241–250 of 1001 posts
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People have hated for thousands of years, and we've made it this far. Have some optimism. Mandating tolerance is about as likely to work as using a sieve to bail water out of a boat.
People have silenced dissidents for thousands of years too, why aren't you willing to be optimistic about that?
I'm only here to draw light to hypocrisy.
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Did something happen in Charlotte I didn't hear about?
I'm not sure - the ad is supposedly from last week. I just thought I ask if anyone new something about this. The PR company seem legit (in the sense it actually exist). It raises a few questions if related to what happened though.
Only if you think Charlottesville, Virginia is the same thing as Charlotte, North Carolina...
I have read many of the threads here, and I think it boils down to this: do businesses (NOT THE GOVERNMENT) have the right to choose what content and customers they serve? Further, does it matter if they are a hosting provider? A network provider? A telephone provider? Can those providers cancel you if the company doesn't like what you say or are? This is tough: I honestly don't know if freedom of speech needs to be…
Yes.
This is why VISA was instrumental in the 'war on porn' and why every service provider ever has a provision in their contracts stating they can terminate your online presence at their discretion.
That's a way for the industry to avoid becoming government regulated, as long as this self regulation takes care of the worst excesses companies will continue to be able to operate in relative freedom.
The few times that local national law (such as in France and Germany) has butted up against companies trying to re-write the law in a more lenient way this has - predictably - failed.
But as long as companies stay on the far side of that line they are free to draw more restrictive lines as they see fit with impunity so long as those lines do not affect the lives of so called 'protected classes' in a negative way and because of the item that triggers that class to be protected in the first place.
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>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.
Still doesn't make sense. CF alone doesn't effectively defend against DDoS attacks without somewhat complicated setup, CF is completely worthless when your backend is getting attacked.
I think you're seriously overestimating the amount of people pushed to use CF because of these booters.
Besides, do you feel that the situation would be any different if the booters weren't allowed on CF? CF is by no means important to their operations.
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Did something happen in Charlotte I didn't hear about?
I'm not sure - the ad is supposedly from last week. I just thought I ask if anyone new something about this. The PR company seem legit (in the sense it actually exist). It raises a few questions if related to what happened though.
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This wasn't roadrage, it was murder. Now get off your fake high horse, you don't get to claim the moral highground on account of a bunch of people that would like to do the same to a fairly large number of people. Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way.
> This wasn't roadrage, it was murder. Now get off your fake high horse I'm attempting to prevent the cheapening of the term "terrorism", not adjusting my positioning on my high horse. Its a hate crime, not terrorism. > Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way. More of this will come regardless if these people get their way. Protests, tweet storms, and tearing down Co…
I'm not sure that it's any more or less 'terrorism' than the vehicular attacks by Islamists in Europe. How would you describe those?
I'm not a fan of cloudflare, I think the net would be better without them. That said I think this was the right call to make. Being the CEO of a company carries with it the weight of having the ultimate responsibility for each and every action of the company and to be an unwilling vehicle for the Neo Nazi movement is something that no company should want to aspire to. Where I have a problem is that ostensibly this di…
But what's the end game? Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Because that's how things are looking. I wish we could just pretend these sites don't exist and stop giving them free publicity and advertisement. Trump is president because he's profitable to hate. Seems like we're repeating our mistakes. The only people who win by manufacturing outrage is the media.
No, but there are obvious limits on what companies would like to be seen to be associating with. Cloudflare is a lot more lenient than most in this respect, but that got interpreted as 'there is no line they will not cross'. That assumption seems to not have borne fruit.
I'm reminded of the 'Slashdot will not censor posts' outrage a number of years ago because, yes, Slashdot did have that power and used it once. Of course for the absolutists that once was the sign that the end was neigh, only that's not how it played out.
> I wish we could just pretend these sites don't exist and stop giving them free publicity and advertisement. Trump is president because he's profitable to hate. Seems like we're repeating our mistakes. The only people who win by manufacturing outrage is the media.
Very astute observation, and definitely a thing to remember when looking at media output.
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This response always strikes me as a huge cop-out. The phrase "free speech" can refer not just to the legal first amendment right but also to the more general societal principle. Nobody has claimed or will claim that Cloudflare's actions here violate the first amendment. The "free speech" discussion is not about whether they can do this, but whether they should .
It's sort of disconcerting to admit this but recent events have me reevaluating the utility of unvarnished free speech as a societal value. Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech. But more ab…
Very disconcerting that you and so many other people feel this way. Free speech and competition of ideas is an essential part of our society. To deny free speech is to oppress.
> no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty
Open, civil, and logical debate of ideas is your recourse. If your ideas cannot win over the majority, maybe you (and possibly that society) deserve to lose. Civil rights, gay marrage, and abortion have all come about because of free speech. Thinking anything else is folly.
>“This was my decision. This is not Cloudflare’s general policy now, going forward,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “I think we have to have a conversation over what part of the infrastructure stack is right to police content.” (from internal email) >Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning i…
This is in a way much worse than if they actually changed their policy. With this precedent, it looks like what they're saying now is "we're not policing content, except for when our CEO feels like it". Basically this is a clear act of corruption, given their own proclaimed principles of content neutrality. That the ultimate trigger seems to have been that the removed site said something negative about CloudFlare is…