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> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equival

• weberer 4y ago
  And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives. These people who want to revoke DDoS protection for groups they don't like are essentially promoting terrorism. Why else would they fight so hard to remove DDoS protection, if not because they simply want those attacks to succeed?
  • cowtools 4y ago
    DDoS is a product of an inherent weakness of the internet infrastructure, namely BGP. Cloudflare "solves" this by acting as a middleman, and charging for their service. I don't know if I would describe a DDoS attack as "digital terrorism", but it is annoying and hard to stop on an individual level because of the design of the internet.
    • greyface- 4y ago
      > namely BGP DDoS attacks would still occur if we used a routing protocol other than BGP. It's not created by BGP, it's created by the fact that the Internet is end-to-end oversubscribed.
      • cowtools 4y ago
        The weakness in the internet that allows for DDoS is that you can't tell your peers to filter incoming traffic on your behalf, so you need to discriminate on the edge. The attacker still gets to eat up your bandwidth and CPU time.
        • greyface- 4y ago
          BGP absolutely does allow you to tell your peers to filter traffic before passing it to you. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7999.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7999.html
          • cowtools 4y ago
            This is just IP-based filtering, which is useless as the attacker can purchase more IP space. What you need is something like a whitelist-by-public-key or hashcash or something.
    • ancarda 4y ago
      Isn't the issue more with how we implemented IP than BGP? AFAIK, DDoS attacks would be far less effective if every ISP implemented BCP 38.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • fomine3 4y ago
      It's a problem that stop on an corporate level is also hard. Ultimately CDN is the only mitigation.
  • sealeck 4y ago
    > They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives. They're attacking KiwiFarms for their agenda of trying to drive people to commit suicide.
    • patmcc 4y ago
      True. Let's say KiwiFarms was entirely hosted/located in a shed in the middle of nowhere. Someone walks up to it and sets it on fire. Should the local fire department put it out? Assume it's not going to spread to other buildings/etc.
      • pseudalopex 4y ago
        Is Cloudflare a government service? Do local fire departments remove copyright infringers' sheds?
        • tomrod 4y ago
          It's a platform of services like a government service is typically provisioned. While not a democratically elected government, they use governance all the same.
          • pseudalopex 4y ago
            > It's a platform of services like a government service is typically provisioned. It's a monopoly funded by taxes obligated to serve everyone? > While not a democratically elected government, they use governance all the same. This is meaningless.
            • tomrod 4y ago
              I can see you're not interested in discussion at this time. No worries, we all have those days. I did not say it was a government service, I said a platform functions a lot like a government service, especially when multihoming is limited due to switching costs.
  • chc 4y ago
    The group they're trying to target here is a terrorist group. Not even in a metaphorical sense. It's people who try to harass random transgender people to the point of suicide or murder.
    • 3sGPqEu59EGDFUn 4y ago
      If they are a terrorist group (or otherwise doing something "wrong"), then the appropriate means to deal with that is courts and law enforcement, not a CDN.
      • chc 4y ago
        I agree, I wish we had a law enforcement apparatus that cared about protecting transgender people. But we don't have a clear path to that at the moment, and in the meantime we want to avoid more people being killed. Thus you have people trying to argue for more informal procedures that revolve around social pressure, telling companies basically "This is obviously way beyond the pale, you should not associate yourself with this." It's not a good state for things to be in, but pretending things are better than they are is an even worse solution.
        • throwrqX 4y ago
          What evidence is there for the law enforcement apparatus not protecting transgender people in this particular case? Have their been similar cases for cisgender people where the law enforcement apparatus has cared more? I am not sure saying we need mob action to stop other mob action is a good long term solution.
          • FrecklySunbeam 4y ago
            Law enforcement is the tool being used to do the violence ffs, they’re not protecting anyone
            • inquirerGeneral 4y ago
  • blibble 4y ago
    > And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives. in my experience most of the time it's due to: - boredom ("gotta nuke something") - revenge for being banned/fragged/... - extortion ("ban this person I don't like, or else")
    • Ticklee 4y ago
      Another big reason is to inhibit the competition, this is often seen in video game servers DDoS attacking each other in order to get people to switch
  • malfist 4y ago
    Wow. So de-platforming Nazis is terrorism now?
    • naasking 4y ago
      If you deplatform a Nazi by murdering them, is it still murder?
      • malfist 4y ago
        Are you implying that if cloudflare kicked a nazi off their services, that would murder them?
        • naasking 4y ago
          No. Clearly you're having trouble understanding basic logic so I'll spell it out for you: 1. Terrorism is not a judgment of the target but of the action. 2. The OP classified DDoS as terrorism. 3. DDoSing Nazis is thus terrorism. By parity of reasoning, I pointed out that murdering a Nazi is still murder, regardless of the fact that the target was a Nazi. The nature of the target is immaterial to the classification of the action taken against them.
          • malfist 4y ago
            > 2. The OP classified DDoS as terrorism. This is begging the question. DDoS is not terrorism. Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." Inconveniencing a people, by taking down a website is not violence or intimidation. Without that tenant, everything you've argued on this thread is a moot point. Keep in mind who you're defending here. The site in question doxxes trans people so they can be harassed and sent death threats. That IS terrorism.
            • naasking 4y ago
              > Inconveniencing a people, by taking down a website is not violence or intimidation. The intent of the DDoS in question is very clearly a form of intimidation. DDoS in general does cause real economic harm and not merely inconvenience. > Keep in mind who you're defending here. That's irrelevant. Murdering Nazis is still wrong and illegal. > The site in question doxxes trans people so they can be harassed and sent death threats. That IS terrorism. If it were they would have been charged. You're imputing intent and actions without sufficient evidence, because if that evidence existed we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Extra-judicial actions of this sort, no matter how plausibly justified, are not how society works. We have laws and a justice system because mob "justice" is wrong.
  • xdennis 4y ago
    > And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. No, it's not. Not everything that's bad is terrorism. Terrorism is specifically about using violence. Don't water down terms.
    • Ticklee 4y ago
      Speech can be violence. This can for instance be seen on the very website we are discussing.
      • naasking 4y ago
        > Speech can be violence No. Don't blur this line or you not only lose credibility, you descend into absurdity.
    • weberer 4y ago
      Terrorism includes attacks on infrastructure, not just bodily harm. Firebombing an empty building still counts. In this case, it would fall specifically within cyber terrorism. >the premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cyberterrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cybert...
  • _ktx2 4y ago
    I would call it vigilantism which is a type of definitional terrorism. People in the US don't like that word, but there's a good many things that are terrorism that we don't call such. At the end of the day, violence with political aims is terrorism.
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      > I would call it vigilantism which is a type of definitional terrorism. Only if it's sufficiently political. Lots of DDoS is not. And that bar gets higher for an attack that's minimally violent.
      • kodah 4y ago
        There is no DDoS that's minimally violent. You are right though, not all DDoS attacks are politically motivated.
        • Dylan16807 4y ago
          Whatever, can we say it's a 3/10 or less on the violence scale instead of having an argument about what "minimal" means?
          • kodah 4y ago
            For certain things I will measure/compare harmfulness relative to potential outcomes because sometimes doing enforcement is suboptimal. In this case, however, we're talking about someone co-opting the governments monopoly on violence, which is more of an issue of principle. Once you let people co-opt that, it's a fairly run-away train. That's a long way of saying, for me this situation is very binary. There's no degrees of vigilantism.
  • anigbrowl 4y ago
    You seem to be treating all political conflict as terrorism. Couldn't you say the same about people who organize on Kiwifarms and flood social media with specious allegations of bad character or nefarious actions? For that matter, the site has been heavily associated with doxxing and swatting.
    • weberer 4y ago
      No, as I've posted below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cyberterrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism#Defining_cybert...
      • anigbrowl 4y ago
        The Technolytics Institute defines cyberterrorism as The premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives. The National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization of legislators created to help policymakers in the United States with issues such as economy and homeland security defines cyberterrorism as: The use of information technology by terrorist groups and individuals to further their agenda. This can include use of information technology to organize and execute attacks against networks, computer systems and telecommunications infrastructures, or for exchanging information or making threats electronically. -- Just taking the first two, they could easily be extended to Kiwifarms, where information on individuals is compiled and shared in public fashion and discourse revolves around how such people deserve to be harrassed. I haven't been following the Keffals episode in particular but Kiwifarms already had a reputation for facilitating and fostering personal harassment.
  • philistine 4y ago
    History has shown that reprehensible acts can be done for the greater good. Getting Kiwi Farms off the Internet at all cost might be good, digital terrorism be damned.
  • LionTamer 4y ago
    Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to equivocate terrorism, which actively targets/kills innocent civilians, with DDOS attacks against services which are responsible for moral atrocities? Could it be compared to vigilante justice? Perhaps. But comparing it to terrorism is unfair, to put it mildly.
• rhinoceraptor 4y ago
  I think one easy thing they could do, is stop hosting for forums dedicated to doxxing and harassing people, preferably before they inevitably bully their victims into suicide.
  • pseudalopex 4y ago
    I'm not sure hosting something and ensuring it's accessible are different really. But the Cloudflare CEO is. And they don't host Kiwi Farms. Or do they? The CEO said CDN isn't hosting. But it fits the common definition.
    • howdyfolks 4y ago
      I see. So maybe we should go after the ISPs transmitting the information too?
      • killyourcar 4y ago
        There's a discussion that could be had about whether it's appropriate for ISPs to block sites that are strongly associated with terrorism. I don't think that discussion can reasonably happen on this forum, but I think there are interesting philosophical positions that are valid that we should put against one another.
  • mjr00 4y ago
    Guess what? They do. FTA: > Our decision to disable access to content in hosting products fundamentally results in that content being taken offline, at least until it is republished elsewhere. Hosting products are subject to our Acceptable Hosting Policy. Under that policy, for these products, we may remove or disable access to content that we believe: [...] Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public.
    • Borgz 4y ago
• delroth 4y ago
  The negative value of a website being serviced by Cloudflare is usually significantly higher than the price they pay for the service. How much do you think Cloudflare donated for the 3 suicides caused by Kiwi Farms in the recent years?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • cowtools 4y ago
  • DoctorOW 4y ago
    > How much do you think Cloudflare donated for the 3 suicides caused by Kiwi Farms in the recent years? Suicides that are awful, and were caused by Kiwi Farms. The quote I used clarified that Cloudflare's aim is to not profit from abhorrent behavior.
• bfgoodrich 4y ago
• a_shovel 4y ago
  > ...we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them. I'm sure their LGBTQ+ employees will appreciate that when they get doxxed, swatted, and harassed every hour of the day and night because they're providing critical resources to the groups doing so. Their position probably really does come from genuine belief in principles of anti-censorship and free speech, but the version that LGBTQ+ people are gonna hear from them is that every death threat, every picture of them taken without their knowledge, every coordinated campaign of harassment, every SWAT officer pointing a gun at their face when they wake up, every suicide after years of abuse, has the full backing and support of a multi-billion dollar corporation, and there's nothing they can do about it. And they're kinda right.
  • shrubble 4y ago
    So, you have at least one example of this scenario (gay Cloudflare employee gets doxxed and harassed) ready to tell us about, right?
    • chc 4y ago
      I can provide lots of examples of Kiwi Farms doxxing and harassing queer people. Whether they happen to work for Cloudflare at the time is a matter of chance, and not particularly relevant to the point.
      • Bigpet 4y ago
        Swatting people is illegal, if you have evidence of a crime you should bring it to the police, not to cloudflare.
        • sascha_sl 4y ago
          Oh, what willful ignorance. KF is the kind of "technically legal" operation that the charge of racketeering was invented for. Everyone knows what's happening and why things are laid out as they are, but nobody immediately responsible for the illegal act can be found.
• cptcobalt 4y ago
  I somewhat agree with these two points as well. When you're running a business, you'll often have customers you find disagreeable. That doesn't mean that they're invalid customers, but you may feel gross helping them. For the exceptionally bad cases, why not jack up the prices 10x and donate those proceeds? > Another automated moderation system that checks for certain keywords? Ask the LGBTQ people banned from Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Google/etc. if those systems really work all that well. This is so, so true. Both automated and human review systems often times don't handle or protect minority users well. (Reasonable Disclosure: I still terminated my services with CloudFlare over this.)
  • pseudalopex 4y ago
    > For the exceptionally bad cases, why not jack up the prices 10x and donate those proceeds? Even paying victims can't fix all harms. Never mind donating to someone else.
• psyc 4y ago
  • DoctorOW 4y ago
    This is not at all what I'm saying. I'm trans, a lesbian and an advocate for feminism.
• tambourine_man 4y ago
  Cloudflare is not a public service, the comparison with firefighters is not apt. I’ve been seeing this confusion more and more recently, probably because of the size and omnipresence of corporations. I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts or simply ignorance, but the distinction has to be emphasized. Corporations and public services are completely different beasts, with different legislations, incentives, etc.
  • splitrocket 4y ago
    100% concur. Illinois has to allow the Nazis to march: they are the government. You don't have to allow nazis into your private party, nor do you have to publish their books. You, as an individual, and corporations as entities are emphatically not the government.
    • SkyBelow 4y ago
      >Illinois has to allow the Per the existing law, but given the Constitution can be changed, should they have to allow? Arguing they have to because the law currently prevents them from doing otherwise seems a different argument than it being good for government to have such restrictions because the benefits are worth more than the detriments (or vice versa).
    • DoctorOW 4y ago
      But see this is where I get tripped up. I don't think laws should dictate morality. So barring the fact that it's the way the law is written in the United States. Why is Illinois morally required to protect speech and Cloudflare, who almost certainly has far greater control (theoretically) over speech not?
      • phillipcarter 4y ago
        This is fast approaching the whole, "why is anyone morally required to do anything?" sort of existential discussion. The US Government has laws in place like this because those were written as founding principles and interpreted in certain ways by our legal system over time. That's only it. But it's all calvinball in the end. Congress could strike the 1A from the constitution, or all our courts could start ruling against the 1A tomorrow. We're just making it up as we go. Now this would likely result in a mass uprising, but that's besides the point. The only reason why this is a thing right now is because CloudFlare(a) is in a position to stop digital protection of Kiwi Farms (and thus force them to fully own the consequences of their speech), and (b) has explicitly chosen not to do anything about it, much to the chagrin of myself and a whole lot of other people. My belief, as is the belief of others, is that Kiwi Farms are violating their TOS and should be removed. That's it. CloudFlare, like Calvin when playing Calvinball, is deciding to make it up as they go, and we aren't happy about that.
• schainks 4y ago
  You make a good point that policing who is who is difficult enough that letting bad guys pay $20 month or whatever is "cheaper" than actively validating who they are and then kicking them off your service for moral reasons. I get the feeling that 9/10 times these bad actors are on the cheapest cheapo plan available so it's actually very expensive to deal many tiny customers versus one huge one. Oh, but wait, CloudFlare HAS the resources to validate and act, since they know whose fees to send to rights organizations. And as for being the fire department? Excuse me? They are a company that exists to make money, not a public service beholden to a specific, lawfully mandated social contract. Their first point is a false equivalency and they can go fuck themselves for even bringing that up. This statement from them is PR fluff. Paradox of tolerance. You must be _intolerant_ to these intolerant people or they will fuck up everything for everyone. Cloudflare is letting cancer of society erode public trust, just like every other hyper scale tech company, because businesses exist to make money.
  • DoctorOW 4y ago
    > They are a company that exists to make money, not a public service beholden to a specific, lawfully mandated social contract. Part of the reason for my position as stated above and throughout the thread. I believe that SPECIFICALLY at Cloudflare's scale, they have more control than most governments in the realm of speech. Therefore, they are MORALLY (not legally) required to enact the same social contract. I believe any alternative where they break that social contract will have unintentional repercussions for minority groups. To have my position changed, I would need to be convinced those repercussions wouldn't happen in practice.
• fivre 4y ago
  > We don't and won't talk about these efforts publicly because we don't do them for marketing purposes in a post that further goes out of its way to say, "look at these morally good things we're doing (Galileo and Athenian) that aren't themselves part of the abuse process, and then has their logos as two of the three images in the article body? Okay, sure, this may not strictly be marketing material insofar as it's not an ad the marketing team purchased, but c'mon, did ya'll put those in place to help explain the abuse process or because they're nice "but look, we also do good things!" window dressing on an article you think otherwise may not have the best reception?
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    The projects with logos are not part of "these efforts" in the sentence you're quoting. Yes, they market some other things they do.
• colechristensen 4y ago
  I just don't want to live in a world where society is governed and censored by big corporations. Wanting them to do so to further my worldview invites others to further the worldview of people I oppose. Leave the governing to the government, especially when it comes to systems with very broad usages (social networks, internet infrastructure, etc.)
  • phillipcarter 4y ago
    > I just don't want to live in a world where society is governed and censored by big corporations. You already do. And that's actually a good thing. It means that in free societies like the USA, these companies are free to choose to do (or not do) business with whomever they choose. They are not free from the market reacting to those decisions, though.
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      Which is effectively mob rule, or fear-of-mob-rule rule. I don't want dominating corporations to be run by people afraid of offending a vocal minority.
      • helloworld97 4y ago
        Who decides what's a minority?
        • colechristensen 4y ago
          By "vocal minority" I mean a small but loud group, the literal definition of minority not the social justice sense of some oppressed group.
          • devmor 4y ago
            Oh, so like a forum full of people addicted to internet stalking?
      • 4y ago
• nightpool 4y ago
  > That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires This is a false equivalence, because fire departments are public utilities provided and regulated by the state. Cloudflare is a private business. If Cloudflare was democratically elected by its constituents, and it was accountable and answerable to them, then I would agree with them that they have a responsibility to make their services available to all of their constituents, subject to the due process of law. But they aren't a public utility, and they don't get democratically elected. Cloudflare is a private business, and it exists to capture the surplus value of keeping more websites online and marketing their security products to more corporations. They can do business with whoever they choose to. And they choose to do business with Kiwifarms. Honestly: in effect, Kiwifarms functions as a free success story for Cloudflare's sales folks—"Look at how many people hate this website, and yet they're still online, thanks to Cloudflare!". I think that's probably the reason that Cloudflare's support of Kiwifarms rankles so much with people who are victims of the website—the fact that Kiwifarms is still online is Cloudflare working exactly as intended, but amorally. > For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation service we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them Okay, you donated the fees, but why continue to accept the money from the site that opposes LGBTQ+ rights in the first place? Cloudflare still got to keep the benefit of increased revenue, and a larger customer base, and the world still got worse. Did the donation they make actually offset the harm done to the world by keeping that site (whatever it is) online? It seems unlikely. > In addition, I think it's touched on but Cloudflare is huge. Even if they changed their mind on terminating amoral customers, how would that go down? Another automated moderation system that checks for certain keywords? No, it would go down, ideally, the same way it does today and the same way it did for the Daily Stormer and 8chan. Terminating services for customers like Kiwifarms is a big decision, and it's one that shouldn't be made lightly, and frankly: there just aren't that many harassment websites that are as big and as long-lived as Kiwifarms. I can maybe think of one or two others off the top of my head. I'm okay if Cloudflare decides to terminate one or two of the biggest, most important harassment sites using their platform per year—doing something is better than doing nothing.
  • 4y ago
• stormbrew 4y ago
  > the latter makes me more hopeful as someone in that specific minority community. I'm curious what you think the "balancing" donation/action/whatever cloudflare could do to counteract the very real harms kf causes are? This isn't a political action group that takes donations and lobbies. It's a site where people's personal information is offered up to anyone who wants it, knowing that many of those people want to do harm with it. The owners and moderators know all of this and both allow and encourage it. I think this kind of "but we donate!" approach is both an admission that they enable harm, and a completely inadequate to the situation here. Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcement. But this has been going on for years and nothing has been done, in spite of many efforts being made and many people literally going into hiding due to harassment from this site. So how is cloudflare going to make this one right to their ERG?
  • DoctorOW 4y ago
    > This isn't a political action group that takes donations and lobbies. It's a site where people's personal information is offered up to anyone who wants it, knowing that many of those people want to do harm with it. The owners and moderators know all of this and both allow and encourage it. I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan. > Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcement. But this has been going on for years and nothing has been done, in spite of many efforts being made and many people literally going into hiding due to harassment from this site. This is the specific contradiction I'm trying to avoid. It feels incredibly odd to me to look at a coordinated campaign of harassers and think "it should be easier for organized groups of people to control the conversation". You can look at my comments in this thread or in others, I'm totally cool every time hateful shitbags are taken off the internet and I fight back when they're defended. I'm just not in favor of any broad policy that puts one organization in control of speech.
    • stormbrew 4y ago
      > I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan. I didn't say it was? I don't see why the fact that cf is paying for their ddos protection instead of kf paying for it themselves is really relevant to the enablement of harm. Honestly that makes it even worse: in the other situation, cf is taking money from a bad actor and funneling it towards a good one (both allegedly). Here cf is paying expenses (probably in the marketing line of their expense sheet) to keep kf accessible, including storing, replicating, and distributing their content, doxes and all. > This is the specific contradiction I'm trying to avoid. I think this is a contradiction of your own making? The problem people have isn't that the targets of kf are being "silenced" in some Renaissance ideal sort of way. It's that they are put in a position of fearing for their own lives and the lives of the people around them. There's no contradiction here unless you think the people who want the site to stop are secret free speech absolutists. Anyways, while we're talking about perfect worlds where police actually do anything about stuff like this and no one has to resort, in my perfect world the internet doesn't break because cf does, and cf isn't even in a position to arbitrate speech. But we can't always get what we want.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]