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On the one hand, Cloudflare crying crocodile tears for their policy decisions isn’t remotely moving. If anything, their plea for US intervention feels incredibl
by stego-tech 1y ago
On the one hand, Cloudflare crying crocodile tears for their policy decisions isn’t remotely moving. If anything, their plea for US intervention feels incredibly insincere given that their business has been to defend literal Nazis and Pirates alike for decades, and if you’re going to build a business out of defending bad actors, well, you best be prepared for the consequences.
That being said, they’re absolutely right that these broad, automated blocks aren’t acceptable for the internet as a whole - especially when a ruling is applicable regionally or globally. Blocking an entire IP range or service provider because of a handful of bad actors on their service is incredibly excessive, akin to barricading off an entire neighborhood because one apartment is a crack den, i.e. stupidly disproportionate. If countries are having an issue with a company routinely and willfully allowing bad actors to prosper, the solution is simply to bar that company from operating within their jurisdiction commercially.
Yet the IT dinosaur in me reads that statement above, and I ultimately find myself back at where I’ve been for years: for a globally distributed network, the only way to effectively punish an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.
We have to punish bad actors, but when said actor commands a significant swath of the legitimate internet, you either have to harm a disproportionate amount of legitimate traffic in blocking them, or admit they’re too big and important for a government to intervene against. The former is bad, but the latter is infinitely worse.
- wbl 1y agoThe courts can absolutely get Cloudflare to comply with orders. The only reason this doesn't happen is that the people asking for the blocking come with a list of IPs.
- stego-tech 1y agoYou’re eSplaining my own argument back to me. Cloudflare’s whinging is they shouldn’t be required to block entire swaths of IP ranges because they have legitimate customer traffic there; their opponents (rightly) state that because of how Cloudflare and the internet works, the only real way to stop these piracy streams are wholesale service blocks, because of how easily specific IP or domain blocks can be bypassed. The centralization of power is the problem, and as I say near the end: > …I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.
- wbl 1y agoCloudflare could be told to kick the streams off and they would stop
- mikkupikku 1y ago"Defend literal pirates" - imagine if it was the opposite; if the only way to keep a site on the internet without being ddosed into oblivion was to use Cloudflare but also they only permit sites which are approved of by corporate interests. That would be very dystopian. The root problem of course is their de facto monopoly status, as gatekeepers of the internet (if they aren't secretly an NSA run company, the NSA is probably very jealous of what they've done), but this would be so much worse if they decided to play internet editor.
- stego-tech 1y ago…I find it interesting that you edited the quote to remove their defense of Nazis. Like, that’s just a very odd decision to make when quoting somebody. And you’re covering the ground I already laid in the original comment: > …the only way to effectively punish an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization. I don’t need eSplaining of my own argument.
- inemesitaffia 1y agoTaylor Swift is now on so...
- mikkupikku 1y agoIf you can't defend the premise of knocking Anna's Archive off the internet without hiding behind the tarpit of demanding the conversation be about Nazis, that is extremely telling.
- wbl 1y agoAkamai, CloudFront, whatever Googles service is, a bunch of other ones I can't think of compete in the same market. Cloudflare obviously is good at what they do but there decently are many fine CDN/DDOs prevention companies.
- 1y ago
- immibis 1y agoI knew about the Nazis, but I wasn't aware Cloudflare defended literal sea pirates? When did that happen? I guess the US Navy?
- sammy2255 1y agoThey don't. And actually, quite hilariously, Somalian pirates raided the Kenyan data center that Cloudflare have their Kenyan PoP in (7 years ago). https://old.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/837c4c/somalian_pirates_raided_the_cloudflare_data/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/837c4c/somalian...
- stego-tech 1y agoI had missed this and find it deeply hilarious that actual meatspace pirates raided a company’s datacenter that protects digital pirates. Also, just for folks seemingly confused by my words in the original post: I got no beef with digital piracy myself, just more pointing out that if your company is willfully protecting hate speech (like Nazis) and piracy sites, well, you’re courting a very specific kind of response, and whining about receiving that response after the fact is not exactly sympathetic.
- sammy2255 1y agoYeah it's not true. It was a joke /r/woosh
- stego-tech 1y agoFolks keep confusing where I used the term “literal” in that sentence. I said “literal Nazis and pirates”, not Nazis and literal pirates. It’s why I staunchly refuse to touch Cloudflare for fucking anything. When your company defends a group whose ethos is genocide, you’ve lost me forever, free speech be damned.
- kbelder 1y agoAnd when your ethos is censorship, you've lost me.