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Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#891

Post by eastdakota »

bell-cot wrote: post #485

There must be a lot of times when Cloudflare's leaders wish that they were a janitorial supply company. Or a roofing firm. Or a ball bearings manufacturer. Or anything where there was ~zero public expectation that they would monitor and be "held responsible" for the business models, behaviors, and morals of the millions of people and organizations using their products & services.

No, these are hard and important issues. I trust our team to think them through and would never want to outsource or shirk that responsibility. Having what you do matter is the highest job satisfaction. We may not always get it right, but I’d never not want to be in the arena.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#892

Post by kodah »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #514
_ktx2 wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no DDoS that's minimally violent. You are right though, not all DDoS attacks are politically motivated.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#893

Post by didibus »

Kind of a side question, when did CDN services became rebranded as DDoS protection? I've never used Cloudflare because I wanted DDoS protection, though that's a nice side effect, but I normally use it to cache content and deliver the content to my users faster and without more costly hosting/DB reads.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#894

Post by didibus »

freeone3000 wrote: post #815
endtime wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule of law and due process are the best way of doing things, and are not exclusively American concepts.

Absolutely, but, Canadian law would absolutely allow illegally-collected evidence. The trial against the officer invading the defendant's privacy is a separate matter; the goal of a trial is to determine the truth of matters, after all, and if the defendant did kill someone, all evidence to support (or refute) that is generally admissible.

This makes so much more sense lol. I think this is a good example of people accepting certain things at face value and never stop to think about it.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#895

Post by afiori »

pjc50 wrote: post #702
afiori wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> We should not take X as client, clients W, Y, and Z will drop us -> not political "Why would they drop us?" "I'm sorry Dave, corporate code forbids me from discussing that"

Again, I am not advocating for anyone to follow this "solution" but you can discuss how Y does not want to be associated with X without discussing whether they are right or not to do so.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#896

Post by raxxorraxor »

Borgz wrote: post #79

It's rather disappointing that Cloudflare's policy is to not host content that is "illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public", but they do not apply that same policy to content that they provide DDoS mitigation services for. I don't see why their policies sh…

I think it is good that they stay neutral and I believe even banning the Daily Stormer from their infrastructure was a mistake. As they write themselves it immediately created expectations for other content to be removed. Yes, the difference here is arbitrary, in my opinion a host should stay neutral as well.

The Daily Stormer tried to unsuccessfully groom kids with cute comics. They could not have fallen any lower. An intervention here would not be required. A negative example is also an example you can learn from.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#897

Post by defen »

XorNot wrote: post #830
defen wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called fedposting and it's basically the message board version of what the FBI does to entrap Muslim terrorists and white supremacists IRL. The problem you're going to have with making it a crime is, where do you draw the line? If someone gets in front of a big crowd and says "Donald Trump is a fascist, he's the next Hitler", and then one of those people takes the matter into his own hands - do you think the…

The speaker is pretty obviously guilty of incitement to violence if they were inciting violence. Which my parody above is demonstrating pretty clearly. Now, is one incident sufficient cause? Probably not. What if I launched a sustained campaign across multiple media against that HN user? What if that user starts receiving harassment and death threats? I am running a sustained campaign of making specific, targeted ref…

If someone actually does something, then yes, they should be guilty of a crime. I don't think it's possible to come up with a definition of "stochastic terrorism" in the way that you want, which doesn't result in a massive curtailment of civil liberties. How many acts of speech are necessary to make it into a crime? How many listeners / readers?

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#898

Post by raxxorraxor »

skybrian wrote: post #786
rosmax_1337 wrote: post #210

I find the article hopeful for the future of free speech on the internet. Even though the ability to host content on the net is one thing and lacking access to most platforms (where the users actually are) like youtube, facebook, instagram, tiktok is another. The most important thing nowadays is access to the siloed user bases for people who try to express dissident opinions, not the access to the net as whole, even…

Companies have values because they are not machines. They are organizations of people, who do have values. (And sometimes even agree on them.) Also, you're decades out of date on shareholder capitalism. ESG is big now. Even the shareholders don't necessarily want to you to maximize profit.

ESG is primarily a mechanism for shareholders to get even more influence. This is not altruism. On the contrary, they leverage their financial advantages. Road to hell in my opinion.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#899

Post by HereIGoAgain »

LionTamer wrote: post #887
HereIGoAgain wrote: post #851

I'm going to keep this simple. The ToS nonsense and other things are distractions. The entire argument for "dropping" is pretty much as disingenuous as it gets. They aren't just essentially arguing but LITERALLY arguing that CF should drop a legal site because they don't like that site and CF's services keep the site from being ILLEGALLY DDOS'd off of the internet entirely. That IS the other side of this debate! "Sto…

Why do you think the law determines what is morally right?

Your aren't actually making the kind of point that you think you are.....

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#900

Post by dehugger »

Banana699 wrote: post #712
sealeck wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are exact type of customer who need DDOS protection the most. They (KiwiFarms, Daily Stormer) would be better not on the internet. > They've decided they want to be seen as a utility. This isn't how law works - just as you can't say "we don't have a banking license but we'd like to be seen as a bank and provide banking services" you can't say "we're not a utility but we'd like to be seen as one". Note that bei…

>They (KiwiFarms, Daily Stormer) would be better not on the internet. That's not for you to decide, you're not the manager of the internet.

Who decides then? Who is the manager of the Internet? Cloudflare?
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