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Why would CloudFlare do anything like that??? If what kiwifarms is doing is illegal, then law enforcement should stop them. If it's not illegal, then CloudFla

Why would CloudFlare do anything like that??? If what kiwifarms is doing is illegal, then law enforcement should stop them. If it's not illegal, then CloudFlare should continue providing service to them, regardless of how much CloudFlare may dislike what it believes they may be doing. It should ideally be illegal for CloudFlare (given how large and important they have become) to refuse business to anyone unless under an explicit court order to do so. Law enforcement should never be up to unaccountable private entities.

devman0 4y ago
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- dfgdfgfdg 4y ago
  That XKCD gets brought up every time someone mentions free speech and all it does is make a bad argument and refute its own bad argument. First, who's the "asshole?" In ANY situation, people point at each other. But more importantly, free speech is how we democratically resolve conflicts. Rather than fighting about things, we discuss and vote. As a conflict resolution mechanism, democracy which rests on freedom of speech, has been extraordinarily successful. And yet it's always under threat by people who when they are in power feel the temptation to ban the people they don't like from taking part. Even though the people we disagree with are exactly the people with whom we have to resolve conflicts. For thousands of years, when someone got into power, they would use force to keep others from gaining that same power, meaning the only way to get power was by force. That puts the most brutal in power. Welcome to the dark ages. Talking about things is much better, even if it means hearing things you don't like. Sometimes you are right, and sometimes you are wrong.
- vageli 4y ago
  > That Cloudflare does or does not do has no bearing on the website continuing to have an origin so it isn't even really censorship in the lightest. This has to be one of the most narrow definitions of censorship I've seen. Suppression of information is censorship, full stop. Suppression does not need to be committed by government for it to be censorship.
  - devman0 4y ago
    It isn't suppression of information, its not taking part in re-broadcasting (emphasis on re) it. If this was AWS banning Parler where AWS was the origin, then you might have a point.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      > It isn't suppression of information, its not taking part in re-broadcasting (emphasis on re) it. So, it sounds like you're in agreement that Cloudflare's role here is fairly impartial; they're not editorializing or supplementing the KiwiFarms data with any of their own opinions or biases. They take no part in the creation of this material, just the preservation of it. So, where do we draw this line? Should we remove Terry A. Davis' videos off the Internet Archive for intolerable racism and encouraging hateful behavior? Or maybe we should delete all the GNU projects because the public opinion on Stallman has changed of late? I simply don't follow this line of logic; there is nothing to gain from de-platforming this content. They'd only be giving them a reason to reincarnate as a Matrix server or Onion domain, and good luck getting your self-conscious service providers to take out the trash when that happens. I despise Cloudflare from the bottom of my blackened heart, but seeing people think a Twitter campaign is going to stop a forum from existing is silly. We're begging for an "Epik" situation, where a replacement pops up with the sole purpose of catering to extremist politics. Congratulations, now nobody wins.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    These kinds of arguments are torturous. It's not "censorship" when your local coffee store tells you to leave the premises after the third time you've threatened to kill the waitstaff.
    - rstupek 4y ago
      Wouldn't threatening to kill the waitstaff qualify as "illegal" since it's technically assault
      - woodruffw 4y ago
- liminvorous 4y ago
  I don't think the internet can funciton as a public platform, which it both is and should continue to be, without allowing infrastucture providers to provide services without being selective in who they provide them to. Also the details of America's legal implementation of the principle of free speach don't resolve the moral debate over what constitutes censorship, especially in regards to a global platform like the internet.
  - devman0 4y ago
    As long as actual ISPs remain neutral the Internet is an open platform, if you have a controversial position you may just have to do your own hosting as you are not entitled to demand others do so for you.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      > As long as actual ISPs remain neutral They already aren't neutral. For example, if you mirror or seed a Kali ISO, you're in violation of Comcast's TOS (even if you have business-class service), which says you may not "distribute tools or devices designed or used for compromising security or whose use is otherwise unauthorized, such as password guessing programs, decoders, password gatherers, keystroke loggers, analyzers, cracking tools, packet sniffers, encryption circumvention devices, or Trojan Horse programs."
    - simiones 4y ago
      > you are not entitled to demand others do so for you I agree that no one is entitled to this, but why do you feel entitled to demand others refuse service in this way?
      - madeofpalk 4y ago
        I can 'demand' whatever I want. Doesn't mean anyone has to actually follow that.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  "It's not literally illegal to say" is the argument for Cloudflare keeping Stormfront. Except they already compromised on that position so their free-speech extremist credentials already aren't that great. There's actually an easier argument against KF than XKCD 1357. The forum is specifically a platform for discussing and distributing the personal information of notorious public figures[0] in the interest of generating drama and lulz. They actively brag about having a kill count[1]. My personal opinion is that KF is actually engaging in illegal conduct and the only reason why they get away with it is because the US legal system has many blind spots. [0] Originally just one particularly weird Sonic fan comic author, but now a mish-mash of transgender streamers and alt-right nutters [1] Except when it comes to emulator developers, when they instead go full Alex Jones trying to claim Near didn't commit suicide
  - simiones 4y ago
    Yes, I believe Cloudflare shouldn't have interrupted their contract with Stormfront, or anyone else, for the reasons that they don't like what these others are publishing. That KF is a horrible place for horrible people should simply not be Cloudflare's concern. A company that is offering web hosting or DDOS protection services is too far removed from this idea of "publishing" for this to make any sense. I am not even necessarily against things like YouTube removing Alex Jones' videos - but this type of content validation needs to stop early. If you believe Cloudflare shouldn't do business with these people, neither should their ISP, nor should Github or Nginx or wherever they get their code from, and soon you'll say that they cleaning services company and their accountant should similarly stop providing service to such an evil organization (without any legal recourse, of course). And to be clear, I don't in any way sympathize with what KF is doing (assuming what you are saying is true, which I do believe but have not checked myself). But suing them or at least seeking to alert the authorities is what you should do, not complaining to Cloudflare about it.
- simiones 4y ago
  I have never once mentioned the word "censorship", and that is not my only concern. I would be saying the same thing if someone were asking a coffee company why they continue to sell coffee to this evil organization - even though no one would claim that the coffee company is "censoring" someone if they refuse service for this reason. My point is more related to this idea of a private company punishing an individual or organization for behavior it doesn't like. I believe this is a dangerous notion, and we should be demanding it stops, not encouraging it to happen more.
- Asraelite 4y ago
  For highly competitive markets I fully agree, but when the service providers form a monopoly or oligopoly it becomes a different story. These companies become de-facto gatekeepers for certain infrastructure. Cloudflare as a CDN isn't quite in that position yet, but it's close, close enough that it deserves to be scrutinized.
Ajedi32 4y ago
It's always ugly when the court of public opinion starts trying to supplant the role of an actual court.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Isn't it pretty normal to have an opinion on what companies or people do? I think Google should and should not do certain things, but my opinion is not enforceable in any way. I don't think that's "ugly", and I don't think people are trying to supplant the role of actual courts?
  - simiones 4y ago
    You're of course free to have any opinion, and express it in some reasonable limits. But, I think that extending responsibility for company/organization A's behavior to all those doing business with A is a bad idea and a net negative.
kurikuri 4y ago
> If it's not illegal, then CloudFlare should continue providing service to them > It should ideally be illegal for ClourFlare . . . to refuse business to anyone Yes, we should abstain from acting on _any_ moral interpretation unless it has been codified into law. /s Fun hyperbolic thought experiment, consider a site which posted 2-3 pictures a day of 12-13 year old girls, with faces blurred out, and no context other than the text representing their age (e.g. a caption with "12 year old"). There's no nudity involved, but the girls are always in some sort of skirt. Now imagine this was hosted through CloudFlare and they decided to close the site because they were uncomfortable with the content. Would you find it reasonable for a law to force them to continue hosting this content?
- simiones 4y ago
  > Would you find it reasonable for a law to force them to continue hosting this content? Yes, at least in principle. Generally, I don't think companies should have any business deciding what their customers can say. Now, if this site was sending threatening emails to Cloudflare employees, that would be a different discussion - I do believe that a company may have a right to protect its own employees from attacks. Though even here, requiring Cloudflare to go through some legal process where the senders have a chance to defend themselves before a neutral 3rd party would be a good thing. In general, the principle I'm following is that companies should have minimal rights, and definitely minimal to 0 obligations, to police their customers' behavior, outside very specific niches (e.g. AML and KYC for banks are probably important enough).
- psyc 4y ago
  Your experiment is the first interesting argument I've found in this whole accursed thread. As someone who gets triggered by child abuse, thinking about it forced my mind past the Cloudflare issue to what is my real issue, and the whole reason I take any interest in the KF situation in the first place. Because I can't bring myself to say Cloudflare should host your thought experiment, in spite of them not wanting to host it. But as much as I hate it, and I do hate it, your example should be allowed to be on the capital-I Internet. Because the only reason this is an issue is that WE ourselves have long since lost our innocence / ignorance of pedophilia and fetishes, and we're imagining how they would see it, and it's nauseating. But like we always used to say, if you see something dirty it's because you have a dirty mind. And as much as it's sickening, what goes on in other people's minds and how they view the world, as long as it stays in the mind, is none of anyone's god damn business except their therapist and maybe their spouse, if they're interested. If anybody thinks the girls are being abused, the site should be investigated by the FBI or equivalent. I have no idea but I hope to God there's a law somewhere that says the site owners can be convicted for their intended purpose, for example if there is no evidence that there's a legitimate explanation like pageantry (ugh) or fashion. Or if they're using a known porn payment processor, or if they require payment in BTC or something. But ultimately the law is the (changeable) law. Samantha Fox's mother put her in real softcore porn when she was 16 and it was shot, bought, and sold in the open, legally. Yup. Her mom. But my issue that I'm trying to get to is this. The real problem is that it turns out that the Internet, from an architectural / engineering standpoint, ain't quite so amazing as we thought it was back in the 90's. It turns out the Internet can't route around shit, because way too much of its infrastructure is privately owned, and there may not be sufficient or well-written-enough legislation and regulation to prevent these private pieces of the network from acting unilaterally when they should not. Here's an article another HNer posted the other day. It's called Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet, it's written by the admin and owner of Kiwi Farms, and it explains the problem way better. It also explains exactly why Josh won't back down for anything. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-10-28/where-sidewalk-ends-death-internet https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-10-28/where-sidewalk-end... My interest in this, in addition to just as a concerned netizen, stems from my own attempt to solve a much harder version of Kiwi Farms' problem. I failed. Josh hasn't failed yet. I wouldn't stop rooting for him no matter WHAT was on his site, legally. All these people on a forum centered on internet tech, who can't see past doxing and swatting and think they're better people than those monsternaziterrorists, and meanwhile I have more respect for this Josh kid right now (I was online and coding before his parents met, probably) than anyone in this industry right now. I don't care about the content. I care about the censorship at the scope of the whole planetary Internet, as well as free speech in the U.S.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Why would CloudFlare do anything like that??? Because it's their business, and they have the right to to choose what it is permitted to be used for. > If what kiwifarms is doing is illegal, then law enforcement should stop them. Law enforcement deals with crime, not everything illegal is also criminal. > If it's not illegal, then CloudFlare should continue providing service to them, regardless of how much CloudFlare may dislike what it believes they may be doing. Cloudflare is not a common carrier or public utility, not is it the kind of natural monopoly that would typically justify it being made such, and has the freedom to decide who to do business with, and what to allow their facilities to be used for, and is not obligated to only refuse unlawful business.
- simiones 4y ago
  > Because it's their business, and they have the right to to choose what it is permitted to be used for. > Cloudflare is not a common carrier or public utility, not is it the kind of natural monopoly that would typically justify it being made such, and has the freedom to decide who to do business with, and what to allow their facilities to be used for, and is not obligated to only refuse unlawful business. They also have the right to choose to keep doing business. We're not discussing what they must do, we are discussing what they should do. They are well within their rights to both allow or deny service to KF or any other person or organization (at least barring some kind of court order). The GP demanded that they cut their business relationship with KF. I am arguing that they shouldn't do that.
yoshuaw 4y ago
> Why would CloudFlare do anything like that??? Do anything like what? Address controversy? It’s common for companies to issue public statements when they’re in hot water. Or did you mean doing something about bad actors? It certainly is their prerogative to do nothing. But they’re just as capable of doing something. That’s why I’m asking their CTO whether they’ve issued any statements yet. So far I’m not aware of any external communication about this, and I’m keen to hear what they have to say.

devman0 4y ago

[flagged]

dfgdfgfdg 4y ago
That XKCD gets brought up every time someone mentions free speech and all it does is make a bad argument and refute its own bad argument. First, who's the "asshole?" In ANY situation, people point at each other. But more importantly, free speech is how we democratically resolve conflicts. Rather than fighting about things, we discuss and vote. As a conflict resolution mechanism, democracy which rests on freedom of speech, has been extraordinarily successful. And yet it's always under threat by people who when they are in power feel the temptation to ban the people they don't like from taking part. Even though the people we disagree with are exactly the people with whom we have to resolve conflicts. For thousands of years, when someone got into power, they would use force to keep others from gaining that same power, meaning the only way to get power was by force. That puts the most brutal in power. Welcome to the dark ages. Talking about things is much better, even if it means hearing things you don't like. Sometimes you are right, and sometimes you are wrong.
vageli 4y ago
> That Cloudflare does or does not do has no bearing on the website continuing to have an origin so it isn't even really censorship in the lightest. This has to be one of the most narrow definitions of censorship I've seen. Suppression of information is censorship, full stop. Suppression does not need to be committed by government for it to be censorship.
- devman0 4y ago
  It isn't suppression of information, its not taking part in re-broadcasting (emphasis on re) it. If this was AWS banning Parler where AWS was the origin, then you might have a point.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > It isn't suppression of information, its not taking part in re-broadcasting (emphasis on re) it. So, it sounds like you're in agreement that Cloudflare's role here is fairly impartial; they're not editorializing or supplementing the KiwiFarms data with any of their own opinions or biases. They take no part in the creation of this material, just the preservation of it. So, where do we draw this line? Should we remove Terry A. Davis' videos off the Internet Archive for intolerable racism and encouraging hateful behavior? Or maybe we should delete all the GNU projects because the public opinion on Stallman has changed of late? I simply don't follow this line of logic; there is nothing to gain from de-platforming this content. They'd only be giving them a reason to reincarnate as a Matrix server or Onion domain, and good luck getting your self-conscious service providers to take out the trash when that happens. I despise Cloudflare from the bottom of my blackened heart, but seeing people think a Twitter campaign is going to stop a forum from existing is silly. We're begging for an "Epik" situation, where a replacement pops up with the sole purpose of catering to extremist politics. Congratulations, now nobody wins.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  These kinds of arguments are torturous. It's not "censorship" when your local coffee store tells you to leave the premises after the third time you've threatened to kill the waitstaff.
  - rstupek 4y ago
    Wouldn't threatening to kill the waitstaff qualify as "illegal" since it's technically assault
    - woodruffw 4y ago
liminvorous 4y ago
I don't think the internet can funciton as a public platform, which it both is and should continue to be, without allowing infrastucture providers to provide services without being selective in who they provide them to. Also the details of America's legal implementation of the principle of free speach don't resolve the moral debate over what constitutes censorship, especially in regards to a global platform like the internet.
- devman0 4y ago
  As long as actual ISPs remain neutral the Internet is an open platform, if you have a controversial position you may just have to do your own hosting as you are not entitled to demand others do so for you.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    > As long as actual ISPs remain neutral They already aren't neutral. For example, if you mirror or seed a Kali ISO, you're in violation of Comcast's TOS (even if you have business-class service), which says you may not "distribute tools or devices designed or used for compromising security or whose use is otherwise unauthorized, such as password guessing programs, decoders, password gatherers, keystroke loggers, analyzers, cracking tools, packet sniffers, encryption circumvention devices, or Trojan Horse programs."
  - simiones 4y ago
    > you are not entitled to demand others do so for you I agree that no one is entitled to this, but why do you feel entitled to demand others refuse service in this way?
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      I can 'demand' whatever I want. Doesn't mean anyone has to actually follow that.
kmeisthax 4y ago
"It's not literally illegal to say" is the argument for Cloudflare keeping Stormfront. Except they already compromised on that position so their free-speech extremist credentials already aren't that great. There's actually an easier argument against KF than XKCD 1357. The forum is specifically a platform for discussing and distributing the personal information of notorious public figures[0] in the interest of generating drama and lulz. They actively brag about having a kill count[1]. My personal opinion is that KF is actually engaging in illegal conduct and the only reason why they get away with it is because the US legal system has many blind spots. [0] Originally just one particularly weird Sonic fan comic author, but now a mish-mash of transgender streamers and alt-right nutters [1] Except when it comes to emulator developers, when they instead go full Alex Jones trying to claim Near didn't commit suicide
- simiones 4y ago
  Yes, I believe Cloudflare shouldn't have interrupted their contract with Stormfront, or anyone else, for the reasons that they don't like what these others are publishing. That KF is a horrible place for horrible people should simply not be Cloudflare's concern. A company that is offering web hosting or DDOS protection services is too far removed from this idea of "publishing" for this to make any sense. I am not even necessarily against things like YouTube removing Alex Jones' videos - but this type of content validation needs to stop early. If you believe Cloudflare shouldn't do business with these people, neither should their ISP, nor should Github or Nginx or wherever they get their code from, and soon you'll say that they cleaning services company and their accountant should similarly stop providing service to such an evil organization (without any legal recourse, of course). And to be clear, I don't in any way sympathize with what KF is doing (assuming what you are saying is true, which I do believe but have not checked myself). But suing them or at least seeking to alert the authorities is what you should do, not complaining to Cloudflare about it.
simiones 4y ago
I have never once mentioned the word "censorship", and that is not my only concern. I would be saying the same thing if someone were asking a coffee company why they continue to sell coffee to this evil organization - even though no one would claim that the coffee company is "censoring" someone if they refuse service for this reason. My point is more related to this idea of a private company punishing an individual or organization for behavior it doesn't like. I believe this is a dangerous notion, and we should be demanding it stops, not encouraging it to happen more.
Asraelite 4y ago
For highly competitive markets I fully agree, but when the service providers form a monopoly or oligopoly it becomes a different story. These companies become de-facto gatekeepers for certain infrastructure. Cloudflare as a CDN isn't quite in that position yet, but it's close, close enough that it deserves to be scrutinized.

Ajedi32 4y ago

It's always ugly when the court of public opinion starts trying to supplant the role of an actual court.

madeofpalk 4y ago
Isn't it pretty normal to have an opinion on what companies or people do? I think Google should and should not do certain things, but my opinion is not enforceable in any way. I don't think that's "ugly", and I don't think people are trying to supplant the role of actual courts?
- simiones 4y ago
  You're of course free to have any opinion, and express it in some reasonable limits. But, I think that extending responsibility for company/organization A's behavior to all those doing business with A is a bad idea and a net negative.

kurikuri 4y ago

> If it's not illegal, then CloudFlare should continue providing service to them > It should ideally be illegal for ClourFlare . . . to refuse business to anyone Yes, we should abstain from acting on _any_ moral interpretation unless it has been codified into law. /s Fun hyperbolic thought experiment, consider a site which posted 2-3 pictures a day of 12-13 year old girls, with faces blurred out, and no context other than the text representing their age (e.g. a caption with "12 year old"). There's no nudity involved, but the girls are always in some sort of skirt. Now imagine this was hosted through CloudFlare and they decided to close the site because they were uncomfortable with the content. Would you find it reasonable for a law to force them to continue hosting this content?

simiones 4y ago
> Would you find it reasonable for a law to force them to continue hosting this content? Yes, at least in principle. Generally, I don't think companies should have any business deciding what their customers can say. Now, if this site was sending threatening emails to Cloudflare employees, that would be a different discussion - I do believe that a company may have a right to protect its own employees from attacks. Though even here, requiring Cloudflare to go through some legal process where the senders have a chance to defend themselves before a neutral 3rd party would be a good thing. In general, the principle I'm following is that companies should have minimal rights, and definitely minimal to 0 obligations, to police their customers' behavior, outside very specific niches (e.g. AML and KYC for banks are probably important enough).
psyc 4y ago
Your experiment is the first interesting argument I've found in this whole accursed thread. As someone who gets triggered by child abuse, thinking about it forced my mind past the Cloudflare issue to what is my real issue, and the whole reason I take any interest in the KF situation in the first place. Because I can't bring myself to say Cloudflare should host your thought experiment, in spite of them not wanting to host it. But as much as I hate it, and I do hate it, your example should be allowed to be on the capital-I Internet. Because the only reason this is an issue is that WE ourselves have long since lost our innocence / ignorance of pedophilia and fetishes, and we're imagining how they would see it, and it's nauseating. But like we always used to say, if you see something dirty it's because you have a dirty mind. And as much as it's sickening, what goes on in other people's minds and how they view the world, as long as it stays in the mind, is none of anyone's god damn business except their therapist and maybe their spouse, if they're interested. If anybody thinks the girls are being abused, the site should be investigated by the FBI or equivalent. I have no idea but I hope to God there's a law somewhere that says the site owners can be convicted for their intended purpose, for example if there is no evidence that there's a legitimate explanation like pageantry (ugh) or fashion. Or if they're using a known porn payment processor, or if they require payment in BTC or something. But ultimately the law is the (changeable) law. Samantha Fox's mother put her in real softcore porn when she was 16 and it was shot, bought, and sold in the open, legally. Yup. Her mom. But my issue that I'm trying to get to is this. The real problem is that it turns out that the Internet, from an architectural / engineering standpoint, ain't quite so amazing as we thought it was back in the 90's. It turns out the Internet can't route around shit, because way too much of its infrastructure is privately owned, and there may not be sufficient or well-written-enough legislation and regulation to prevent these private pieces of the network from acting unilaterally when they should not. Here's an article another HNer posted the other day. It's called Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet, it's written by the admin and owner of Kiwi Farms, and it explains the problem way better. It also explains exactly why Josh won't back down for anything. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-10-28/where-sidewalk-ends-death-internet https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-10-28/where-sidewalk-end... My interest in this, in addition to just as a concerned netizen, stems from my own attempt to solve a much harder version of Kiwi Farms' problem. I failed. Josh hasn't failed yet. I wouldn't stop rooting for him no matter WHAT was on his site, legally. All these people on a forum centered on internet tech, who can't see past doxing and swatting and think they're better people than those monsternaziterrorists, and meanwhile I have more respect for this Josh kid right now (I was online and coding before his parents met, probably) than anyone in this industry right now. I don't care about the content. I care about the censorship at the scope of the whole planetary Internet, as well as free speech in the U.S.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Why would CloudFlare do anything like that??? Because it's their business, and they have the right to to choose what it is permitted to be used for. > If what kiwifarms is doing is illegal, then law enforcement should stop them. Law enforcement deals with crime, not everything illegal is also criminal. > If it's not illegal, then CloudFlare should continue providing service to them, regardless of how much CloudFlare may dislike what it believes they may be doing. Cloudflare is not a common carrier or public utility, not is it the kind of natural monopoly that would typically justify it being made such, and has the freedom to decide who to do business with, and what to allow their facilities to be used for, and is not obligated to only refuse unlawful business.

simiones 4y ago
> Because it's their business, and they have the right to to choose what it is permitted to be used for. > Cloudflare is not a common carrier or public utility, not is it the kind of natural monopoly that would typically justify it being made such, and has the freedom to decide who to do business with, and what to allow their facilities to be used for, and is not obligated to only refuse unlawful business. They also have the right to choose to keep doing business. We're not discussing what they must do, we are discussing what they should do. They are well within their rights to both allow or deny service to KF or any other person or organization (at least barring some kind of court order). The GP demanded that they cut their business relationship with KF. I am arguing that they shouldn't do that.

yoshuaw 4y ago

> Why would CloudFlare do anything like that??? Do anything like what? Address controversy? It’s common for companies to issue public statements when they’re in hot water. Or did you mean doing something about bad actors? It certainly is their prerogative to do nothing. But they’re just as capable of doing something. That’s why I’m asking their CTO whether they’ve issued any statements yet. So far I’m not aware of any external communication about this, and I’m keen to hear what they have to say.