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Right? Thoughts and prayers for this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse, doxxing and other harmful crimes. Ge

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?
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Anyone can SWAT anyone with enough personal information and a cell phone. You cannot stop swatting by taking down a forum like KF- because a swatting attack is trivial to execute, and can be falsely attributed to any party. If I started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? Should they be taken down? Should the new york times be refused service by cloudflare? Should WikiLeaks or Charlie Hebdo have their domains taken down and their IPs revoked? The whole world is not some sort of first-world bubble where we can all safely live our lives and log into our coporatist social media at the end of the day. We have to come to terms with the fact that journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society. I mean look at what happened with the panama papers or arab spring, everyone involved gets assassinated and the movements are just completely dismantled by the surveillance system within a decade. The USA is a massive exporter of the means of surveillance to the third world, and this is sort of what we are entertaining with this type of reasoning.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? If you were organising these through the newspaper’s classifieds, yes, obviously, everyone would get in trouble. > journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society There is zero journalistic value in bomb threats. There may be something redeeming hidden away in those forums. But nobody should be forced or expected to do business with them.
      - cowtools 4y ago
        [flagged]
  - vintermann 4y ago
    The swats were not verified as coming from KF, and they said they oppose that sort of thing. I noticed that some of the people KF had threads on, were targeted specifically because they overstep the boundaries of what KF considers acceptable (for instance the "Ralph Retort" blogger). You could still argue that Kiwifarms still "enables" people who are even worse than them, in the same way that certain glossy magazines enable harassment of various celebrities. Certainly Kiwifarms themselves get worked up over people who merely "enable" bad things, so they don't have that much non-hypocritical leg to stand on. Still, we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest. (The "credible bomb threats" was IMO not very credible, it was a fresh account claiming to be able to commandeer out Irish paramilitaries to bomb multiple sites in minutes. And the post was reported instantly, and removed within minutes. That's something that could happen to all sites that allow public comments.)
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest There was editorial control. Someone to be held accountable, and someone making decisions knowing that. User-generated content is different. I am less certain of any prescription for the problem than I am in the difference being salient. Heuristics that work on print media aren’t easily translated to social.
      - curtainsforus 4y ago
        Kiwifarms has editorial control, though. Posts advocating swatting or violence are removed, and their users banned.
- woeh 4y ago
  The Netherlands is working on making doxxing illegal[0]. And rightly so, imho. Isn't the goal of doxxing harassing someone? How would that translate to citizen journalism? It is more akin to threatening someone than adding to a debate. [0]https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebruik-van-persoonsgegevens-met-als-doel-intimidatie-wordt-strafbaar https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebru...
TeeMassive 4y ago
> this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse Source?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  There have been loads of recent articles and posts on HN about the type of content Kiwifarms hosts and promotes, easily findable from the HN search bar. Even people who disagree with Cloudflare's actions aren't debating the odiousness of Kiwifarms' content.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    That's a different statement though. Twitter hosts some terrible content. Hell, Cloudflare provides CDN-services for some terrible content. But I'm sure you wouldn't say that therefore they exist for the "express purpose" of doing that.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Let's propose a test. We can scrape all of the tweets submitted in the last month and all of the posts on Kiwi Farms in the last month. Then let's count up the percentage of posts that contain a slur for black people, jewish people, or trans people. If the rate of slurs on KF is no more than 10x that of Twitter then we can consider these sites comparable. Otherwise, we can consider them to be in different categories.
      - account42 4y ago
        Why should we only count slurs for these groups?
    - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      In many of the recent discussions on the topic on HN, you can easily read about the origins of Kiwi Farms, which was originally "CWCki Forums", created for the express purpose of harassing a webcomic creator, Chris Chandler - the name literally grew out of the initials of their first primary target. Furthermore, heck, the Wikipedia page on Kiwi Farms has tons of references to primary sources that detail some of the directed harassment, e.g. from one well sourced article at https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/... > In the most extreme instance of this, they goaded a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler (and record it, of course). This information is so trivially easy to find (just go down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, or again, read many of the posts on this topic on HN) that I can't believe the requests for "Source?" and false equivalence statements of "lots of companies host objectionable content" are made in good faith. TBH, I haven't seen anyone really try to defend any of Kiwi Farms' content. The only real question is whether Cloudflare should be in the position to make judgement calls on the level of danger inherent to any of the sites that use their DDoS protection services.

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?
- cowtools 4y ago
  Anyone can SWAT anyone with enough personal information and a cell phone. You cannot stop swatting by taking down a forum like KF- because a swatting attack is trivial to execute, and can be falsely attributed to any party. If I started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? Should they be taken down? Should the new york times be refused service by cloudflare? Should WikiLeaks or Charlie Hebdo have their domains taken down and their IPs revoked? The whole world is not some sort of first-world bubble where we can all safely live our lives and log into our coporatist social media at the end of the day. We have to come to terms with the fact that journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society. I mean look at what happened with the panama papers or arab spring, everyone involved gets assassinated and the movements are just completely dismantled by the surveillance system within a decade. The USA is a massive exporter of the means of surveillance to the third world, and this is sort of what we are entertaining with this type of reasoning.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > started swatting people I read about in the newspaper or yellow pages, would the newspaper or yellow pages be to blame? If you were organising these through the newspaper’s classifieds, yes, obviously, everyone would get in trouble. > journalism and free speech is inherently risky but necessary for the maintenance of free society There is zero journalistic value in bomb threats. There may be something redeeming hidden away in those forums. But nobody should be forced or expected to do business with them.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      [flagged]
- vintermann 4y ago
  The swats were not verified as coming from KF, and they said they oppose that sort of thing. I noticed that some of the people KF had threads on, were targeted specifically because they overstep the boundaries of what KF considers acceptable (for instance the "Ralph Retort" blogger). You could still argue that Kiwifarms still "enables" people who are even worse than them, in the same way that certain glossy magazines enable harassment of various celebrities. Certainly Kiwifarms themselves get worked up over people who merely "enable" bad things, so they don't have that much non-hypocritical leg to stand on. Still, we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest. (The "credible bomb threats" was IMO not very credible, it was a fresh account claiming to be able to commandeer out Irish paramilitaries to bomb multiple sites in minutes. And the post was reported instantly, and removed within minutes. That's something that could happen to all sites that allow public comments.)
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > we used to defended those magazines for free speech reasons, and for the sake of the few times they reveal something genuinely in the public interest There was editorial control. Someone to be held accountable, and someone making decisions knowing that. User-generated content is different. I am less certain of any prescription for the problem than I am in the difference being salient. Heuristics that work on print media aren’t easily translated to social.
    - curtainsforus 4y ago
      Kiwifarms has editorial control, though. Posts advocating swatting or violence are removed, and their users banned.
woeh 4y ago
The Netherlands is working on making doxxing illegal[0]. And rightly so, imho. Isn't the goal of doxxing harassing someone? How would that translate to citizen journalism? It is more akin to threatening someone than adding to a debate. [0]https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebruik-van-persoonsgegevens-met-als-doel-intimidatie-wordt-strafbaar https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/07/08/gebru...

TeeMassive 4y ago

> this service that has the express purpose of instigating and facilitating targeted abuse Source?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
There have been loads of recent articles and posts on HN about the type of content Kiwifarms hosts and promotes, easily findable from the HN search bar. Even people who disagree with Cloudflare's actions aren't debating the odiousness of Kiwifarms' content.
- luckylion 4y ago
  That's a different statement though. Twitter hosts some terrible content. Hell, Cloudflare provides CDN-services for some terrible content. But I'm sure you wouldn't say that therefore they exist for the "express purpose" of doing that.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Let's propose a test. We can scrape all of the tweets submitted in the last month and all of the posts on Kiwi Farms in the last month. Then let's count up the percentage of posts that contain a slur for black people, jewish people, or trans people. If the rate of slurs on KF is no more than 10x that of Twitter then we can consider these sites comparable. Otherwise, we can consider them to be in different categories.
    - account42 4y ago
      Why should we only count slurs for these groups?
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    In many of the recent discussions on the topic on HN, you can easily read about the origins of Kiwi Farms, which was originally "CWCki Forums", created for the express purpose of harassing a webcomic creator, Chris Chandler - the name literally grew out of the initials of their first primary target. Furthermore, heck, the Wikipedia page on Kiwi Farms has tons of references to primary sources that detail some of the directed harassment, e.g. from one well sourced article at https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190511184633/http://nymag.com/... > In the most extreme instance of this, they goaded a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler (and record it, of course). This information is so trivially easy to find (just go down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, or again, read many of the posts on this topic on HN) that I can't believe the requests for "Source?" and false equivalence statements of "lots of companies host objectionable content" are made in good faith. TBH, I haven't seen anyone really try to defend any of Kiwi Farms' content. The only real question is whether Cloudflare should be in the position to make judgement calls on the level of danger inherent to any of the sites that use their DDoS protection services.