ago

How is a service, that you are completely free to use or not, any kind of “police”? This could be useful solution for a household with children, or with several naive users on Windows machines: one central mechanism to keep malware away from them. If you don’t like it, how does it affect you?

kick 7y ago
If you see children as humans rather than as dogs or non-sentient creatures, they will be forced into this without consent by authority figures.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  Wait till you find out that children are forced into many things without their consent, from attending school to being grounded in their rooms. It's like a mini-North Korea, right?
  - kick 7y ago
    This comment was in response to a comment that asked how this was forcing people into things. Regardless of how you see it, it's literally doing that. Sure, it may not be the most grievous occurence of it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, in fact, policing.
    - macspoofing 7y ago
      >it's literally doing that. Literally like North Korea. Right? I'm going guess you don't have kids. Correct? >Sure, it may not be the most grievous occurrence of it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, in fact, policing. Only if you hate language and you purposely warp definition of commonly understood words and concepts to support your conclusion or ideology. Raising children by imparting morals, and providing structure and constraints is NOT authoritarian policing. Those are two different things. And though children certainly are humans (who actually claims otherwise?), they are not endowed with the same societal rights and responsibilities that adults are. This is why you can ground a child, but not an adult. Most people understand this distinction instinctively. You, on the other hand, have some trouble there.

meowface 7y ago

If they had added this to 1.1.1.1 itself, I'd agree this would be a huge overreach, but they're just adding some additional options for those who choose to manually set their resolvers to one of the new ones. I personally wouldn't use any of the filtered ones, but lots of companies provide free resolvers with blocklists like these. I don't really see how anyone could be fine with the existing 1.1.1.1 resolver but have a problem with this announcement. (If they were also against the original 1.1.1.1 resolver, then I can at least understand their being opposed to all of them.)

lma21 7y ago

honest question, why do you care how they evaluate 'porn' websites? as long as we're still capable of switching between 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8, what's wrong with providing this additional service? it really doesn't have to be a joke...

Mindwipe 7y ago
Because it is very likely that governments (such as the UK) will attempt to force all traffic to the censored one by law.
neop1x 7y ago
Because it tells governments it is possible to do. Years later we may start seeing devices with DNS servers hard-codded to this. And also because blocking like this is not very effective. You can't block every "harmful" website on the internet, plus there are various proxies. And what is "harmful" anyway, who decides? This also brings questions - are there already blocking something on 1.1.1.1 or will they propagate some blocks from 1.1.1.3 back to their main server? Any blocking is very wrong and may cause freedom reduction in the future.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

msla 7y ago

They block GLAAD but not Stormfront. That's all you really need to know.