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It's an intentional business decision, and it makes some sense if you understand the process. First, here's their CEO's explanation of their stance: http://blo
by rudolf0 12y ago
It's an intentional business decision, and it makes some sense if you understand the process.
First, here's their CEO's explanation of their stance: http://blog.cloudflare.com/58611873/ http://blog.cloudflare.com/58611873/
Cloudflare is closer to a router than a host. They just happen to be a router which masks that which they're routing to.
If you file an abuse complaint to them about a specific domain, they won't take any actions themselves. However, they will tell the reporter the server's real hosting provider, and will forward the complaint to the hosting provider with information allowing the provider to determine what server the domain corresponds to.
There are some pros and cons to this approach, but considering their role as a completely neutral "transit station" of traffic, I think it makes the most sense legally and practically. Ethically I have a few qualms with it (if a site is very, very blatantly advertising illegal material, ethically I think they should either disable Cloudflare cloaking for the domain, stop resolving the domain at all, or just cancel the customer's account entirely; legally they don't necessarily need to, though, and I can understand why they don't), but they still make it very easy for a hosting provider to take action when there is an abuse complaint.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago>Cloudflare is closer to a router than a host. They literally run Varnish, mod_security, mod_evasive, etc. They literally host content. They are a host, not a "router."
- newaccountfool 12y agoThey're not really a host, you don't give them any files to use or to host for you, you merely switch your DNS settings and they cache your content.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoThis argument wouldn't hold up if copyright infringement were involved. Why should it hold up in this case? I'm undecided.
- newaccountfool 12y agoDepends what country your from really whether or not that would hold up. Depends if the US is going to user the overreaching arm to sort things like this out.
- rudolf0 12y agoThey cache static content like images and host that, yes, but they do not host any dynamic pages or "websites" themselves. They have some hosting capabilities but I think that would be better described as a "mirror" rather than a host. Most of their infrastructure is routing and some is mirroring/caching.
- xorcist 12y agoThey do host a lot more material than for example The Pirate Bay, which only hosted metadata about the files (size, description, checksums). The reasoning is very similar, "we don't care what our users do, we're infrastructure". I wonder how well that will hold up in court, once tested. I have a nagging suspicion they will have to change their stance, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.