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Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#51

Post by cft »

ryanlol wrote: post #40
cft wrote: post #17

Cloudflare's major business is hosting paid DDoS providers "booters" [1] . Scary to delegate such powers to a person who "literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet" 1. https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-July/087295.h...

>Cloudflare's major business is hosting paid DDoS providers "booters" No it isn't, this is complete nonsense. There's not very many booters and besides a few exceptions they don't have paid CF plans.

"paid" as in you have to pay per DDoS to the booter. CF business is not in getting money directly from the booters, but in acquiring many paid CF subscriptions from the sites that the booters can attack. Some of these booters can generate 100+Gbps UDP attacks.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

Clubber wrote: post #48
jlgaddis wrote: post #11

This is a slippery slope, Cloudflare. Once you take it upon yourself to begin moderating and regulating content, you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so consistently. Do you really want that responsibility? My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with t…

>I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them. This was big when I was growing up too. KKK was always used as an example. No one liked what they had to say, but as Americans, we felt we were obligated to protect their ability to say it. You know, principles and all.

> No one liked what they had to say, but as Americans, we felt we were obligated to protect their ability to say it

Their right to say it.

Their ability to say it is a different thing.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#53

Post by nrb »

aphextron wrote: post #30
bwb wrote: post #10

Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :). Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included. The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.

(Playing devil's advocate here) But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service provide…

The equal time rule exists because they are broadcasting on finite wireless spectrum that belongs to the public. It does not apply here.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#54

Post by tedivm »

cft wrote: post #17

Cloudflare's major business is hosting paid DDoS providers "booters" [1] . Scary to delegate such powers to a person who "literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet" 1. https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-July/087295.h...

Cloudflare has also been crucial to malware vendors who are pushing out their exploit kits. When I worked at Malwarebytes we had the worst possible time working with the Cloudflare abuse team to take down active exploit kits.

They continuously hid behind "free speech" to justify hosting this stuff, even though we not talking about speech but literal malware exploit kits. Cloudflare is one of those companies that is actively making the world a worse place to live in.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#55

Post by thinkfurther »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #33
RandVal30142 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are quoting earlier content instead of Cloudflare's statement on this particular matter. From today: >Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology. Seems no one woke up in a bad mood here.

If eastdakota said it, it's damning, regardless of the later PR scrubbing.

Damning? I find it humble and self-deprecating to call a lucid moment as this a "bad mood".

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#56

Post by notyourwork »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #26

I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies. If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally)…

Reading this it sounds like you missed the intent of the post. Cloudflare would have not done this had there not been circumstances in which it was indicated that cloudflare supports the organization.

It isn't clear to me where/how they determined this organization was "secretly" claiming cloudflare supported them.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#57

Post by mattnewton »

aphextron wrote: post #30
bwb wrote: post #10

Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :). Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included. The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.

(Playing devil's advocate here) But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service provide…

Nazi's aren't a protected class. I don't have to sell you server space. But I also don't have the right to knock down your own server, should you set one up on the public internet.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#58

Post by Clubber »

bwb wrote: post #10

Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :). Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included. The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.

Every time someone says that, I just hear "I'm defending censorship." Is that what you are doing, or am I just overly sensitive?

I mean everyone on here knows this, yet every time someone feels they need to say it. We aren't debating what the first amendment protects, we are debating on wether it's good for our country to have all internet speech controlled by a handful of conglomerates.

This is going to sound unfair, but it's not unlike saying, "Sure slavery is immoral, but it's legal! The Supreme Court said so!"

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#59

Post by vkou »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
RandVal30142 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also said this: >“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”

Don't try to market yourself as critical Internet infrastructure if you're going to throw your principals away because someone made you feel icky. The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways. Edit: I was proud of Cloudflare not turning them off after their domain was deregistered. Now, so disappointed. Freedom of speech is rarely the speech we agree with. Or even speech we…

The Pirate Bay and Lizard Squad aren't an existential threat to our society. Neither is ISIS. Fascism and white supremacy is.

Re: Why We Terminated Daily Stormer

#60

Post by tedunangst »

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #42
jlgaddis wrote: post #11

This is a slippery slope, Cloudflare. Once you take it upon yourself to begin moderating and regulating content, you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so consistently. Do you really want that responsibility? My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with t…

Would you hang a sign with a writing of my choice out of your window?

If I were in the sign hanging business and you paid the advertised fee, yes.
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