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Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

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Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#561

Post by CharlesW »

Georgelemental wrote: post #531
phillipcarter wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Large corporations policing free speech Let me stop you right there. This is not a free speech issue. Please be precise with your terminology.

It is a free speech issue. It is not a First Amendment (or equivalent in non-US jurisdictions) issue. Legal provisions that protect speech from government interference provide a minimum level of free expression; in a health society private citizens and organizations will generally go above and beyond that minimum.

Just a reminder that (lowercase) "free speech" always has a giant fucking asterisk after it. It has never been, and will never be, absolute.

"Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, hate speech, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Additionally, private companies can always throw you off their platform for any reason. No shirt, no shoes, no service.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#562

Post by snowwrestler »

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?

Illinois is not morally required to protect speech. They are prevented from using government powers to restrict or punish speech.

If counter protestors show up and shout over the Nazis, Illinois is not morally required to silence the counter protestors so the Nazis can speak.

And if Nazis want to gather on private land, Illinois is not morally required to force the private landowner to permit that.

The morality of equality is compromised by the practical execution of law. It’s legal for a cop to pull a gun and force you to the ground; it’s not legal for you to do that to me (or vice versa). So we place constraints on when the government can apply those special powers.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#563

Post by tambourine_man »

bakugo wrote: post #536
tambourine_man wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Isn't it, though? I see people are still desperately clinging to this "websites aren't public services" narrative but as the years go by it's becoming increasingly clear that it just isn't entirely true. The whole logic behind the "it's a private space/service so they can deny service to whoever they want" argument is that, if a user is denied service, they can seek service from…

> Isn't it, though?

Nope. Do we elect the board? Do they charge mandatory taxes in the currency only they can emit and will they have an armed force arest you if you don't pay?

> But this isn't really the case in the modern web because you often don't have alternatives.

Facebook and Google really are a monopoly in the West and that's a problem with must deal with. Cloudflare, thankfully, is far from being a monopoly anywhere but in our tech bubble.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#564

Post by pseudalopex »

tomrod wrote: post #434
pseudalopex wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Cloudflare a government service? Do local fire departments remove copyright infringers' sheds?

It's a platform of services like a government service is typically provisioned. While not a democratically elected government, they use governance all the same.

> It's a platform of services like a government service is typically provisioned.

It's a monopoly funded by taxes obligated to serve everyone?

> While not a democratically elected government, they use governance all the same.

This is meaningless.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#565

Post by colechristensen »

helloworld97 wrote: post #560
colechristensen wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is effectively mob rule, or fear-of-mob-rule rule. I don't want dominating corporations to be run by people afraid of offending a vocal minority.

Who decides what's a minority?

By "vocal minority" I mean a small but loud group, the literal definition of minority not the social justice sense of some oppressed group.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#566

Post by schleck8 »

tedivm wrote: post #556
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…

Cloudflare has always hidden behind this stance as a way to justify doing awful things. When I worked at Malwarebytes we had regular issues with malware being hosted on Cloudflare. Now I don't mean like "hey download this file so you can learn"- that kind of thing we fully supported. I mean that these files were being explicitly used in drive by exploit attacks- if a user with a vulnerable browser went to the wrong w…

This entire 'freedom of speech' absolutism bullshit is so incoherent.

They host and protect a website only dedicated to muzzling people the userbase disagrees with...

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#567

Post by BryantD »

vorpalhex wrote: post #543
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 you as a private individual or company can choose to hold the right to free speech in high regard.

I hold it in such high regard that I have considered the question of whether or not Kiwifarms inhibits free speech.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#568

Post by splitrocket »

vorpalhex wrote: post #543
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 you as a private individual or company can choose to hold the right to free speech in high regard.

Yup. And if your choice is pro-nazi, the rest of us can decide for ourselves what that means about you.

For what it's worth, you can't be just a little bit Nazi.

It's like poop in ice cream: if you have ten tons of ice cream and an ounce of poop, if you mix them together, you've just created ten tons of poop.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#569

Post by tambourine_man »

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…

To be clear, I think Cloudflare should take the offending site down because it is, IMO, the right thing to do.

Just don't justify whatever decision you make by conflating public and private services.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#570

Post by aa9a0s9dsljk »

JYellensFuckboy wrote: post #167
driverdan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KF actively pushes people to commit suicide. People have died because of them.

Is this in fact the case? Of course it is being claimed, but I always perceived that KF's nastiness was relatively self-contained, e.g. when someone encourages suicide, it's performative to other Farmers, rather than reaching out to a potential victim or their loved ones. All bark, no bite, and caged.

The current push for cloudflare to unlist kiwifarms is in response to a well known twitch streamer's attempted killing via swatting. They literally had to leave the country (canada), and the new address was found, and they were swatted again.

https://globalnews.ca/news/9097654/twitch-streamer-and-trans...

Their "nastiness" (suggestion: terrorism) is never self contained. I know several people who've been doxxed on there - every single person had to move and change their legal name. If a thread on someone in KF is active, they will find every member of your family, your workplace, friends and loved ones. Then if they find your friends are "degenerates", they will doxx them too, and all their family workplace friends and loved ones.

The fucking point of the site is harassment - they post ADDRESSES and PHONE NUMBERS, why would those ever be allowed if it was supposed to be self-contained?

Here is the how the southern poverty law center describes Kiwifarms:

> KiwiFarms – a forum with roots in 4Chan culture that has become notorious for engaging in extreme trolling, harassment, and even stalking

Source: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou...

Throwaway because its not safe to post on my primary account about them while kiwifarms is allowed to operate.

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