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Kiwifarm's owner statement: https://web.archive.org/web/20220905182626/https://poa.st/notice/ANFcT4JQ0sKGObHi6K https://web.archive.org/web/20220905182626/https

Kiwifarm'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 ago
The 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...
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> the future of the internet seems pretty sad... That’s frankly terrible. Sites infamous for promoting harassment can’t be hosted anymore. Clearly a tremendous loss for the internet. /s
- vdnkh 4y ago
- amatecha 4y ago
  Right? Thoughts and prayers for this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse, doxxing and other harmful crimes. Get some perspective please.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    - DanBC 4y ago
      Post your name and address here.
      - cowtools 4y ago
        DanBC 4y ago
        cowtools 4y ago
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > since when is "doxxing" a crime? The focus on doxxing is odd. There were SWATs. There were credible bomb threats. Since when is there a public obligation to sell your work to domestic terrorists?
ivraatiems 4y ago
Did you ever watch 12 Angry Men? There's a scene in that movie where an unabashedly racist man is making his point as loudly and angrily as he can. One by one, all the others in the room turn their backs on him. When only one man is left, that man has a short message for the racist: "Sit down, and don't open your mouth again while I'm here." Nobody puts him in jail. Nobody takes away his right to make a living or his children or his home. They just send a clear message: Don't bring that sort of thing around here. Don't bring it around us. There's no point in engaging in a dialogue with that person. Sure, you allow them to speak, in that you don't respond to that speech with violence or prosecution. But you don't have to make room for it. We can't and shouldn't have the government stepping in to say what speech is or is not allowed. And in the United States, we don't. Russia is another matter, but as the post says, the idea that that means every Russian person or company is OK with things this awful is not true. What that means, though, is that if there are sentiments so odious (and in some cases, literally dangerous, but not illegal) that our free society doesn't think it's appropriate to support a venue for their discussion, it's up to that society writ large, not government, to limit that discussion. There is nothing wrong with fostering a societal sense that there is no room in our world for the kind of shit that Kiwi Farms spewed, even if it is legal. There is nothing wrong with expecting large companies to live up to that standard. So I don't see this as scary, at all. I see it as a relief. I see it as a free society working the way it's supposed to, with some caveats. (I still don't love how much power large corporate entities have, but not for this reason, exactly.) And I think there are a lot of people out there whose lives are safer because of it. Edit: For people who haven't seen it, here's the scene I reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA
- bergenty 4y ago
  - borski 4y ago
    Have you ever been on a jury? That’s pretty much exactly how it works, aside from the fact that overt racists usually don’t make it onto the panel.
  - 4y ago
spurgelaurels 4y ago
This wasn't just due to Twitter outrage. People are actually being targeted and harmed through this site. Hate and harm are not covered under free speech.
- borski 4y ago
  Not to mention that this isn’t the government shutting them down, but private companies and citizens; free speech is only protected against government censorship and retaliation, not that of private companies or citizens. Nobody is required to provide a platform for this.
- inquirerGeneral 4y ago
  - ratsmack 4y ago
    It seems that this is accepted behavior with the large corporate internet infrastructure companies, though. There are many in powerful government positions worldwide that applaud this behavior, because it is in vogue.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > This wasn't just due to Twitter outrage. People are actually being targeted and harmed through this site. I'm saying the following comment without knowing much about Kiwifarms and the back and forth drama about it other than some of the surface-level accusations. If people there were engaging in false swatting or other crimes, sure throw the book at those individuals. That's reprehensible behavior, and should be treated about as harshly as attempted murder IMO. But one big reason that I think taking down a website like this is very morally questionable without a court order is that there's no way for the public to know what really happened. Was Kiwifarms the site engaging in bad behavior, or were a few individual users there guilty of crimes? It's almost impossible to get an unbiased accounting of what actually happened there, and there's no way for an outsider to research this after the fact with the site down. I can't just trust a big corporation's word on what really happened here. Additionally, who really committed crimes? The level of drama around what happened there seemed personal and insane from the little I saw about it. If you were an unhinged person who was willing to take a "the ends justify the means" to "win", you'd probably be willing to create fake accounts on that site and engage in illegal activity to try and get a site shut down that you hated. I have no idea if this is the case, but it's hard to rule out anything when it comes to the level of personal drama that seemed to be going on there. > Hate and harm are not covered under free speech. Organizing harm against others probably isn't considered free speech by most legal systems or philosophers, but an expression of hate in and of itself is absolutely covered under free speech.
bergenty 4y ago
I’ve actually accepted and have come around to prefer a regulated internet. I actually don’t want my kid to be exposed to any information coming out of anyone except experts that are excepted at a societal level like we’ve had these past few decades. I like the status quo and that’s why I now identify as a conservative.
- ratsmack 4y ago
  >I actually don’t want my kid to be exposed... We used to call this parenting. Censoring the internet at large because some people don't actively police their children's access is not a solution.
  - borski 4y ago
    I don’t agree with the parent re: regulating the internet, but private companies are by no means beholden to host or support content they disagree with (or, moreover, that they believe is illegal). If there is enough political will and enough people that want to support KF garbage, there are other providers out there, or they can build one.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    It also actively undermines other people's ability to parent. My parents made the active parenting decision to expose us to things and stress the value of information. We never had our media/internet consumption censored (hell, I remember sitting on my dad's lap and playing a DOOM mod where we shot Barney and yet it was the Grue from Zork who terrified me), but we were also taught the difference between real life and fiction, that it was okay to not like or feel comfortable with things and stop playing/reading/watching them, and to never uncritically believe anybody. Whatever you think of my upbringing, it was a choice my parents made because they thought it was best. Plus different children can handle different things. It's very Harrison Bergeronesque to censor everyone for the sake of the few.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    You can’t parent something that is everywhere else in society unless you homeschool your kids and I’m not going to do that.
mikl 4y ago
Yeah, as much as one might be glad to see Stormfront, Kiwifarms and the like gone, the reality that without the protection of Cloudflare, pretty much any site without serious corporate backing can be taken off the Internet by anyone willing to pay a botnet operator a few bucks to have the deed done.
dangus 4y ago
The idea that this is scary or unsettling is libertarian bullshit. Kiwi Farms is a societal antagonist. The paradox of tolerance shows us that we need to not tolerate assholes like them. This whole idea that there's a "mob" that's "screaming loud enough" is, in this case, is just the rest of well-adjusted society refusing to tolerate these assholes. I think of it this way: if I build something that's "agnostic" and still offer it to someone I know is harming others, and in some cases committing crimes or enabling them, that means a part of my labor is helping that act, and my service is no longer agnostic. It's almost like I am working for them. If I know who my customer is, and I know what they do, I can no longer claim ignorance. If I sell Internet service to Adolf Hitler and I know who he is, I'm complicit.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Sit down in the boat. Thepiratebay is still online a trizillion years after all the debacles. Cloudflare is not the biggest player at these services. Any other major competitor does not allow services like KW. This whole ordeal is stupid.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Thepiratebay hasn't had an angry mob of people trying to take it down via any means necessary. A site being taken down because of copyright infringement is different from a site being taken down because of social pressure.
  - AtNightWeCode 4y ago
    Thepiratebay has been offline because of DDOS-attacks in the past.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    It's had an angry mob of copyright fanatics targeting it since it's inception
TechSquidTV 4y ago
I dont understand this post, it seems so backwards. Are we upset that a social harm has been deplatformed by a private company by simply choosing to not serve them? No one has prevented Kiwifarms from being on the internet, in fact that isn't even really possible. Free speech is working as intended. There is legally nothing wrong with saying what you want on the internet, but that doesn't mean everyone else needs to listen to you or agree with you. If Kiwifarms is worried about free speech, they can stand on a milk crate and hand out free newspapers, completely legally.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  Let's hope you abide by this standard if the same happens to a site you care about.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Let's hope you abide by this standard if the same happens to a site you care about Gladly. We need more competition in the space anyway [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/985443/worldwide-ddos-bot-protection-market-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/985443/worldwide-ddos-bo...
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
Careful - this group _IS_ the arsonist who are caring torches. Hacker news is not the place to rail against this hypocrisy unless you are fully anon. One target looks a lot like the other when you have a 'cause' you are fighting for. And this is not @dang or other moderators fault. Its the changing times and the changing opinions of the user base.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> the firefighters will just stop serving said target I saw a good analogy the other day [1]. Cloudflare is a bartender throwing out a brawler. They called the cops, but nobody is arrested. And while yes, brawling on the streets may be riskier than brawling inside, it’s extreme to insist the brawler be sheltered because their right to brawl overrides others’ physical safety. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708253
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  While I agree that CloudFlare should not be required to provide service to anyone if they don't want to, this is a bad analogy. A brawler in a bar disrupts the ability of other customers to enjoy the service. CloudFlare providing DDoS protection to Kiwi Farms doesn't disrupt the ability of its other clients from receiving this service. The entire point of DDoS protection is that your clients will be the targets of attacks, possibly because they're saying or doing something someone objects to. This is like a bodyguard being shocked that some of its clients are criminals. With this, CloudFlare has tipped its hand and shown that it's not a reliable provider of protection; the first time anyone raises a little stink they unilaterally terminate the service of one of their clients and throw them to the wolves.
daveguy 4y ago
Hopefully there will always be enough screaming on the internet to take down a doxxing operation.
pryce 4y ago
> it just shows how hard you can shut someone down by just twitter outrage. Your analysis is absurd. First, supposing we only care about "free speech" and no other values is absurd from the outset*. It should be obvious that people can't make use of any right to free speech" if they get swatted and killed, so the idea that free speech as a value exists in a moral phantom zone of its own where no other ethical considerations have any weight is pretty much false. Let's put aside for now the incredibly insincere enforcement of 'free speech' principles that exists in the US, where black community organisers like MLK and Fred Hampton are blackmailed and murdered (respectively) intentionally by top levels law enforcement for their speech, and put aside the historical record that shows how the anti-war movement of the 1970s was suppressed by an intentionally manufactured war on drugs (as admitted to by ringleaders), a war on drugs that is still costing lives 50 years later. Let's put aside the clear legislative efforts to suppress speech (in the forms of suppressing speech of say the BDS movement) that is occurring at the moment. Let's put aside the decades of law enforcement targeting gay and trans people. Let's pretend, just for now, that we sincerely felt only "free speech" was the only relevant ethical concern. We still have to ask: Whose? Who is speaking, is it more than one party? Who is being protected for their speech? Against who? I cannot see a planet on which the speech rights of kiwifarms forum members is somehow relevant but the speech of trans people who they target is either not relevant or is 'less' relevant. If trans people get harassed, stalked and even have the armed apparatus of state sent to have them intimidated into silence or murdered, for the speech of posting what amounts to "I am trans, and I think that's good", then it is incoherent even for 'free speech adovcates' to place the speech of kiwifarms users (up to and including stalking and harassment) as some noble idea worth protecting while the speech rights of trans people to say even benign things like "i exist" *isn't even part of the ethical considerations*. Basically, there are two ways of approaching 'free speech' issues. For it to be genuine, it cannot be concerned about protecting the speech of one of the groups, and not the other. It cannot be concerned about the speech of one group and think that the speech of a different second group isn't important if that second group gets killed or is forced to move out of the town or nation due to the clear threat to their wellbeing. Anything less than this sincere interest in all parties and a clearheaded interest in how the abstract moral position plays out in practice and our 'free speech advocacy' becomes an insincere figleaf for perpetuating the violence of thugs. Maybe I'm just pissed off because kiwifarms users have harassed and stalked people I care about for over a decade, chased them into their homes, accosted them at their places of work, for literally nothing except being trans, and then I come to HN and see people willing to dismiss all that, or dismiss the rebuke of the unfathomable damage that has been done by this site as this as "twitter outrage" without so much as acknowledging the extraordinary grounds for that criticism. * we should pretty surely concede that further considerations like safety, privacy, health, life, the right to the "pursuit of happiness", etc have relevance here

cowtools 4y ago

The 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...

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

> the future of the internet seems pretty sad... That’s frankly terrible. Sites infamous for promoting harassment can’t be hosted anymore. Clearly a tremendous loss for the internet. /s

vdnkh 4y ago
amatecha 4y ago
Right? Thoughts and prayers for this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse, doxxing and other harmful crimes. Get some perspective please.
- cowtools 4y ago
  - DanBC 4y ago
    Post your name and address here.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      - DanBC 4y ago
        cowtools 4y ago
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > since when is "doxxing" a crime? The focus on doxxing is odd. There were SWATs. There were credible bomb threats. Since when is there a public obligation to sell your work to domestic terrorists?

ivraatiems 4y ago

Did you ever watch 12 Angry Men? There's a scene in that movie where an unabashedly racist man is making his point as loudly and angrily as he can. One by one, all the others in the room turn their backs on him. When only one man is left, that man has a short message for the racist: "Sit down, and don't open your mouth again while I'm here." Nobody puts him in jail. Nobody takes away his right to make a living or his children or his home. They just send a clear message: Don't bring that sort of thing around here. Don't bring it around us. There's no point in engaging in a dialogue with that person. Sure, you allow them to speak, in that you don't respond to that speech with violence or prosecution. But you don't have to make room for it. We can't and shouldn't have the government stepping in to say what speech is or is not allowed. And in the United States, we don't. Russia is another matter, but as the post says, the idea that that means every Russian person or company is OK with things this awful is not true. What that means, though, is that if there are sentiments so odious (and in some cases, literally dangerous, but not illegal) that our free society doesn't think it's appropriate to support a venue for their discussion, it's up to that society writ large, not government, to limit that discussion. There is nothing wrong with fostering a societal sense that there is no room in our world for the kind of shit that Kiwi Farms spewed, even if it is legal. There is nothing wrong with expecting large companies to live up to that standard. So I don't see this as scary, at all. I see it as a relief. I see it as a free society working the way it's supposed to, with some caveats. (I still don't love how much power large corporate entities have, but not for this reason, exactly.) And I think there are a lot of people out there whose lives are safer because of it. Edit: For people who haven't seen it, here's the scene I reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA

bergenty 4y ago
- borski 4y ago
  Have you ever been on a jury? That’s pretty much exactly how it works, aside from the fact that overt racists usually don’t make it onto the panel.
- 4y ago

spurgelaurels 4y ago

This wasn't just due to Twitter outrage. People are actually being targeted and harmed through this site. Hate and harm are not covered under free speech.

borski 4y ago
Not to mention that this isn’t the government shutting them down, but private companies and citizens; free speech is only protected against government censorship and retaliation, not that of private companies or citizens. Nobody is required to provide a platform for this.
inquirerGeneral 4y ago
- ratsmack 4y ago
  It seems that this is accepted behavior with the large corporate internet infrastructure companies, though. There are many in powerful government positions worldwide that applaud this behavior, because it is in vogue.
logicalmonster 4y ago
> This wasn't just due to Twitter outrage. People are actually being targeted and harmed through this site. I'm saying the following comment without knowing much about Kiwifarms and the back and forth drama about it other than some of the surface-level accusations. If people there were engaging in false swatting or other crimes, sure throw the book at those individuals. That's reprehensible behavior, and should be treated about as harshly as attempted murder IMO. But one big reason that I think taking down a website like this is very morally questionable without a court order is that there's no way for the public to know what really happened. Was Kiwifarms the site engaging in bad behavior, or were a few individual users there guilty of crimes? It's almost impossible to get an unbiased accounting of what actually happened there, and there's no way for an outsider to research this after the fact with the site down. I can't just trust a big corporation's word on what really happened here. Additionally, who really committed crimes? The level of drama around what happened there seemed personal and insane from the little I saw about it. If you were an unhinged person who was willing to take a "the ends justify the means" to "win", you'd probably be willing to create fake accounts on that site and engage in illegal activity to try and get a site shut down that you hated. I have no idea if this is the case, but it's hard to rule out anything when it comes to the level of personal drama that seemed to be going on there. > Hate and harm are not covered under free speech. Organizing harm against others probably isn't considered free speech by most legal systems or philosophers, but an expression of hate in and of itself is absolutely covered under free speech.

bergenty 4y ago

I’ve actually accepted and have come around to prefer a regulated internet. I actually don’t want my kid to be exposed to any information coming out of anyone except experts that are excepted at a societal level like we’ve had these past few decades. I like the status quo and that’s why I now identify as a conservative.

ratsmack 4y ago
>I actually don’t want my kid to be exposed... We used to call this parenting. Censoring the internet at large because some people don't actively police their children's access is not a solution.
- borski 4y ago
  I don’t agree with the parent re: regulating the internet, but private companies are by no means beholden to host or support content they disagree with (or, moreover, that they believe is illegal). If there is enough political will and enough people that want to support KF garbage, there are other providers out there, or they can build one.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  It also actively undermines other people's ability to parent. My parents made the active parenting decision to expose us to things and stress the value of information. We never had our media/internet consumption censored (hell, I remember sitting on my dad's lap and playing a DOOM mod where we shot Barney and yet it was the Grue from Zork who terrified me), but we were also taught the difference between real life and fiction, that it was okay to not like or feel comfortable with things and stop playing/reading/watching them, and to never uncritically believe anybody. Whatever you think of my upbringing, it was a choice my parents made because they thought it was best. Plus different children can handle different things. It's very Harrison Bergeronesque to censor everyone for the sake of the few.
- bergenty 4y ago
  You can’t parent something that is everywhere else in society unless you homeschool your kids and I’m not going to do that.

mikl 4y ago

Yeah, as much as one might be glad to see Stormfront, Kiwifarms and the like gone, the reality that without the protection of Cloudflare, pretty much any site without serious corporate backing can be taken off the Internet by anyone willing to pay a botnet operator a few bucks to have the deed done.

dangus 4y ago

The idea that this is scary or unsettling is libertarian bullshit. Kiwi Farms is a societal antagonist. The paradox of tolerance shows us that we need to not tolerate assholes like them. This whole idea that there's a "mob" that's "screaming loud enough" is, in this case, is just the rest of well-adjusted society refusing to tolerate these assholes. I think of it this way: if I build something that's "agnostic" and still offer it to someone I know is harming others, and in some cases committing crimes or enabling them, that means a part of my labor is helping that act, and my service is no longer agnostic. It's almost like I am working for them. If I know who my customer is, and I know what they do, I can no longer claim ignorance. If I sell Internet service to Adolf Hitler and I know who he is, I'm complicit.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Sit down in the boat. Thepiratebay is still online a trizillion years after all the debacles. Cloudflare is not the biggest player at these services. Any other major competitor does not allow services like KW. This whole ordeal is stupid.

charcircuit 4y ago
Thepiratebay hasn't had an angry mob of people trying to take it down via any means necessary. A site being taken down because of copyright infringement is different from a site being taken down because of social pressure.
- AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  Thepiratebay has been offline because of DDOS-attacks in the past.
- malermeister 4y ago
  It's had an angry mob of copyright fanatics targeting it since it's inception

TechSquidTV 4y ago

I dont understand this post, it seems so backwards. Are we upset that a social harm has been deplatformed by a private company by simply choosing to not serve them? No one has prevented Kiwifarms from being on the internet, in fact that isn't even really possible. Free speech is working as intended. There is legally nothing wrong with saying what you want on the internet, but that doesn't mean everyone else needs to listen to you or agree with you. If Kiwifarms is worried about free speech, they can stand on a milk crate and hand out free newspapers, completely legally.

fluoridation 4y ago
Let's hope you abide by this standard if the same happens to a site you care about.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Let's hope you abide by this standard if the same happens to a site you care about Gladly. We need more competition in the space anyway [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/985443/worldwide-ddos-bot-protection-market-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/985443/worldwide-ddos-bo...

OrangeMonkey 4y ago

Careful - this group _IS_ the arsonist who are caring torches. Hacker news is not the place to rail against this hypocrisy unless you are fully anon. One target looks a lot like the other when you have a 'cause' you are fighting for. And this is not @dang or other moderators fault. Its the changing times and the changing opinions of the user base.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> the firefighters will just stop serving said target I saw a good analogy the other day [1]. Cloudflare is a bartender throwing out a brawler. They called the cops, but nobody is arrested. And while yes, brawling on the streets may be riskier than brawling inside, it’s extreme to insist the brawler be sheltered because their right to brawl overrides others’ physical safety. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708253

deadbeeves 4y ago
While I agree that CloudFlare should not be required to provide service to anyone if they don't want to, this is a bad analogy. A brawler in a bar disrupts the ability of other customers to enjoy the service. CloudFlare providing DDoS protection to Kiwi Farms doesn't disrupt the ability of its other clients from receiving this service. The entire point of DDoS protection is that your clients will be the targets of attacks, possibly because they're saying or doing something someone objects to. This is like a bodyguard being shocked that some of its clients are criminals. With this, CloudFlare has tipped its hand and shown that it's not a reliable provider of protection; the first time anyone raises a little stink they unilaterally terminate the service of one of their clients and throw them to the wolves.

daveguy 4y ago

Hopefully there will always be enough screaming on the internet to take down a doxxing operation.

pryce 4y ago

> it just shows how hard you can shut someone down by just twitter outrage. Your analysis is absurd. First, supposing we only care about "free speech" and no other values is absurd from the outset*. It should be obvious that people can't make use of any right to free speech" if they get swatted and killed, so the idea that free speech as a value exists in a moral phantom zone of its own where no other ethical considerations have any weight is pretty much false. Let's put aside for now the incredibly insincere enforcement of 'free speech' principles that exists in the US, where black community organisers like MLK and Fred Hampton are blackmailed and murdered (respectively) intentionally by top levels law enforcement for their speech, and put aside the historical record that shows how the anti-war movement of the 1970s was suppressed by an intentionally manufactured war on drugs (as admitted to by ringleaders), a war on drugs that is still costing lives 50 years later. Let's put aside the clear legislative efforts to suppress speech (in the forms of suppressing speech of say the BDS movement) that is occurring at the moment. Let's put aside the decades of law enforcement targeting gay and trans people. Let's pretend, just for now, that we sincerely felt only "free speech" was the only relevant ethical concern. We still have to ask: Whose? Who is speaking, is it more than one party? Who is being protected for their speech? Against who? I cannot see a planet on which the speech rights of kiwifarms forum members is somehow relevant but the speech of trans people who they target is either not relevant or is 'less' relevant. If trans people get harassed, stalked and even have the armed apparatus of state sent to have them intimidated into silence or murdered, for the speech of posting what amounts to "I am trans, and I think that's good", then it is incoherent even for 'free speech adovcates' to place the speech of kiwifarms users (up to and including stalking and harassment) as some noble idea worth protecting while the speech rights of trans people to say even benign things like "i exist" *isn't even part of the ethical considerations*. Basically, there are two ways of approaching 'free speech' issues. For it to be genuine, it cannot be concerned about protecting the speech of one of the groups, and not the other. It cannot be concerned about the speech of one group and think that the speech of a different second group isn't important if that second group gets killed or is forced to move out of the town or nation due to the clear threat to their wellbeing. Anything less than this sincere interest in all parties and a clearheaded interest in how the abstract moral position plays out in practice and our 'free speech advocacy' becomes an insincere figleaf for perpetuating the violence of thugs. Maybe I'm just pissed off because kiwifarms users have harassed and stalked people I care about for over a decade, chased them into their homes, accosted them at their places of work, for literally nothing except being trans, and then I come to HN and see people willing to dismiss all that, or dismiss the rebuke of the unfathomable damage that has been done by this site as this as "twitter outrage" without so much as acknowledging the extraordinary grounds for that criticism. * we should pretty surely concede that further considerations like safety, privacy, health, life, the right to the "pursuit of happiness", etc have relevance here