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The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it

The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it doesn’t like. You can’t win with these people, I personally think this is the best outcome and shows our systems work (albeit slowly). Sure it took a while, but now there doesn’t have to be a precedent of Cloudflare acting as the internet police more than it has to.

lolinder 3y ago
> You can’t win with these people This is the classic fallacy of assuming that because you see comments of type A and comments of type B on the same forum that means they're the same people. They're usually not. A more accurate way to phrase this is "you can't win with ... people". Whatever you do will end up ticking off some subset of the population.
- mypastself 3y ago
  “These people” is presumably a set of people quick to find fault in anything a corporation does, which could be a superset of those two groups. Not sure what kind of fallacy that’s supposed to be.
  - __s 3y ago
    intersection, not superset
  - kortilla 3y ago
    Those people are in the noise and nobody cares what they think once they realize they just criticize for the sake of it. That doesn’t change that people seem to think the top upvoted comments being contradictory from day to day represents some kind of inconsistency in the views of the commenters on this site.
  - mathgradthrow 3y ago
    Your evidence for the non-emptiness of this set of people is the fallacy above
- philsnow 3y ago
  There’s a similar problem I encounter from time to time: when I self-identify as “conservative” and express opinion C, many people assume I also hold opinions D, E, and F, because “that’s how all conservatives are”. There are multitudes in every group.
  - remram 3y ago
    They are not many multitudes in the US. Good on you, but my experience is that most people stick with one group and regurgitate the party lines. I think this comes mostly from very polarized TV shows. Likewise, if you disagree with them, they instantly assume that you are with the other group. It is strange.
    - nine_k 3y ago
      The two-party system easily evokes the ancient knee-jerk reflexes. The millennia-old "us against them" tends to eschew any nuance and instill the war mentality. Either you are "one of us", and subscribe to the bulk of "our" views, or you are "one of them", and are assumed to subscribe to the bulk of "their" views. Pretty sad :(
  - nine_k 3y ago
    There's one great piece of advice: "Keep your identity small" [1]. (If people ask me about my political affiliations, I usually answer something like "Hamilton for president! Of maybe Jefferson."; this kind of statesmanship is hard to find now though.) [1]: https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html (It's short, read it now.)
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      Does that mean, instead of saying "I am conservative", you instead only answer about specific policies (e.g. whether you use vim or emacs)?
explain 3y ago
Not the same people at all.
AlienRobot 3y ago
This seems like such a weird problem to me. If they're criminals, just send the cops? If you can't send the cops, then they aren't criminals? How do you end up in this limbo where you need critical infrastructure to play judge?
- lolinder 3y ago
  The internet is a global system that spans ~all jurisdictions, and most internet criminals live in jurisdictions that don't prosecute internet crimes as long as the bad actors leave citizens of their own country alone. So they're criminals as far as the US and allies are concerned, but de facto not criminals where they live. If they're going to be locked out of the system, it has to be by the infrastructure, because their government has no interest in stopping them.
  - AlienRobot 3y ago
    I see. Perhaps there should be a legal framework to get the government to demand companies like cloudflare stop serving these international criminals, then. That way it wouldn't depend on a private entity making the judgement. Do you ever think it's weird that we have gone through web 1.0, web 2.0, semantic web, intertubes clogged with spam bots, web 3.0: crypto edition, and the dawn of AI scraping, and we still haven't figured out these issues?
    - Caligatio 3y ago
      Which government do you mean when you say "the government"? Any national government? Only the US government? Only governments in which the US is friendly and/or has agreements with? Would you want authoritarian governments to be able to demand Cloudflare stop serving those they consider criminals that are outside their borders? International law is messy.
      - toast0 3y ago
        The rule of thumb is governments where Cloudflare has equipment, personel, or banking. There is a procedure to get a foreign case recognized in the US, too, but it has to be serious, and it's not an easy process.
lxgr 3y ago
What criminals are you referring to? The operators of .tk, or their users?
- mobilemidget 3y ago
  There are tons of shady websites hiding behind cloudflare's services. Some used .tk domains too but just in general, many shady websites are hiding behind Cloudflare and at least I know from personal experience if you contact cloud flare about it, they pretend not to be home. "We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying for that website it would be at least offline, never worked.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Cloudflare is a US company. If they provide hosting (or reverse proxying; I don't think there's a material legal difference) services for anything illegal under US law, shouldn't it be possible to compel them to stop doing that through the legal system? And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
    - internetter 3y ago
      > if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation. Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"
      - diggan 3y ago
        > Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law Isn't that somewhat of an oxymoron? What are some examples of something that is against the law but not handled by the courts of law?
0x0000000 3y ago
> The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it doesn’t like. It'd be interesting if you could point to a single example of someone taking both sides. I strongly doubt these are the same people.
- overstay8930 3y ago
  If you're asking me to personally identify someone, no I'm not going to do that. However if you want to see some hilarious hypocrisy, go ahead and see who said what when Cloudflare banned 8chan.
akira2501 3y ago
> You can’t win with these people People who want to live in a just world often get in the way of things. I'm just not sure why you're mad at those who want justice and not those who put profits above all else? > that Cloudflare hosts these criminals Oh.. it's not that they host them, it's that they go out of their way to protect them, and the profit streams associated with them.
ogurechny 3y ago
There is no contraposition. In both cases, big company simply does something it wants. This comparison actually highlights that there is no “system”, because some (imaginary) impersonal entity decides that those bad actors are allowed, and those bad actors are not allowed. Some public sensibilities are given as a reason, but no one is actually asking anyone's opinion on anything. Still, there are people who believe that Santa Claus brings presents for free, and that the whole thing is not governed by typical hypocrisy and typical politics behind closed doors. The thing is, you've built a turnpike, you can now bargain with people interested in sharing control over that turnpike.
mardifoufs 3y ago
Well CloudFlare already does exactly that. It already set the precedent you are referring to. That's why it feels odd that they don't shut down literal criminals too. They have no issues with shutting down stuff, but they are famously very lax when it comes to actual criminal stuff. I'm not trying to say that they were wrong or right for engaging in content policing, what I'm saying is that the precedent isn't new.

lolinder 3y ago

> You can’t win with these people This is the classic fallacy of assuming that because you see comments of type A and comments of type B on the same forum that means they're the same people. They're usually not. A more accurate way to phrase this is "you can't win with ... people". Whatever you do will end up ticking off some subset of the population.

mypastself 3y ago
“These people” is presumably a set of people quick to find fault in anything a corporation does, which could be a superset of those two groups. Not sure what kind of fallacy that’s supposed to be.
- __s 3y ago
  intersection, not superset
- kortilla 3y ago
  Those people are in the noise and nobody cares what they think once they realize they just criticize for the sake of it. That doesn’t change that people seem to think the top upvoted comments being contradictory from day to day represents some kind of inconsistency in the views of the commenters on this site.
- mathgradthrow 3y ago
  Your evidence for the non-emptiness of this set of people is the fallacy above
philsnow 3y ago
There’s a similar problem I encounter from time to time: when I self-identify as “conservative” and express opinion C, many people assume I also hold opinions D, E, and F, because “that’s how all conservatives are”. There are multitudes in every group.
- remram 3y ago
  They are not many multitudes in the US. Good on you, but my experience is that most people stick with one group and regurgitate the party lines. I think this comes mostly from very polarized TV shows. Likewise, if you disagree with them, they instantly assume that you are with the other group. It is strange.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    The two-party system easily evokes the ancient knee-jerk reflexes. The millennia-old "us against them" tends to eschew any nuance and instill the war mentality. Either you are "one of us", and subscribe to the bulk of "our" views, or you are "one of them", and are assumed to subscribe to the bulk of "their" views. Pretty sad :(
- nine_k 3y ago
  There's one great piece of advice: "Keep your identity small" [1]. (If people ask me about my political affiliations, I usually answer something like "Hamilton for president! Of maybe Jefferson."; this kind of statesmanship is hard to find now though.) [1]: https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html (It's short, read it now.)
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Does that mean, instead of saying "I am conservative", you instead only answer about specific policies (e.g. whether you use vim or emacs)?

explain 3y ago

Not the same people at all.

AlienRobot 3y ago

This seems like such a weird problem to me. If they're criminals, just send the cops? If you can't send the cops, then they aren't criminals? How do you end up in this limbo where you need critical infrastructure to play judge?

lolinder 3y ago
The internet is a global system that spans ~all jurisdictions, and most internet criminals live in jurisdictions that don't prosecute internet crimes as long as the bad actors leave citizens of their own country alone. So they're criminals as far as the US and allies are concerned, but de facto not criminals where they live. If they're going to be locked out of the system, it has to be by the infrastructure, because their government has no interest in stopping them.
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  I see. Perhaps there should be a legal framework to get the government to demand companies like cloudflare stop serving these international criminals, then. That way it wouldn't depend on a private entity making the judgement. Do you ever think it's weird that we have gone through web 1.0, web 2.0, semantic web, intertubes clogged with spam bots, web 3.0: crypto edition, and the dawn of AI scraping, and we still haven't figured out these issues?
  - Caligatio 3y ago
    Which government do you mean when you say "the government"? Any national government? Only the US government? Only governments in which the US is friendly and/or has agreements with? Would you want authoritarian governments to be able to demand Cloudflare stop serving those they consider criminals that are outside their borders? International law is messy.
    - toast0 3y ago
      The rule of thumb is governments where Cloudflare has equipment, personel, or banking. There is a procedure to get a foreign case recognized in the US, too, but it has to be serious, and it's not an easy process.

lxgr 3y ago

What criminals are you referring to? The operators of .tk, or their users?

mobilemidget 3y ago
There are tons of shady websites hiding behind cloudflare's services. Some used .tk domains too but just in general, many shady websites are hiding behind Cloudflare and at least I know from personal experience if you contact cloud flare about it, they pretend not to be home. "We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying for that website it would be at least offline, never worked.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Cloudflare is a US company. If they provide hosting (or reverse proxying; I don't think there's a material legal difference) services for anything illegal under US law, shouldn't it be possible to compel them to stop doing that through the legal system? And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
  - internetter 3y ago
    > if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation. Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"
    - diggan 3y ago
      > Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law Isn't that somewhat of an oxymoron? What are some examples of something that is against the law but not handled by the courts of law?

0x0000000 3y ago

> The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it doesn’t like. It'd be interesting if you could point to a single example of someone taking both sides. I strongly doubt these are the same people.

overstay8930 3y ago
If you're asking me to personally identify someone, no I'm not going to do that. However if you want to see some hilarious hypocrisy, go ahead and see who said what when Cloudflare banned 8chan.

akira2501 3y ago

> You can’t win with these people People who want to live in a just world often get in the way of things. I'm just not sure why you're mad at those who want justice and not those who put profits above all else? > that Cloudflare hosts these criminals Oh.. it's not that they host them, it's that they go out of their way to protect them, and the profit streams associated with them.

ogurechny 3y ago

There is no contraposition. In both cases, big company simply does something it wants. This comparison actually highlights that there is no “system”, because some (imaginary) impersonal entity decides that those bad actors are allowed, and those bad actors are not allowed. Some public sensibilities are given as a reason, but no one is actually asking anyone's opinion on anything. Still, there are people who believe that Santa Claus brings presents for free, and that the whole thing is not governed by typical hypocrisy and typical politics behind closed doors. The thing is, you've built a turnpike, you can now bargain with people interested in sharing control over that turnpike.

mardifoufs 3y ago

Well CloudFlare already does exactly that. It already set the precedent you are referring to. That's why it feels odd that they don't shut down literal criminals too. They have no issues with shutting down stuff, but they are famously very lax when it comes to actual criminal stuff. I'm not trying to say that they were wrong or right for engaging in content policing, what I'm saying is that the precedent isn't new.