Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#511

Post by kevingadd » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

kmlx wrote: post #371

a2128 wrote: post #347

In my experience Cloudflare goes too far with offering their security services to everyone. There is a website that's constantly ripping and stealing artistic content from a community I used to be part of. They have an automated process for ripping and reuploading content not meant to be downloadable from small independent artists in this community without informing the artist, obtaining permission or anything. Outra…

> Over the course of a year I have sent several abuse reports about this website to Cloudflare and have never heard back. why would you send abuse reports to cloudflare about a website that hosts copyrighted material? why not send the reports to the website itself? and if that website ignores them then there are other ways to get that content offline, no?

How do you send abuse reports to a website with no abuse contact? The host is the first port of call in that case.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#512

Post by MichaelCollins » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #495

MichaelCollins wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of, not all fire departments are government services. Sometimes they are private associations of volunteers that receive marginal if any taxpayer support. Other times, they are for-profit corporations. This is particularly true when another company needs specialized firefighting services because they are remote or handle materials and situations the local government-supported firefighters aren't equipped to han…

Cloudflare is not a private association of volunteers. Private fire fighting services are not called fire departments commonly, are plural, and are not local frequently. My response is still the analogy is bad. We can understand the situation better without trying to imagine what fire would be like if it didn't spread.

I did not compare cloudflare to a private association of volunteers. I am suggesting they are comparable to a private for-profit firefighting company. Can you respond to this?

If KF farms hires a private for-profit firefighting company, and then political activists commit arson against KF, should the private for-profit firefighting company put out the fire? Or does your political ideology oblige firefighters to side with arsonists?

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#513

Post by zzyzxd » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:33 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #464

DoctorOW wrote: post #22

> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. > For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation…

Cloudflare is not a public service, the comparison with firefighters is not apt. I’ve been seeing this confusion more and more recently, probably because of the size and omnipresence of corporations. I don’t know if this confusion is deliberate to justify certain acts or simply ignorance, but the distinction has to be emphasized. Corporations and public services are completely different beasts, with different legisla…

> Cloudflare is not a public service

Do we consider stuff like DNS, BGP to be public service? I mean, Cloudflare can affect everyone who uses Internet.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#514

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

_ktx2 wrote: post #504

weberer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives. These people who want to revoke DDoS protection for groups they don't like are essentially promoting terrorism. Why else would they fight so hard to remove DDoS protection, if not because they simply want those attacks to succeed?

I would call it vigilantism which is a type of definitional terrorism. People in the US don't like that word, but there's a good many things that are terrorism that we don't call such. At the end of the day, violence with political aims is terrorism.

> I would call it vigilantism which is a type of definitional terrorism.

Only if it's sufficiently political. Lots of DDoS is not. And that bar gets higher for an attack that's minimally violent.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#515

Post by pier25 » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

creeble wrote: post #214

>We believe cyberattacks, in any form, should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Unless, of course, you are an _enabler_ of such attacks. This is where CF's hypocrisy shines through. instant-stresser.com str3ssed.co freestresser.co metastresser.com (dozens more) These are all sites hosted with CF DNS, who provide services that are literally the opposite of free speech -- they are in the business of _suppressing…

> If they were "relegated to the dustbin of history", so too would be CF's business model.

If DDoS didn't exist I'm sure CF would still thrive as a CDN and all the other services they provide (Argo, Workers, etc).

If anything, I'm sure CF would be more than happy to stop providing DDoS protection for free. They'd save a lot of money.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#516

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

Cyberdog wrote: post #465

ladyattis wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nothing like the evangelicals by any stretch of the imagination. The fact of the matter is that Kiwi Farms is a cesspit full of people who revel in obsessing over people and then harassing them not only at their jobs but even through their private communications (phone numbers, personal email addresses, etc). How you react if dozens of people just started calling you at all hours because you're trans and are vis…

It's nothing like the SJWs by any stretch of the imagination. The fact of the matter is that Reddit/ResetERA/Twitter/DailyKos is a cesspit full of people who revel in obsessing over people and then harassing them not only at their jobs but even through their private communications (phone numbers, personal email addresses, etc). How you react if dozens of people just started calling you at all hours because you're Chr…

A really key difference that I feel gets missed is the "who swung first" aspect.

A great deal of what gets called "cancel culture" is people reacting to someone behaving in a way that harms others, including but not limited to...

- Discrimination (gender, orientation, religion, race, whatever) - Harassment - Threats, ranging from the subtle to the overt - Actual violence

Quite often, the targets of this behavior have done nothing beyond exist and be honest about who they are and how they see themselves. Their harassers swung first.

To take your porn example (I too am old enough to remember the 90s), the moral majority was swinging first. They were offended by porn, but no one was forcing them to consume it. No one was threatening or harassing them.

Maybe the right wing (which is where the moral majority centered as well) should consider why they keep swinging first instead of why sometimes people swing back.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#517

Post by jdgoesmarching » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #240

superkuh wrote: post #21

I am amazed at how cloudflare has turned around and become a reputable, reliable company re: arbitrary breaches of contract based on the CEO's personal opinions. After he breached contract with the Daily Stormer because of "a bad mood" I was sure it'd just devolve into a no-holds barred censorship-fest. Instead he's managing to hold the line against all of the authoritarians and individuals wanting to rip each other…

The people who are against CloudFlare supporting authoritarian terorrists... are authoritarians. Got it.

Leave it to HN to prioritize this weird bastardized philosophical theory of free speech over actual people who have been harassed, doxxed, and driven to suicide. This isn’t even a case of “simple” hate speech which this community views as morally gray, it’s straight up harassment and violence.

It doesn’t help that the focus of these harassment campaigns are people that right wing tech types have little sympathy for, but this thread is one of the more ridiculous examples of how much “free speech” has become an infallible ideology that must be defended regardless of who it hurts, or kills in this case.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#518

Post by foldr » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

afiori wrote: post #351

hooverd wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to decide what is "political", too.

Topics that cause disagreements not related to the job can be classified as personal and/or political. We should not take X as client, they are bad -> political We should not take X as client, my ex work there -> political We should not take X as client, they are unreliable with payments -> not political We should not take X as client, clients W, Y, and Z will drop us -> not political

Those principles could lead to taking on some really awful clients, though. Think of e.g. companies like IBM that provided support to organizations engaged in genocide.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#519

Post by noptd » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

phillipcarter wrote: post #500

xdennis wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not a free speech issue. Please be precise with your terminology. Let me take a stab in the dark: you think "free speech" refers only to the United States' First Amendment, and not a universal principle, which: * according to Wikipedia, is "a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction"…

You're shifting goalposts.

No, you need to be more precise in your wording if you're not getting your intended message across.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#520

Post by phillipcarter » Wed, Aug 31, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

DoctorOW wrote: post #486

splitrocket wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% concur. Illinois has to allow the Nazis to march: they are the government. You don't have to allow nazis into your private party, nor do you have to publish their books. You, as an individual, and corporations as entities are emphatically not the government.

But see this is where I get tripped up. I don't think laws should dictate morality. So barring the fact that it's the way the law is written in the United States. Why is Illinois morally required to protect speech and Cloudflare, who almost certainly has far greater control (theoretically) over speech not?

This is fast approaching the whole, "why is anyone morally required to do anything?" sort of existential discussion.

The US Government has laws in place like this because those were written as founding principles and interpreted in certain ways by our legal system over time. That's only it. But it's all calvinball in the end. Congress could strike the 1A from the constitution, or all our courts could start ruling against the 1A tomorrow. We're just making it up as we go. Now this would likely result in a mass uprising, but that's besides the point.

The only reason why this is a thing right now is because CloudFlare(a) is in a position to stop digital protection of Kiwi Farms (and thus force them to fully own the consequences of their speech), and (b) has explicitly chosen not to do anything about it, much to the chagrin of myself and a whole lot of other people. My belief, as is the belief of others, is that Kiwi Farms are violating their TOS and should be removed. That's it. CloudFlare, like Calvin when playing Calvinball, is deciding to make it up as they go, and we aren't happy about that.