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Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- intunderflow 4y ago*They still have a Tor Hidden Service, that's it though
- tony-allan 4y agoI suspect that a TOR service is easy to DDOS. Anyone know if that's true?
- prvit 4y agoYes, Tor services are particularly easy to DoS and there's pretty much nothing the DoS recipient can do about it.
- noasaservice 4y agoWell, other than deregistering the onion address from dHT and quit :) I'm glad their little "community" is being seen off into the void. Good riddance.
- tsujamin 4y agolooks like it took down a related nz neo-nazi site too > The ban may have also inadvertently blocked a New Zealand-based neo-nazi group called Action Zealandia. > The Action Zealandia website, which is believed to be hosted by a website run by Moon, is also offline. (https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/technology/2022/09/infamous-kiwifarms-website-blocked-by-cyber-security-firm-over-escalating-threats.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/technology/2022/09/infamous-k...)
- ogurechny 4y agoComments like these really make me see it as another Internet Battle of one group of dedicated assholes against the other group of dedicated assholes.
- LinuxBender 4y agoIf they have the time and are willing to put in the effort, they can create a myriad of Tor onion servers that are just nginx proxy-cache nodes that forward over a VPN mesh to their application servers. The end-users would have to be aware of all the onion cache servers somehow or their application would have to load balance people across them and keep some unannounced and cycle some in and out.
- prvit 4y agoThis isn't meaningfully different from using onionbalance, the attackers will still be at a significant advantage.
- LinuxBender 4y agoI know what you mean and somewhat agree. I don't know much about KF but I assume they probably have subforums and groups of people within those forums. What I have seen people do in the past is set up what I described above and then share half of the random cache nodes with the general public and then share specific nodes with sub-groups of people keeping the site accessible to the regular or trusted users. The public cache nodes can have stricter limits on how many requests are forwarded over the VPN. Perhaps this is not compatible with KF's model. I've never seen their site aside from the CF error message.
- Krisando 4y agoYou can DDoS TOR it self, but not a specific service easily.
- prvit 4y agoComplete nonsense. You can easily DoS a specific service by flooding it with rendezvous requests.
- heartbeats 4y agoThat's far from "easy" - if it were so simple, people would be able to extort big money from drug markets for doing it.
- prvit 4y agoPeople are extorting big money from drug markets doing this... It's very easy, anyone with basic grasp of C can modify the Tor client to do this.
- Krisando 4y agoAs I understand, KF have been under attack for quite some time including employing techniques here discussed on this post. https://blog.torproject.org/cooking-onions-reclaiming-onionbalance/ https://blog.torproject.org/cooking-onions-reclaiming-onionb... If it was easy, I wouldn't expect them to still be online on TOR after all this time.
- prvit 4y agoOnionbalance doesn’t solve anything, the attack remains asymmetric so you’ll have to spend significantly more on hardware than the attacker is. > If it was easy, I wouldn't expect them to still be online on TOR after all this time. You seriously overestimate how many people care enough to DDoS kiwifarms.
- Krisando 4y ago
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoTor services get DDOS’d all of the time - you generally have a single host somewhere that is the first hop in relaying traffic back to the service and that is easy to overwhelm. There is a hackish way to have several of those hosts but I think it tops out at a dozen. You lose a lot of audience going to Tor so might not be worth it.
- heartbeats 4y agoNo, that's not true. The first hop (last from the service's PoV) is basically randomly selected. Unless you restrict it, there will be thousands of possible IPs.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoEach hidden service has its own circuits to the Tor network. You can't their side of the connection.
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoYes but only one rendezvous point unless you do the hackish stuff. There are a lot of options for scaling the hidden service itself, but the rendezvous point is out of your control (and should be) so that is where the real constraint is.
- worldofmatthew 4y ago32 hosts officially but there are ways of protecting onion websites (caching reverse proxies with some sort of challenge) that protects drug market places that have governments trying to DDOS them offline. Not to mention that Tor has been working on anti-DDOS (From what I remember that will be based on proof-of-work) which will massively increase the cost of DDOS attacks against hidden services.
- ShowalkKama 4y agoheh it's quite a bit different but there are ways to avoid ddos (see dread, recon & co with endgame and onionbalance)
- tony-allan 4y agoI'm very glad Kiwi Farms is gone. But as a thought experiment, would an IPFS based distributed website survive attacks of this nature? It could be pinned by individual users and gateways and accessed using browser plug-ins. [1] https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/
- prvit 4y agoSure, it could. Good luck building a decent forum on IPFS though.
- tsujamin 4y agoI'd be interested to know if the users of the site would be brave and willing enough to pin Kiwi Farm's content to their attributable/personally owned devices... Surely some of the appeal or enablers for the behaviour on there is that someone else is wearing the legal risk of storing it all
- ragebol 4y agoThere are pinning services, that do the pinning for a fee. But Those can also be DDosed I suppose. Can have multiple pinners of course but, but I doubt that makes a difference in the longer term.
- polygamous_bat 4y agoAnd of course the pinning services can drop them just like cloudflare and DDOS-guard did.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoI think this is the big flaw of systems like IPFS and BitTorrent. “If you pin it, it will stay online” is all well and good, but if it's a legal risk to keep the content online, you're putting a target on your head. Now, you could make everything encrypted and anonymised, but now you're Freenet (is that what it's called?) and the risk you're hosting e.g. CSAM means nobody wants anything to do with you no matter what you have pinned.
- 8b16380d 4y agoStallman is right again…
- Y-bar 4y ago> Hosting providers MUST be forced to provide a platform for everyone and anyone against the will of the provider. It SHALL NOT matter how many people their customers brag about driving to suicide. Nor should the hosting provider take into consideration harassment campaigns orchestrated by users of their platforms. -- Stallman, probably? /endsarcasm
- _dain_ 4y ago
- pjc50 4y agoAs people say in the free speech issue: if it's illegal - if you've got actual evidence - report it to the police. Plenty of KF users have been in contact with the police .. making bogus reports. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/psni-investigating-after-canadian-youtuber-is-harassed-in-northern-ireland-by-online-trolls-41960100.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/psn... In a statement to The Sunday Times, the PSNI said they received a report of an incident last Tuesday. “Officers attended the scene but found nothing ongoing on their arrival. Inquiries are continuing surrounding the incident which is being treated as hate-motivated at this time,” a PSNI spokesperson added.
- UncleMeat 4y agoWeird how the "hey, it isn't illegal" defense is good enough for KF but not for Cloudflare.
- viraptor 4y agoMhmm... They have nothing to do with that behaviour. wink They're just joking about the self harm and suicide. wink The swatting of the discussed people is a completely unrelated coincidence. wink wink It's a terrible art people master. It's like the worst hateful accounts on twitter which are extremely clean - you couldn't report a single tweet, yet we know exactly what they mean. Of course this account for explicitly-super-straight is not against anyone. Of course all this public information collected on specific people and their connections is for fun and not an invitation to harass them.
- schleck8 4y agoThey host (or shield) a bunch of high-profile piracy sites (the largest repacker for example) and hosted Parler after it was kicked from AWS. I've never heard of anyone being suspended by DG. Great achievement, that surely wasn't easy.
- tsujamin 4y ago"At least Russian cyber firms have more corporate ethics than @CloudflareHelp." :') (https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1566729178807926785 https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1566729178807926785)
- dmitri_ignat 4y agoIt's rare, but it has happened before. 8chan/8kun and Hamas managed to get suspended by DG.
- Borgz 4y agoI wonder what their suspension criteria is. Maybe it's just "too much bad press"?
- prvit 4y agoOf course that’s always one criteria. But at it’s core it just comes down to certain customer relationships being deeply unprofitable and not worth continuing.
- dmitri_ignat 4y agoDDoS-Guard are in the strange position of being seen as a legitimate service within Russia, used by banks and telecoms and newspapers, but are almost exclusively used for illegal or unsavory purposes outside of Russia. They are well aware of what their global clientele are up to, but I assume they would rather avoid their domestic clients becoming too aware of it.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
- philliphaydon 4y agoWonder how long it will be before it’s back online or if the owner will throw in the towel.
- DarkWiiPlayer 4y agoLast thing I heard was that they were still somehow accessible, but this was just discord talk. EDIT: This was yesterday evening, EU time
- r721 4y agoFurther in the OP thread there is a screenshot of owner's statement: https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1566746606396997635 https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1566746606396997635 He says he has a "family emergency" and will be unavailable for a "week or more".
- philliphaydon 4y agoGuess he’s taking time to reflect if it’s worth the effort. Hopefully it’s the end of kiwi farms.
- maccam912 4y agoSomething I'm curious about in this whole thing: who is DDoSing kiwifarms? Most people find their content reprehensible but does that usually translate into people DDoSing something?
- jl6 4y agoJust speculating, but I’m sure any internet thing involving drama at scale also involves DDoSes.
- corobo 4y agoWouldn't surprise me. People used to DDoS to knock competitor IRC networks offline for laughs, never mind something people believe in. It helps it's the easiest way to do damage to a website and you just can pay someone to do the tech part of the hack. A DDoS attack is as easy to buy as the web hosting you're attacking now, back in the day you had to set up the botnet yourself
- worldofmatthew 4y agoDDOS attacks enabled by Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard protecting the attackers.
- colpabar 4y agokeffals.
- prvit 4y agoI don't think anyone is actually DDoSing kiwifarms at any significant scale. If they end up running the site on a server with no DDoS filtering at all, people will probably DoS them because it will be super easy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- origin_path 4y agoYes. Why do you think KF's enemies went after Cloudflare and not some other aspect of their operation - it's because they want to destroy the site totally and that means DDoSing it off the internet.
- tomohawk 4y ago
- Borgz 4y agoMaybe if they decide to become platforms exclusively dedicated to harrassment, stop prohibiting and removing that type of content, and actively encourage it. Until then, it doesn't seem likely.
- flumpcakes 4y agoI've browsed through kiwifarms and they seem to say horrible stuff about people but in my sample I haven't seen anyone directing action against someone. It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care. I saw some nasty comments about the person, but in the few hundred forum pages no calls to action or threats made against the people. Is writing something horrible about someone in and of itself harassment? I've honestly seen an order of magnitude worse on Facebook/Twitter/social media. Then again, I've only really read one thread deeply and a few pages on other threads as a sample. Perhaps the place is organising crime as the Cloudflare blog post suggests.
- pjc50 4y ago> It was a good source of information that was omitted from the press regarding a recent case in the UK about terminal medical care Was this information omitted because it was false or libelous, perhaps? How did you verify it was actually true?
- flumpcakes 4y agoI don't believe so. I think it was omitted because if it was published in the press (TV and newspapers) there would have been a public outcry of indecency. Funnily enough though, while you couldn't see the facts that were glossed over/not reported, you could see the same opinions echoed (without some of the strong language/nastiness) in the public "have your say" parts of the "mainstream news" as Kiwifarms forum members. So their opinions were widely shared with regular people. I assume this is why some people say that Facebook is a better news source than the "mainstream news". I don't agree on that, but I do like to see all of the _facts_ regardless if they would hurt feelings. Kiwifarms has a lot of hatred and nasty comments, but I tune that out. As I said, I've seen worse on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube comments. > How did you verify it was actually true? The same information was published in other places, just not on the TV/newspapers where I read 95% of my news.
- bakugo 4y agoWorks fine for me on Tor.
- atdrummond 4y agoTor won’t go down - for now. Once his host buckles, all belts are off.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoThere are hosts who don't ask for personal information and won't know they are hosting Kiwifarms if its a Tor hidden service if Josh wants to go that route.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nemo44x 4y agoReal principled stance there from their CEO - 3 days to totally flip-flop? I mean, if your stance is we will ban content we arbitrarily find bad then just state it as such. Put into your agreement terms precisely what is and isn’t allowed. Be consistent. This “conflicted” act makes them look weak and of questionable leadership. Either take a principled stance on speech or put into your terms how you censor speech.
- viraptor 4y agoMy headcanon is that Price wanted to take a stand, but the legal team actually took a better look at the situation because of the pressure and had a long meeting, explaining to him why it's a really bad idea. I hope we learn what really happened in a few years. Reason: twice I sent messages directly to appropriate teams at (large-companies) with something like "are you aware of what your ceo is doing at (link)" which was followed by the team sending a new response and ceo disappearing from that conversation.
- that_guy_iain 4y agoDidn't he previously say he took down the nazi site because they were saying that the reason they weren't taken down was that he agreed with them? That provides the sort of decision making process. Also, I find it hard to believe that a legal team would all of a sudden decide 3 days after they publically announce they wouldn't remove security services from a customer that one customer who has basically been the same for god only knows how long needs to have those services removed. I honestly, would be surprised if the original announcement hadn't already had input from legal. So if legal thought this customer was so bad, why wouldn't they have it done before they publically say they won't do it. I think the twitter mobbing of CloudFlare worked.
- prvit 4y agoHe said he took down the Daily Stormer because they claimed to have friends at Cloudflare (which was true https://nitter.net/GossiTheDog/status/1565128386753843201 https://nitter.net/GossiTheDog/status/1565128386753843201)
- shadowgovt 4y agoThe modern 'Net is demonstrating the ability to interpret abuse as damage and route around it.
- ohCh6zos 4y agoThe pre-modern internet was a far more interesting place.
- philosopher1234 4y agoGood riddance
- shadowgovt 4y agoI was there and I cannot agree. I caution, in general, against mythologizing the past. It was a wilder place, but so was the Wild West. Is Vegas less interesting than Tombstone? I find it to be a different kind of interesting (and this one is far more convenient than what we had when it was AOL and BBSes).
- ohCh6zos 4y agoThe current internet has been taken over by corporations and made safe for advertisers. I could read the thoughts of neo-nazis and free love hippies back to back and really gain a better understanding of people with different philosophers to me. The current internet is overwhelmed with advertising friendly pink capitalism neoliberalism.
- Krisando 4y agoIt looks like KiwiFarms is still running on their onion site: http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz... (Need TOR browser or Brave)
- gyuopy 4y agoOne can also use a Tor proxy (tor2web), there is a list here: https://gist.github.com/adulau/5caf188bb1f63263bf7ac00c4a19f710 https://gist.github.com/adulau/5caf188bb1f63263bf7ac00c4a19f... For example, appending ".moe" to the ".onion" in that URL: https://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion.moe/ https://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificed... Which also allows it to be archived (as the mainstream archive sites don't recognise Tor hidden services): https://web.archive.org/web/20220905153904/https://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion.moe/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220905153904/https://uquusqsaa...
- Krisando 4y agoI learned this morning that they've managed to acquire the services of a Chinese company to run kiwifarms.top on the public Internet.
- that_guy_iain 4y agoThe thing is, it's hard to feel bad for kiwifarms. They seem to be one of the worst sites there are. But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and open society.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoKiwifarms is a downgrade from the others aka its already a slippery slope. Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are known to protect booters. So, they can in effect decide who is allowed online and who will be DDOS'ed offline by services protected by them. The more website use them, the more power they have to abuse and they are already going down the slippery slope..... Soon even countries will have to decide if Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are national security risks for protecting the DDOS-for-Hire industry that helps fund botnets (The resources for that industry provides would likely have helped Russia in their DDOS attacks against Ukraine) and if arrest warrents needs to be issued for their leadership.
- ratg13 4y agoA private company having a policy against using their platform to incite violence is not the human rights violation you think it is.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoThese listed companies literally break the law to grow. They create demand by knownly allowing illegal DDOS-for-Hire websites. That is not a free market if the people on top are allowed to break the law to stifle competition and force people to use them or stop existing.
- concordDance 4y agoI treat these sites as cannaries. As long as they exist I can be confident that censorship isn't too bad, as they start to get shut down I start to worry. First the came for the X and I was not an X etc etc...
- flumpcakes 4y agoI personally have never seen any content on Kiwifarms that would lead to statements as we saw the other day from Cloudflare. It is a place where people say some horrible stuff, but I think 4chan is worse (including CSAM) and they are protected by Cloudflare as far as I know. I don't know much about the people who post there, other than that they say some nasty things. I have also seen such content on Facebook and Twitter - nastier content, in greater volume, with a larger audience. I have found comments about people on kiwifarms that have been moderated out of other sites (not death threats or harassment, but factual information), in that regard it has been somewhat useful.
- prvit 4y agoHow is 4chan worse? They rapidly take down any CSAM and anything that vaguely resembles a raid. Most KF threads wouldn't survive on today's 4chan for even an hour. This 12 years old comment describes the situation in 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947648 , although neglects to mention that things were this way due to strict moderation on 4chan.
- flumpcakes 4y agoI, personally, have seen much worse on 4chan than I have on Kiwifarms. If I read the Cloudflare blog post and didn't know which site it was referring to I would have put 95% of my money on it being 4chan over Kiwifarms. I am not an omnipotent arbiter of what is bad or worse, this is my own subjective opinion. I just haven't seen anything on Kiwifarms that would call for such a response. It made it seem like we were hours away from people dying. I guess as an example though: > they rapidly take down any CSAM I haven't seen that posted to Kiwifarms in the first place, regardless if 4chan has a quick response.
- thinkingemote 4y agoI've read that 4chan works proactively with law enforcement, regularly notifying them as soon as possible. They don't have a "wait for a warrant" policy that neutral providers claim, they will eagerly submit and support LEOs. This might be why it has survived so long. The common idea about the forum is that there is no moderation, but the truth is that the moderation is invisible. (The content is beyond the pale, and I don't support it which used to be needless to say)
- SinParadise 4y agoDe-platforming works.
- bioemerl 4y agoThis ability to "deplatform" is also what allows fascist nations to exist and keeps Putin in power today in Russia.
- Snetry 4y agoNo A good 'ol gun to the head does the same job for cheaper plus it takes care of the root of the problem
- bioemerl 4y agoGuns don't work at scale for these things. You can't have a functioning society when the only thing keeping people in line is the threat of force.
- SinParadise 4y agoSure, a gun can also kill an innocent man or neo-Hitler. We just need to make sure that it is applied more on the latter and less on the former.
- bioemerl 4y agoIn civil society you generally aren't allowed to run around shooting anyone.
- anigbrowl 4y agoBut you were talking about fascist nations, not civil society. Defenestration seems to have more impact that deplatforming in such places. Russian police also have no issue with arresting people for holding completely blank sign, on the basis that the medium (a sign on which a message of protest could be included) is a sufficiently message-like reason to take someone off the street. Mind you, the same is true of the US to some extent.
- Aeolun 4y agoAgain? They don’t mess around do they?
- DFHippie 4y agoThis, I think, is a useful perspective for all those here talking about free speech: https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/kiwi-farms-cloudlfare-anti-trans-speech.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/kiwi-farms-cloudlfare-a... The point is that if you're using your speech to silence people, not by disproving their arguments but through terror and the destruction of their reputation and social network, when you silence people by lying about them, your speech is a threat to free speech. By protecting sites whose purpose is to silence particular individuals through lies and threats you are reducing free speech. This is a case where you have to choose which speech to protect. They are in conflict. And the site you might defend is not the one making a good faith use of the freedom you wish to protect.
- rep_lodsb 4y agoThe only ones who are attempting to silence people are the Twitter mob and the journalists who are aligned with them. That article is pure propaganda.
- deepcyanide 4y agoI don't see kiwifarms trying to silence keffals, I 100% see the reverse happening unless archiving keffals public statement about giving children drugs you aren't authorized to provide to anyone is somehow censorship.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago"Using your speech to silence people" is very vague, "the destruction of their reputation and social network" and "lying about them" could refer to any case of cancel culture. These things are bad of course, bad for freedom of speech in a broad millian sense[1], but they are way too vague for cloudflare to ban any forum that has speech like this (which is any forum I'm aware of, including HN). [1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
- Canada 4y agoIt's an interesting problem - designing a basic forum that can survive DDoS attacks without a centralized protector such as cloudflare.
- superkuh 4y agoThey might look into a federated server + p2p content exchange architecture like notabug.io was building for a few years.
- flumpcakes 4y agoA simple web server can hold millions of connections. With some smart caching you could serve a wide audience. If the DDOS is big enough you will max out your 1GB/s line - I'm not sure on ways around that. Even blocking ranges on your router won't fix it.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThis is not too hard of a problem, but the issue is that it's expensive. You can likely get to ~100k packets/second of forum serving + DDoS attack filtering on one core, but you will eventually saturate your (likely 1 gbps or less) upstream connection. The only real mitigation to this is to have a much bigger upstream connection than you need. Edit - clarifying that 100k pps per core would only be achievable if the vast majority of the traffic (>95%) could be filtered out.
- AtNightWeCode 4y agoYou could build something on top of bittorrent for instance. With the consequence that the IPs of the users will get exposed.
- Cyberdog 4y agoSomething like BitTorrent wouldn't work well for dynamic content such as a web forum.
- AtNightWeCode 4y ago
- 8jy89hui 4y agohttps://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/ The cloudflare blog is a better resource on this topic.
- ok123456 4y agoNot really. Just allusions to bad things. The actual response from the site owner showed that it was likely an agent provocateur who used a dormant account, and then posted a screenshot to twitter. The post in question was deleted by staff within minutes.
- Natsu 4y agoThey corrected that, apparently the person self-deleted their comment (with the note "retarded") some minutes after it was screencapped for Twitter. But yes, a 2 year old account that had never done anything but one random post posts some threatening message apparently outside someone's house, gets screencapped on Twitter and self-deletes minutes later is their story, basically.
- jessaustin 4y agoIf service providers wanted to take down e.g. HN, such a pretext would be easy enough to create. HN would never get to that point, however, since most posts here don't piss off "protected groups". From my brief perusal in the week that I've been aware of KF, nearly every thread was intended to piss off such a group. That's a widely appealing if thankless task, so alternatives will probably be created soon enough.
- deepcyanide 4y agoIs it too early to say the internet is done for because it's looking that way to me. keffals has given the government the recipe to kill off any website they want gone. I'm hearing that keffals creatures are now attacking TOR to get them to drop kiwi too. This isn't going to stop, 4chan is definitely next then every other site that isn't mainstream.
- goldenchrome 4y agoI don’t think 4chan is next. I believe the site has staying power because its users are anonymous. Anonymity means it’s very difficult for leaders to emerge which means it’s difficult to rally behind a particular cause. This means it’s difficult for 4chan to grow in influence as an organized force. It’s just a steady state of low-level chaos, which is good for containment. I’m also quite confident that the FBI monitors the site and I don’t think they want to see all those borderline people scurry off into different corners of the internet should the site go offline.
- spoonjim 4y agoSpeaking from personal experience, when a “bad” forum is shut down the members are not usually successful in spreading their toxicity into other areas. Sadly it sort of just dies.
- bt4u 4y ago
- julianbuse 4y agosadly?
- spoonjim 4y agoI mean sadly for me and probably better off for everyone else
- _vvaw 4y ago
- rosmax_1337 4y agoThey should consider building their own DDOS protection. I've heard thats pretty simple and something website owners should be expected to do on their own. After all, it's not like most website owners rally behind like one or two giant services to mitigate the issue of DDOS against their sites. I for one never voted to have CF and DDoS-Guard as censors of the internet.
- donkarma 4y ago
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago[flagged]
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
- more_corn 4y agoIt’s almost like there are some behaviors we collectively won’t tolerate and if you engage in them people will pull out all the stops to bring you down. Act like an asshole and you end up getting taken down. Who could have guessed?
- phillipcarter 4y ago> Act like an asshole and you end up getting taken down. Who could have guessed? Ah, but you see, there's a lot of right-wing HN posters here who disagree with this. They believe that acting terrible should be free from all consequences, social or legal, because ... well, I won't speculate.
- originalvichy 4y agoThey might have lived a life in which they have never had to feel real fear of targeted harassment online?
- birdboy2000 4y agoHard to think of that many positions more right-wing than "corporate monopolies should be able to disappear anything you say on a whim with no safeguards" but that's the one you're endorsing. Would it kill you to have any sort of critical analysis of power for once in your life? KF are scum but they're far from the only scum in this fight, and others are infinitely more dangerous
- phillipcarter 4y ago> Would it kill you to have any sort of critical analysis of power for once in your life? You seem angry. Have you considered addressing that?
- birdboy2000 4y agowould be nice to have somewhere to blow off steam but the internet is down to like four or five active sites now and none of them are fun (KF wasn't either, mind)
- irthomasthomas 4y agoI didn't know about this site until yesterday. After reading the thread that got them took down, I know one thing, I will not be letting my children near discord. I mean, if this is how people act in public[0], I hate to imagine what kind of stuff they are doing in a private discord, away from parents prying eyes. There's no heroes in this story. [0] Bathtub hormones being sold to minors in bright packaging featuring a cartoon with the speech bubble: "Don't look at my giant Girldick" and a warning to "Keep out of reach of parents" https://archive.ph/6DnzT https://archive.ph/6DnzT I doubt this person is representative of the trans community, she is probably just the most controversial, and made a name for herself that way. No more heroes, any more.
- flumpcakes 4y agoFrom the threads I have seen, these are generally the type of people they make threads out of.
- antiufo 4y agoTrans woman here, both 1) access to HRT for minors and 2) HRT without medical/parental gatekeeping are widely supported positions in the trans community (which I also endorse). Rationale for 1. It's widely supported by the medical community and by scientific studies, and helps improve the quality of life of people with gender dysphoria. Rationale for 2. Gatekeeping traditionally consist in telling a psychiatrist anecdotal personal stories about your gender expressions and behaviors. Some psychiatrist hold sexist attitudes, and can prolong your gatekeeping or refuse treatment if you don't tell them a nice tradwife story (always known, only attracted to boys (if MtF) or girls (if FtM), always played with [gendered toy]). This even has the opposite effect of not wanting to talk with them about genuine doubts, since they can deny you HRT if they don't like your adherence to sex stereotypes. In the end the trans person themself is more qualified to know whether they would like their bodies to be more masculine or feminine. (EDIT: added rationales)
- pclmulqdq 4y agoI also read a lot of the kiwifarms thread after this latest news, and it seems like there are a lot of trans people on that thread, so at least a slice of the trans community disagrees. This may be a popular position among trans activists and the Twitter crowd, though.
- phillipcarter 4y agoFreedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Good to see it.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoFreedom of speech for speech you hate is also a social principle - see the ACLU Klan cases. Principles aren't supposed to be easy to keep, otherwise they're hobbies.
- bioemerl 4y agoI don't understand how anyone reading someone saying something like this doesn't immediately picture some government organization with an authoritarian leader holding the exact same value while considering dissenters a harm to their society.
- phillipcarter 4y agoConsidering DDoS is illegal where I live, no, nobody has the right to do that here! What does that have to do with Kiwi Farms?
- phillipcarter 4y agoI agree! KF is expressing their speech just as freely as they did before. But less of society is choosing to support that speech. What do you see wrong with that?
- squeaky-clean 4y agoFreedom of Speech also means Cloudflare doesn't have to host anyone it doesn't want to.
- dmix 4y agoFreedom of speech is a cultural value, it's not something strictly defined by the US constitution. It's the reason there is a constitution not the other way around.
- neonsunset 4y agoThe problem with salem witch trials du jour so fervently pushed by certain groups of people is closing to its demise with every case like this. The advantage of emotionally immature people (regardless of their actual age) having too much time on their hands forcing their narrative and banning any discourse that they don't like will eventually cease when the majority of people will realize that they are, well, in a majority, and it's time to put stop to this madness. In other news, http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion/ http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz... is up.
- pxeger1 4y ago(I'm inferring that your comment is supporting KiwiFarms. If this is not the case, you should probably re-word it.) > salem witch trials du jour so fervently pushed by certain groups of people Hunting trans people and pushing them to suicide sounds like much more of a witch trial to me. > forcing their narrative and banning any discourse that they don't like Telling to people to kill themselves is "discourse" that we merely "don't like"? > put stop to this madness Even if you're a raging transphobe, how can you possibly think being trans is more madness than pushing people to kill themselves?
- neonsunset 4y agoYour response is a perfect demonstration of the issue at hand and the choice of words is driven by a desire to silence the people who question the logic of a tribe you perceive yourself a part of: nothing in my post indicated support of some narrow part of the spectrum of opinions yet you make an assumption and go through with accusation anyway. As Paul Graham himself put this, anyone suspected of supporting yellowists is to be investigated for missteps and once one is found to the trial they go.
- ratsmack 4y agoSupporting Kiwi Farms right to exist is not the same as supporting the content.
- 4y ago
- philippejara 4y agoKiwifarm's owner statement: https://web.archive.org/web/20220905182626/https://poa.st/notice/ANFcT4JQ0sKGObHi6K https://web.archive.org/web/20220905182626/https://poa.st/no... This whole thing is kinda fascinating, if not extremely scary. After learning about the situation from the last couple threads here and going down the rabbit hole of sources, the future of the internet seems pretty sad... If cloudflare doesn't reinstate the website after dealing with said immediate danger they claimed was the reason to remove its protection it just shows how hard you can shut someone down by just twitter outrage. If the threat really was so dire, and if there really was something of the sort sure i can see allowing the obvious DDOS in the background go thru and take the website down. But not reinstating it after the time they were claiming to buy by doing it was already bought it means if you scream loud enough on twitter, even while having an obvious army of arsonists behind you, the firefighters will just stop serving said target. Sure, cloudflare is a private company and all that, nobody questions it, but it doesn't make it any less unsettling.
- cowtools 4y agoThe site is still up as an onion service. This is more than just cloudflare's DDoS protection at this point, they have no one to support their DNS registration or IP space, as their operator goes into detail here[0]: >[...] >Domain Registrar >Cloudflare was both our application-level DDoS mitigation and our domain registrar. They have given me a way to transfer my domains to another registrar. I do not know what registrar to send it to because I do not have faith in any company. >DDoS Mitigation >DDoS-Guard will drop us dropped us while I was writing this post. This meme about Russia being a free country is a joke. The US is a free country, but with no stewards to protect it. Without the US, there is no second best. I did not expect Cloudflare to crumple so quickly and I don't have a Plan C for DDoS mitigation. >Resource Allocation >I own IP addresses. Our IP allocation is from APNIC. APNIC is one of the 5 private companies which allocate Internet resources around the world. APNIC happens to be based out of Australia, which recently passed draconian censorship laws. There is an effort to get our RIR to revoke our allocation. This would be unprecedented in the history of the Internet, and considering China is in APNIC's region, an absolutely horrific standard which will echo throughout the upcoming decades. There is a non-zero chance of this happening. >Hosting >We have one host and I am looking at two more. It is likely that the host will give up too. The two hosts confident they can handle the Kiwi Farms are probably wrong. DDoS-Guard was confident they could handle the Kiwi Farms and said "bring it on" for less than 24 hours >[...] It seems like this guy is getting completely unplugged from the internet infrastructure because every company sees him as a liability. Well, there's always onionbalance for these types I guess. [0] http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion/threads/the-endless-drum-beating.129023/ http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz...
- Claude_Shannon 4y agoI am really not surprised. They already bullied someone to death. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/o90ats/near_the_emulator_developer_of_bsnes_higan_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/o90ats/near_the_emul...
- spoils19 4y ago
- borski 4y agoIt isn’t. They openly talk about how he was autistic and an easy target, and Occam’s razor gives no reason to believe the complex plot of a false flag op rather than “they did exactly what they said they were going to do.”
- judge2020 4y agoSlightly related, but why would Archive admins exclude near.sh from the wayback machine? https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://near.sh https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://near.sh
- Ticklee 4y ago
- Febra33 4y agoKiwi Farms is a cesspool and I'm glad it got booted off. We need stronger protections and laws against such heinous forms of organised harassment that ends up killing people.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoThere's no actual evidence that Near is dead.
- reset-password 4y agoIs this a good thing? That internet vigilantes are able to decide what can stay and what must go? If Kiwifarms was a hive for so much illegal activity then certainly the FBI must have heard of them by now and I'd expect them along with the courts to be the arbiters of justice rather than some angry people on Twitter. I'm not celebrating because I'm not short sighted. We can all see where this is going.
- nicbou 4y agoNot every slope is this slippery. You can allow a bunch of things, but have boundaries for what is allowed on your platform. A bar owner can kick out a troublemaker, and people won't think "first they kick Shitstarter Steve, and next thing you know they kick you out because you order the wrong beer". Other patrons are relieved that Steve will have to start shit somewhere else. It's fine to show some people the door.
- BonoboIO 4y agoDeep down in our heart we all know that kiwifarms is a forum made for hate and cloudflare has no responsibility to host them. Yeah, sometimes the Twitter mob comes and cancels someone for no real reason, but this is not the case here.
- tsol 4y agoI think the fear people have is that; if you can be canceled for a reason AND the reasons people are seen as wrong often change THEN there's a worry that next time it could be us. After all, there was a time when being black or gay could get you canceled and presumably that can come back. The reigning ideology switches every 4-8 years, it's a possibility no matter what side you take
- Animats 4y agoCloudflare needs to stop terminating weird sites. Here's the Daily Stormer, which Cloudflare cut off some time back, and is now back.[1] It's not much worse than many other right-wing sites. Neo-Nazis have been around since the 1960s, and they've mostly been a joke. As a kid, I walked past the HQ of the American Nazi Party, a small house in Arlington, VA, with a large "White Man Fight - Smash the Black Revolution Now" sign. Nobody was very upset about it. Some of the militia and gun sites are much scarier. Look at some of the sites referenced at Accelerationism in Wikipedia.[2] [1] http://stormer-daily.rw/ http://stormer-daily.rw/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Animats 4y agoAmusingly, the rating on the above posting has ranged from -2 to +3.
- intrasight 4y agoThose people are free to go and meet somewhere in private. That is how it used to be done. That approach does not require using services that you do not control. Except for regulated monopoly utilities, most everyone else has the freedom to not be a vendor.
- nickdothutton 4y agoI’m continually surprised that Facebook, Twitter, and the rest dont simply create a web interface for law enforcement that allows them to delete (or more likely make invisible) content they want to censor. Noting in place of the post or tweet or whatever “law enforcement in your jurisdiction has deemed this post illegal and have hidden it for your safety”. There’s a culture war afoot, the government wants to insert itself between the warring parties, there’s no need for executives to place their (their shareholders) company in the way. “Let the dog see the rabbit” as they say. Just harvest the energy in the system and monetise it, if that’s your mission.
- phantom_of_cato 4y ago> I’m continually surprised that Facebook, Twitter, and the rest dont simply create a web interface for law enforcement that allows them to delete (or more likely make invisible) content they want to censor. In the US, we have the First Amendment, which prohibits government censorship. Of course, the government still sometimes uses political pressure to censor things, but there's a need to keep a semblance of rule of law.
- judge2020 4y agoActually, if Twitter et al. want to provide the tools to block arbitrary content, they can do that just fine - companies can speak with the police and follow their wishes regardless of the first amendment because Twitter's own protected speech allows them to block any content for any reason, whether that be "it violated our content on harassment" or "the police don't like it and we're voluntarily following their wishes".
- phantom_of_cato 4y ago> companies can speak with the police and follow their wishes regardless of the first amendment because Twitter's own protected speech allows them to block any content for any reason, whether that be "it violated our content on harassment" or "the police don't like it and we're voluntarily following their wishes". Even if that wasn't against the First Amendment (which is a more complicated issue [1]), that wouldn't fly politically in the US. The side which likes law enforcement also currently puts emphasis on free speech, and the side which doesn't like the police wouldn't want them to be in charge of censorship. I think a company doing that would make everyone their enemy, and generate a lot of bad PR. [1]: For example, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
- michaelgrosner2 4y agoWhere’s the consideration for CFs speech? If management doesn’t want to help serve filth, they shouldn’t be compelled to. They’re a private company. It doesn’t even have to be consistent.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
- Febra33 4y agoCloudflare or any other privately owned company doesn't have an obligation to service everyone. They are not violating their free speech, no matter how long you turn it on every side. Kiwi Farms can host their website on any other platform and get any other service they want. No one is forced to service them. Let's not forget that they have been known to publicise private information of people that ended up with them being swatted. They are a big enable of this behaviour. Not only that, but they have been also involved in three suicides at this point. I don't think any private company wants to associate themselves with such a client.
- phantom_of_cato 4y ago> Cloudflare or any other privately owned company doesn't have an obligation to service everyone. That's mostly true legally, but also irrelevant. We also have a right to criticize them for anything. > They are not violating their free speech They aren't violating the First Amendment, which is the legal concept. But what they are doing is corporate censorship, which is of course against the idea of allowing free expression.
- throwaway787544 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dxuh 4y agoThis really shows again that there is no use in giving in to angry Twitter mobs. There is something not quite right with them and even if they are given what they want, you are still the bad guy because it took too long. It happens again and again and people and institutions still give in.
- flumpcakes 4y agoI was just going through the page on Kiwifarms about the person behind the dropkiwifarms campaign and the stuff they have said is shocking. I would say it is on par with anything I've read on Kiwifarms and they're getting 30,000 people to "ratio" their posts so they have a massive audience. There is no winner in this entire saga of internet drama.
- elcamino44 4y agoI think it’s interesting that so many people see the danger in a Twitter “mob” effectively running Kiwifarms off the public, visible internet, without recognising that Kiwifarms themselves were a mob, with the precise goal of running people (including the recently targeted streamer) off the public visible internet too. The tactics were different, but the goal is effectively the same. The key differences are Kiwifarms is targeting individuals personally. And that they’re doing it kind of randomly, for the lulz. Whereas their main opponents here are targeting a company/community, and acting in self-defence. I know who I think is more worthy of protection.
- cowtools 4y agoI don't think the goal of KF is to de-platform individuals, but merely to discredit them by publishing demeaning information and rumors about them. So they are categorically different: one side is pro-free-speech, and the other side is pro-censorship. "Doxxing" doesn't restrict someone else's free speech. It just discourages them from conducting speech under their public identity. If you ask me, what they ought to do is "counter-dox" the KiwiForum users and give them a taste of their own medicine.
- BizarroLand 4y agoThey published the home address of the family of a trans child and their members physically showed up in person to harass and intimidate that family for years for the crime of existing. https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/x76vck/a_story_of_kiwifarms_targeting_a_child_worth_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/x76vck/...
- philosopher1234 4y agoOh no you can’t post hate on the internet, that’s clearly just as bad as causing someone to commit suicide.
- cowtools 4y agoKF is certainly quite hateful, racist, spiteful, etc. I just don't like when arguments devolve into unplugging each other the internet.
- jameslars 4y agoHere's the most disingenuous part for any defender of KF so far. The linked Twitter feed has a post from the KF operator: "For the time being, I am locking the threads of the most prominent members of the hashtag campaigns against us... I'm tired of hearing about it." Very "Free Speech" of KF. This is all just public information after all, isn't it?
- quags 4y agoI come from a hosting background over 20+ years so I think I have a different perspective that others here. I know cloudflare is a large public company - perhaps it is slightly different for this type of company. As a hosting provider I have in the past been noticed for certain sites with in my network that the general internet is pushing back against hosting. What happens is there is of course bad publicity but also crazy people come out - people threatening employees, getting public information on employees and owners working there, calling and threatening at your house for sites you host - which moves beyond fighting for free speech but over to how much of your personal life you and your employees do you want to disrupt for a website you don't agree with and perhaps honestly does nothing to benefit society. So while many people are claiming this is a free speech issue, I can only imagine cloudflare is getting a whole bunch of crazy coming out of the woodwork and threats to their own employees. As a business you need to decide what is worth the safety of your employees and what stands you want to take and cloudflare is deciding kiwi farms is not worth it based on the type of site it is.
- _vvaw 4y ago
- hashxyz 4y ago
- bitwize 4y agoAPNIC has, apparently, withdrawn the IP addresses and ASN for Kiwi Farms. Fuck with the trans community, get blackholed. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- bogantech 4y agoNo I'm pretty sure ipinfo just lists their AS as inactive because it might not be announcing their prefix at the moment or may not have an active peer https://whois.arin.net/rest/asn/AS397702/pft?s=AS397702 https://whois.arin.net/rest/asn/AS397702/pft?s=AS397702
- _vvaw 4y agoSo the trans community stands with Keffals, a documented child groomer and provider of puberty blockers + hormones to minors behind their parents' backs? https://archive.ph/HY4hK https://archive.ph/HY4hK Promoter (again, to children) of sketchy Internet pharmacies that sell hormones with anime lolita box art and labels that say “keep away from parents”? https://archive.ph/zZMRp https://archive.ph/zZMRp
- bitwize 4y agoThe trans community stands against doxxing, harassing, swatting, and stalking one of their own because of her gender identity and activist activities. Because they know, in cisnormative society, they'll be next. Of course, Kiwi Farms does not condone that sort of behavior (wink wink, nudge nudge). Once Kiwi Farms is down for good, I'm sure there will be Twitter bickerfests and slapfights about this and other issues (apparently Keffals is racist too?), but as long as Kiwi Farms is around, it is a direct existential threat to trans people and the community will be pretty united in making sure it is not allowed to operate on the public internet.
- _vvaw 4y agoOver the past week I’ve read enough on and about Kiwi Farms to conclude that while “doxing” does happen there, as it does on Twitter and other websites, the claims of harassment and SWATing and users driving people to suicide are highly and cynically exaggerated. The evidence simply doesn’t support these claims, particularly the suicides: https://archive.ph/JPHtM https://archive.ph/JPHtM The main issue seems to be that Kiwi Farms documents the actual, public behavior of many disgusting, pedophilic, embarrassing people on the Internet, some of whom are trans. Some of the people they document and laugh at are also neo-Nazis or alt-right. Some of the Kiwi Farms users are trans. The willingness of many in news media and at companies like Cloudflare to take these claims of SWATing and harassment at face value with next to no evidence, or in the face of obvious sock-puppet posts to Kiwi Farms that are instantly removed by moderators, has been disheartening. It reminds me how r/againsthatesubreddit mods posted CASM to conservative subreddits to get them banned by site admins. I increasingly understand that the opponents of Kiwi Farms use the exact same tactics they project onto the site: doxing and SWATing Joshua Moon, harassing him and Kiwi Farms, spreading false information about the site’s content and activities. Their goal seems to be wiping evidence of child grooming, illegal drug distribution to minors, and other very bad and embarrassing behavior by their community from the web. They may succeed. I hope reasonable members of the trans community can distance themselves sufficiently from these unstable activists. I hope people like Keffals have their unsavory activities documented and shared with a wider audience. I hope this mob of unscrupulous activists doesn’t succeed in controlling all speech on the Internet.
- no-dr-onboard 4y agoSupporting the removal of a problematic site (as though that would do the trick) at the expense of setting a bad president is a profoundly oblique way to go about things. A few years ago people urged CDNs and ISPs to drop the Daily Caller, then it was Parler, and for numerous times it was 4/8chan. At what point do we admit that the solution to extremism isn’t in blocking sites where this activity collaborates? This is a cultural problem that can’t be fixed with the hammer of authoritarianism.
- nicbou 4y agoIsn't the other option to facilitate it? There's no inaction here, since you provide a service to that group. You choose between turning a blind eye or kicking them out.
- no-dr-onboard 4y agoThat’s a false dichotomy. Tolerance of something you don’t like is a choice. It’s a particularly meaningful choice when you are restraining the urge to act for the sake of downstream consequences and future generations. Note that I’m not suggesting to turn a blind eye either.
- nicbou 4y agoWhat I'm saying is that inaction is also a choice, and not a neutral one. I'd add that tolerating/enabling those groups also bears consequences for the future generations. Like I said in another comment, the slope isn't that slippery. You can ban these guys and stop there.
- robd003 4y agoI really wish we held large internet platforms to the same standards we do to the phone company or the power company. You shouldn't be able to decline service just because you dislike a customer. It's getting rather scary that the internet is so centralized these days and anyone who speaks out against the Cathedral loses their ability to speak.
- deepcyanide 4y agoIf I were ever in a good mood (because censorship bs tends to be common) I'd laugh at the fact that those who speak so loudly against misinformation (the 3 suicides, the greene swat, the sleeper agent bomb threat) weaponized it to silence an archive of their personal idiocy/crimes. It's like the usa's ministry of truth happened anyway and this is the first step to the end times.