11 ms·

Pretty crazy turnaround. I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1] they put out recently, and I don't envy the position they are in. On one h

by orf 4y ago

Pretty crazy turnaround. I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1] they put out recently, and I don't envy the position they are in. On one hand, yes, this specific site is terrible. But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible, and I respect them for that. It's not an easy line to take, and other companies like Google and Facebook have not made that same choice to stay neutral. > 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 equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character 1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-approach/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...

raverbashing 4y ago
I'm thinking someone got a reality check from a lawyer and got cold feet real quick.
phillipcarter 4y ago
I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them.
- seneca 4y ago
  > also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them. This is literally the opposite of neutral. I don't get this constant need for mental gymnastics. Just say you believe in censorship.
  - subsuboptimal 4y ago
    There can be limits on speech and free speech. There are many places where we've agreed there should be limits on speech, for instance it's illegal to lie under oath, or to threaten someone with physical harm, or to falsely advertise. It's not black and white.
    - betwixthewires 4y ago
      No there can't. It absolutely is black and white.
      - lanstin 4y ago
        What do you think the crimes of fraud or conspiracy are?
        betwixthewires 4y ago
        Fraud isn't fraud unless someone's resources are stolen, conspiracy isnt conspiracy unless some unlawful act is imminent or has occurred. In both cases, its not the words that are illegal, it is tangible, observable real world actions that are.
        voganmother42 4y ago
        “the scope of banned speech: that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action”. Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
        betwixthewires 4y ago
        "Directed" has a meaning. "Go do this thing" is directed. Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion. Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
  - timmytokyo 4y ago
    Is it censorship? Or freedom of association?
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      Yes to both.
- cowtools 4y ago
  I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban anyone I disagree with or who even just annoys me.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Being neutral with Nazis is supporting them, period. We've seen in 1933-45 where staying neutral or appeasing them leads to. Nazis need to be fought everywhere, otherwise their cancerous ideology just grows.
    - inawarminister 4y ago
      I agree with you, we also see the same WRT communists. Murderous antiquated ideologies should be eradicated from the modern world.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Communists are no longer a threat anywhere outside the PRC and North Korea.
        inawarminister 4y ago
        And the Nazis...? In both cases, the problem is latent inside our societies. The dam bursts and revolutionary fervor appear until checked away. Not until a large amount of innocent victims. PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
        google234123 4y ago
        Wait what, there aren't any nazi states as far as I'm aware but the PRC and North Korea are both real and have nukes? There are still communist political parties in every western democracy.
        coffeeblack 4y ago
        And Venezuela. And Cuba. And Vietnam. And Laos. And and and.
- Test0129 4y ago
  - jackson1442 4y ago
    Are they taking KF money? CF DDoS protection is free.
    - Vecr 4y ago
      They are, the actual cloudflare free tier (not the one they give to various "social good" sites, that's way better) is not actually that great when it comes to a "well executed" DDOS attack. I don't know the exact details, and I guess it's possible it changed in the last couple years, but it's what I've heard.
      - jackson1442 4y ago
        Interesting. Their messaging on that isn't great in that case. I've used them for years and was under the impression that their full DDoS suite (aside from case managers and such) was part of free tier. I guess the one signal I had is that WAF is a paid product.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Are they a paying customer in the first place?
- scrollaway 4y ago
  "Neutral", maybe, but their stance goes beyond neutral. They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to. This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    I don't care for artificial binary categories. Thinking by analogy or by category always confuses the situation. Evaluate each unique situation on its on own idiosyncrasies from first principles and by studying the unique details.
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    > They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure. That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
    - nathanaldensr 4y ago
      Exactly. The distinction needs to be a very, very bright and clear line legally. If it's fuzzy, then the fuzziness will be pushed and pushed using plausible deniability.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      > having a documented history of not acting like a utility Elaborate, please?
- skissane 4y ago
  > and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero. We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy. It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
  - pixl97 4y ago
    As much as I don't like nazi's and troll farms, I believe they have the right to internet service until they start using it to threaten others with violence. This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  Its so weird how everyone we don't like is a nazi. Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed. One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
  - subsuboptimal 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  - voganmother42 4y ago
    or will they remember how people appealed to corporations trying to force them to provide services…I suppose we shall see
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  [flagged]
- prvc 4y ago
  A nice hack for advancing a hypocritical political position on HN: just say >I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition]. That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 4y ago
  I read comments like this and it reminds me just how much critical thinking has been stripped away from people via their social media over consumption. Did you forget when a duly-elected president of a Democratic nation was deplatformed under your same “easy no brainer” principles? Yeah, yeah, that’s different, that guy sucked (is a Nazi even?). What happens though when you don’t think he sucks or it’s a to a marginalized group? You can’t understand why these ideas are controversial?
prvit 4y ago
> I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1] Except it's neither. The way they try to brand their caching reverse proxy as only a "security service" instead of a "hosting service" is absurd and not based on any well reasoned logic.
- jacooper 4y ago
  How ? They aren't hosting the server and aren't hosting the backend itself.
  - prvit 4y ago
    So what if they aren’t hosting the backend? How do you even define “the backend”? Is it the PHP frontend code serving the site? Or the database server? Cloudflare definitely was hosting the content through their CDN. That’s hosting, there’s really no reasonable debate to be had about this.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      The point is the site can come back online through an alternate CDN vendor, assuming they can find one that wants their business. The origin server(s) presumably are still online. The origin servers "host the site."
      - prvit 4y ago
        Sure, but the site can also come back online through an alternate hosting provider if their origin servers go down. How is that any different? And even then, the concept of “origin server” is pretty vague.
        icedchai 4y ago
        "Origin server" is a well understood concept in CDNs. My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.
syrrim 4y ago
Most major sites started out as being pro-free speech, and ultimately bowed to public pressure in removing various forms of content. There is little reason to assume that cloudflare won't ultimately do the same. It's admirable that they are trying to avoid becoming censors, but I predict it will ultimately be futile.
- coldacid 4y ago
  You're too charitable. They are already censors and have been for a long time, but talk disingenuously and hypocritically about it every time they pull this shit off in public.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible I don't think so. "Trying very hard" would entail doing the actually hard thing which is to continue to provide service to the controversial website. That's the only action that would allow them to stay true to the principles they claim to believe in. Censoring kiwifarms is the easy way out. It reveals exactly what Cloudflare has become: arbiters of which sites are allowed to stay up on the internet.
sealeck 4y ago
Keeping them on the service is also making a decision - that they don't think they're terrible enough to remove them.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Correct. There is a status quo bias that infects people's thinking, as if deciding not to deplatform somebody isn't itself a decision. Similar fallacy that people bring to the Trolley Problem which can maximize the number of dead people.

by orf 4y ago

raverbashing 4y ago

I'm thinking someone got a reality check from a lawyer and got cold feet real quick.

phillipcarter 4y ago

I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them.

seneca 4y ago
> also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. because you choose not to do business with them. This is literally the opposite of neutral. I don't get this constant need for mental gymnastics. Just say you believe in censorship.
- subsuboptimal 4y ago
  There can be limits on speech and free speech. There are many places where we've agreed there should be limits on speech, for instance it's illegal to lie under oath, or to threaten someone with physical harm, or to falsely advertise. It's not black and white.
  - betwixthewires 4y ago
    No there can't. It absolutely is black and white.
    - lanstin 4y ago
      What do you think the crimes of fraud or conspiracy are?
      - betwixthewires 4y ago
        Fraud isn't fraud unless someone's resources are stolen, conspiracy isnt conspiracy unless some unlawful act is imminent or has occurred. In both cases, its not the words that are illegal, it is tangible, observable real world actions that are.
        voganmother42 4y ago
        “the scope of banned speech: that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action”. Like harassing someone? Or like publishing someones personal information to attempt to have them harassed or hurt? Sounds like speech is a “real world action” that has observable effects… and oh, it looks like the courts may even have considered this…
        betwixthewires 4y ago
        "Directed" has a meaning. "Go do this thing" is directed. Honestly I'm very skeptical of any accusation of harassment online, seeing as you can just block people. Maybe I've never experienced it and don't know. When I ehar the word harassment I think of showing up to someone's workplace, home, things where you can't avoid them. Sending them messages that can be blocked, I'm not so sure. But that's a tangent to the topic of our discussion. Publishing someone's address and telling people to go to their home and harass or harm them is direct incitement. This is absolutely punishable, because it's more than speech, it's conspiring to commit real world action, as you said. I'm curious, if that's the sort of thing they do, has anyone been criminally charged or convicted for such behavior? I mean that genuinely, I'm trying to learn about all this kiwifarms stuff as much as I can.
- timmytokyo 4y ago
  Is it censorship? Or freedom of association?
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Yes to both.
cowtools 4y ago
I genuinely believe that it's entirely possible to be seen as very neutral and also just ban anyone I disagree with or who even just annoys me.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Being neutral with Nazis is supporting them, period. We've seen in 1933-45 where staying neutral or appeasing them leads to. Nazis need to be fought everywhere, otherwise their cancerous ideology just grows.
  - inawarminister 4y ago
    I agree with you, we also see the same WRT communists. Murderous antiquated ideologies should be eradicated from the modern world.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Communists are no longer a threat anywhere outside the PRC and North Korea.
      - inawarminister 4y ago
        And the Nazis...? In both cases, the problem is latent inside our societies. The dam bursts and revolutionary fervor appear until checked away. Not until a large amount of innocent victims. PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
      - google234123 4y ago
        Wait what, there aren't any nazi states as far as I'm aware but the PRC and North Korea are both real and have nukes? There are still communist political parties in every western democracy.
      - coffeeblack 4y ago
        And Venezuela. And Cuba. And Vietnam. And Laos. And and and.
Test0129 4y ago
- jackson1442 4y ago
  Are they taking KF money? CF DDoS protection is free.
  - Vecr 4y ago
    They are, the actual cloudflare free tier (not the one they give to various "social good" sites, that's way better) is not actually that great when it comes to a "well executed" DDOS attack. I don't know the exact details, and I guess it's possible it changed in the last couple years, but it's what I've heard.
    - jackson1442 4y ago
      Interesting. Their messaging on that isn't great in that case. I've used them for years and was under the impression that their full DDoS suite (aside from case managers and such) was part of free tier. I guess the one signal I had is that WAF is a paid product.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Are they a paying customer in the first place?
scrollaway 4y ago
"Neutral", maybe, but their stance goes beyond neutral. They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn't privately discriminate, period. Water/Electricity utilities don't cut the supply to rapists and terrorists just because they're rapists and terrorists. They cut it when law enforcement ask them to. This conflicting discussion is better had on this level: "Should Cloudflare be considered infrastructure, or not?". It's not straightforward.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  I don't care for artificial binary categories. Thinking by analogy or by category always confuses the situation. Evaluate each unique situation on its on own idiosyncrasies from first principles and by studying the unique details.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  > They clearly position themselves as "infrastructure". HNers should appreciate this more, as it's often a recurring theme here to talk about ISPs as infrastructure. That's trying to have cake and eat it too. I am highly sympathetic to operating like infrastructure, and I would love to see regulatory bodies take this up as an issue to try and figure out. What I am not sympathetic to is having a documented history of not acting like a utility, but then puffing up chests and saying that they are a utility only when it happens to serve them.
  - nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Exactly. The distinction needs to be a very, very bright and clear line legally. If it's fuzzy, then the fuzziness will be pushed and pushed using plausible deniability.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    > having a documented history of not acting like a utility Elaborate, please?
skissane 4y ago
> and also just ban nazi sites, troll farms, etc. Question: How many nazi sites, troll farms, etc, is Cloudflare still providing services to? I bet you the answer is not zero. We can debate the merits of a consistently applied policy of "we won't provide our services to nazis/racists/trolls/etc" – but it doesn't appear that is Cloudflare's actual policy. It appears their actual policy is "we will happily provide services to anybody, nazis/racists/trolls/etc included – until the social media heat gets too hot for us to handle, at which point we will drop the individual site which is the target of that controversy, but continue offering our services to all the other sites like it"
- pixl97 4y ago
  As much as I don't like nazi's and troll farms, I believe they have the right to internet service until they start using it to threaten others with violence. This said, this will always lead to the nazi's getting banned. At the end of the day they are incapable of not calling for violence. It is their modus operandi.
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
Its so weird how everyone we don't like is a nazi. Your opinion appears to be popular though. Through enough pressure we have successfully removed ddos protection from a site that people on here hope gets ddos'ed. One day, this conversation and this thread will be remembered. How there was a period where everyone celebrated corporations silencing individuals or allowing mobs to ddos them. What happened to our internet.
- subsuboptimal 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
- voganmother42 4y ago
  or will they remember how people appealed to corporations trying to force them to provide services…I suppose we shall see
barry-cotter 4y ago
[flagged]
prvc 4y ago
A nice hack for advancing a hypocritical political position on HN: just say >I genuinely believe [contradictory proposition]. That way, anyone who was to question the value of said belief or the wisdom of sharing it with others could be construed as having engaged in some form of "personal attack".
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 4y ago
I read comments like this and it reminds me just how much critical thinking has been stripped away from people via their social media over consumption. Did you forget when a duly-elected president of a Democratic nation was deplatformed under your same “easy no brainer” principles? Yeah, yeah, that’s different, that guy sucked (is a Nazi even?). What happens though when you don’t think he sucks or it’s a to a marginalized group? You can’t understand why these ideas are controversial?

prvit 4y ago

> I really liked the pretty clear and reasoned abuse policy[1] Except it's neither. The way they try to brand their caching reverse proxy as only a "security service" instead of a "hosting service" is absurd and not based on any well reasoned logic.

jacooper 4y ago
How ? They aren't hosting the server and aren't hosting the backend itself.
- prvit 4y ago
  So what if they aren’t hosting the backend? How do you even define “the backend”? Is it the PHP frontend code serving the site? Or the database server? Cloudflare definitely was hosting the content through their CDN. That’s hosting, there’s really no reasonable debate to be had about this.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    The point is the site can come back online through an alternate CDN vendor, assuming they can find one that wants their business. The origin server(s) presumably are still online. The origin servers "host the site."
    - prvit 4y ago
      Sure, but the site can also come back online through an alternate hosting provider if their origin servers go down. How is that any different? And even then, the concept of “origin server” is pretty vague.
      - icedchai 4y ago
        "Origin server" is a well understood concept in CDNs. My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.

syrrim 4y ago

Most major sites started out as being pro-free speech, and ultimately bowed to public pressure in removing various forms of content. There is little reason to assume that cloudflare won't ultimately do the same. It's admirable that they are trying to avoid becoming censors, but I predict it will ultimately be futile.

coldacid 4y ago
You're too charitable. They are already censors and have been for a long time, but talk disingenuously and hypocritically about it every time they pull this shit off in public.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> But they are trying very hard to not become the arbiters of what is terrible and what isn't terrible I don't think so. "Trying very hard" would entail doing the actually hard thing which is to continue to provide service to the controversial website. That's the only action that would allow them to stay true to the principles they claim to believe in. Censoring kiwifarms is the easy way out. It reveals exactly what Cloudflare has become: arbiters of which sites are allowed to stay up on the internet.

sealeck 4y ago

Keeping them on the service is also making a decision - that they don't think they're terrible enough to remove them.

hackerlight 4y ago
Correct. There is a status quo bias that infects people's thinking, as if deciding not to deplatform somebody isn't itself a decision. Similar fallacy that people bring to the Trolley Problem which can maximize the number of dead people.