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There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here give people a simple toggle that manages geoblocks on legal liability factors. It's way too much for e
by zmmmmm 1y ago
There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here give people a simple toggle that manages geoblocks on legal liability factors. It's way too much for every organisation to individually track every country's laws day by day in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. And it sounds like the UK would have just self-selected out of the list of "safe" countries.
If something like this was in widespread use it would have much more impact since countries would see whole swathes of the internet immediately go dark when they make stupid laws.
- bstsb 1y agohttps://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/security/security-rules/custom-rules/create https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/security/sec... (ip.src.country eq "GB") then take action "Block". i know what you mean by a simpler option though
- stingraycharles 1y agoThe point the parent is making is that you don’t have to manually keep track of the countries you need to block. You just tell Cloudflare what your website does / what type of laws may be problematic, and Cloudflare manages the blocklist automatically. Makes a lot of sense actually that it’s surprising they don’t have this yet.
- lemonlearnings 1y agoSo the entire internet goes off during La Liga?
- debugnik 1y agoNo? That's the other way around, ISPs blocking server IPs for customers. This is about servers blocking legally risky visitor IPs.
- stackskipton 1y agoMy guess is liability factor. If they get it wrong, massive liability on their side especially since someone could be like "I told you X" and Cloudflare didn't think the law applied or not. Better to put onus on the customer.
- _boffin_ 1y ago“”” Our analysis reports that the regulations that are currently being discussed and likely to have an impact on the following services of yours: {{SERVICES}}. These regulations touch on the following points: {{POINTS}}. Here are how each of your listed services would likely be impacted by the different components of the regulations: - {{SERVICE}} — {{POINTS}} “””
- stingraycharles 1y agoThis is already a fact of life: Amazon, Cloudflare, etc all manage blocklists for common patterns in firewalls, and many compliance standards (e.g. SOC2) pretty much require you to enable them. Mistakes are sometimes made in these things, but fairly certain that liability is covered by the ToS.
- ljm 1y agoSo a service like CloudFlare is the Great firewall of the world and CloudFlare can shut you down if you go against their interests as a supranational gatekeeper. Smart thinking Batman.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lurk2 1y ago> CloudFlare can shut you down if you go against their interests as a supranational gatekeeper They already can. > Smart thinking Batman. “Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.” https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gerdesj 1y ago“Be kind. Don't be snarky." Sometimes I think you can ignore the "rules" a bit - they are really guidelines. Your parent was clearly expressing exasperation and engaging effectively and intelligently.
- zmmmmm 1y agoagreed on that ... I'm not too happy with how CloudFlare tried to flex their influence on AI training, so I certainly wouldn't want them in charge of gatekeeping the whole internet. But the truth is, we are already there. CloudFlare can already do this, they just won't because the their customers will leave if they violate their trust.
- Aeolun 1y agoOnly if you want to keep using CloudFlare. You can make your site available without.
- EasyMark 1y agoThere are alternatives to cloudflare tho. If the government cuts you off or starts enforcing 24/7 surveillance there's not a lot that can be done other than tossing them out in the next election (if there are elections) or civil disobedience until they renege
- flir 1y agoI wish Wikipedia would take one for the team, and go dark in the UK. (And I'm in the UK). Wouldn't work with somewhere like China, but the UK might still be capable of being shamed.
- afavour 1y ago[flagged]
- EasyMark 1y agoI can't imagine that working for even more than a couple of days. If it did we have much bigger problems than access to Wikipedia and would like be looking at the beginning of civil disobedience and war as I doubt wikipedia would be the only freedom of speech site.
- dboreham 1y agoThis has been happening for years but if you're in the US you don't realize. For example I can't access my local Montana newspaper web site from the UK "because GDPR" (even though the UK isn't in the EU).
- pverheggen 1y agoThere is a UK GDPR, it’s the same framework but adopted under UK law: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-the-eu/data-protection-and-the-eu-in-detail/the-uk-gdpr/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-the...
- seszett 1y agoI don't remember the exact details now but that was mostly out of spite from presumably one entity (or a handful at most) that owns many US local newspapers though. They're not subject to GDPR anyway as they explicitly don't target EU users as customers, they just wanted to put pressure, pass a message to the EU. And as you can see they didn't even bother updating their block after Brexit.
- 1y ago
- thewebguyd 1y ago> in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against. It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network. TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
- colechristensen 1y agoIt depends on the kind of website. If you're not advertising, selling anything, or otherwise doing any business through your website you're much more emboldened to not care about every jurisdiction. But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries and I don't have a ton of objection to you needing to follow foreign laws. I'm fine with "balkanization" (I know some people from the Balkan countries... maybe they'd object to the use of that word) if it means a freedom divide and actual consequences for countries ever eroding freedoms.
- fizzynut 1y agoThe huge plus of the internet is that you can be disruptive on a global scale on a somewhat even footing to the giants. If you place a giant burden such that before you even do anything of value you need to conform to 100s of different laws/regulations from 100 different countries you create a world where only large companies can exist and everyone else is pushed out.
- dexterdog 1y agoIsn't that the goal of these nonsense laws?
- bigbadfeline 1y ago> But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries. Say, I'm the provider... well sorry, you (the customer) are doing business with a foreign country (mine) and you should do it in accordance with YOUR laws about YOUR country's foreign trade. That's the only way to properly conform to jurisdiction, amirite? In other words, UK has no jurisdiction over US businesses who conduct business from US soil, UK cannot force them to obey UK law just because a UK citizen decided to buy something over the internet. The UK can punish THEIR citizens for what the UK considers unlawful trades and that's always the case no matter what. Claiming jurisdiction over foreign businesses ends up in a completely lunatic situation where every business, in every country, has to obey the laws of every other country just because some people might decide to order from abroad. Block, ban, punish only where you have jurisdiction, everything else ends up in sheer insanity.
- fsckboy 1y ago>There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare i don't think "compliance" in a micropennies per click market like imgur is a full on "opportunity"
- crossroadsguy 1y agoMaybe they can tell the countries where they are anyway not going to do any business anymore - no, you block it.
- hopelite 1y agoDoes anyone know what their actual exposure currently is/was in the UK? They actually had offices and staff there? To your point about the proposed service, isn’t that what cloud providers basically already do in rudimentary ways or could do with finer grain regions? Also, it seems the internet/WWW is basically being snuffed out right before our eyes as governments start using all manner of specious arguments to censor and control adults… for the children… of course. You as an adult are not allowed to have your rights because children may be harmed if you have your rights. “ No, no, we can’t keep the children from engaging in things that we deem harms them, your rights have to be relinquished instead.”
- SunlitCat 1y agoQuite the opposite! There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here to give people a simple toggle that manages to circumvent such geoblocks. ;)
- bmon 1y agoThey call it warp
- hackernewds 1y agoCF already provides this
- isodev 1y ago> for a service like CloudFlare Not Claudflare though, let's not feed another monster monopoly :)
- BatteryMountain 1y agoOr, just ban children from the internet, same as gun ownership for 12yo's. Fine/imprison parents. This is a parenting problem, not a technical/business problem. Remove the supply of children and things will get better. A business cannot make laws or override laws with ToS and invent their own moral compasses - rather it is the sole responsibility of the parent on what their child gets exposed to (whether politics, porn, weird beliefs, spam, chat/user generated content). The parents have been getting a free pass all this time.
- octo888 1y ago> The parents have been getting a free pass all this time I totally agree but the UK government – particular Labour – doesn't want people to take responsibility really, because that would take from their own 'power'. There's nothing the UK loves more than a stupid population hooked on benefits and devoid of education, critical thinking and financial freedom.
- jpfromlondon 1y agoNot the UK, Labour.
- lkramer 1y agoDon't pretend the Tories are any better...
- jpfromlondon 1y agothey were, once upon a time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jeroenhd 1y agoThe Tories wrote the law for the recent changes to internet freedom in the UK. Labour supports it. Support seems to come from all sides across the political spectrum. I think the Greens are opposed to it, and maybe Reform in one of their populist speeches, but the majority of UK representatives seem to support this law. Based on this poll, most Britons also support the OSA: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-age-checks-are-sceptical-effectiveness-and-unwilling-share-id https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
- buyucu 1y agowhat's wrong with a vpn? mullvad basically allows me to go around all the censorship in my country: https://mullvad.net/en https://mullvad.net/en
- jeroenhd 1y agoYou can pretty much get rid of the entire internet that way. All across the USA there are "child protection laws" banning pornography (what's pornography? some politicians say it's mentioning that trans people exist!). Countries like China and Russia have legal mandates to store and process data within their borders. China requires a license to even host a website. The UK and EU have the GDPR, and now the UK also has the OSA. Then there are the incompatible privacy laws (for instance, EU courts have considered DNT as a legal measure to deter tracking, while several American states ban explicitly prevent the DNT header from counting). Oh, and of course, any website with any kind of user-submittable content is subject to laws like the DMCA and the recent EU anti-CSAM laws which put site operators in grave legal risk. I don't even know what laws apply to the Middle East, Africa, or South America, but I'm sure there are enough of them to make most sites culpable in some way.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI was going to say, had this happened back when reddit was still using imgur exclusively, then the UK would have really suffered.