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Blocking Kiwifarms

blog.cloudflare.com

671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#671
post #652

I've followed this story loosely here from HN posts, but does anyone have a blog/TL:DR post around the chain of events that are discussed in this post? (the early events the bubbled this up to ppls attention, and then the new imminent threats?)

The wikipedia page was actually pretty informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#672
post #53

Cloudflare can do whatever it wants but I wish they were honest about it. The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. If anything the owner has been monitoring the thread more proactively and making sure people follow the law. This is included not allowing the creation of new accounts and reminding everyone that their data will be turned over to the authorities should it…

> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person. They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence. Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invite…

I have the same information, unless CF pays someone to lurk the Farms more than I do. Unlikely. This is a pretext plain and simple. Prince is full of it. There was one fedpost and it was taken down. It happens. There's no machine learning algo scanning new comments to see if they sound like plausible threats.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#673
post #142
post #41

>The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy. >have our cake and eat it too. I don't get this corporate reverse speak. They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday and then plainly say "But this violation of that policy doesn't reflect on our policies overall." I get that Kiwifarms is hated, that doesn't make black turn to white and up turn to down. Cloudflare reneged on everything the…

>It looks like it's time for a government to step in with over-sight Which government on Earth is going to enforce a principle of neutrality instead of its own particular censorship agenda?

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Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#674
post #651

Technical question: Cloudflare says they are currently intercepting requests for Kiwifarms and redirecting them to the linked blog post. What does Kiwifarms need to do to remove their dependency on Cloudflare and make their forum visible again [edit: at the original address]? Can they do it unilaterally by changing an DNS address and waiting for it to propagate? Or do they need Cloudflare's cooperation?

When you set up a Cloudflare account, you tell your domain provider (Namecheap, Godaddy, Google etc.) that you want Cloudflare to have complete control over your domain by setting the domain's nameservers to Cloudflare's.

If you want to get off of Cloudflare, you just go to your domain registrar and set your nameservers to some other DNS host, whether it be DDOS-Guard (which is what kiwifarms did with their .ru domain), the domain registrar's own, or any other. It will take a bit to propagate but should be pretty quick. Of course if you bought your domain on Cloudflare you may be kind of screwed, but I don't think that was so in this case.

EDIT: It was https://who.is/whois/kiwifarms.net so they might be screwed. Depends on if Cloudflare still lets them access the dashboard and transfer the domain to another registrar.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#675
post #654

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't trust any screenshot coming out of Kiwifarms since I've seen an edited screenshot tweeted with 10 thousand likes from a (now suspended) popular KF user.

You could only see it if you know what to look out for, there was a masking error on the overlayed image in one corner. And the tweet's text was most likely edited with dev tools.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#676

They muffed it. They were proving to the world how reliable they could be and repairing the damage from the Stormfront debacle, and again they just showed how prone to caving to pressure they can be. What a joke. I will never use CF for anything I want kept online in the face of angry people.

It blows my mind that someone would judge a company for not hosting a literal neonazi website.

[deleted]

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides. When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they eng…

He's been taken to court around 7 times. It's almost as if he didn't break the law, and people just think he must of because it be so nasty!

This is the same argument made by anti-free speech people defending companies that censor/deplatform.

Something can be legal and wrong. Sometimes the law is out of date with reality.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#678

I think a lot of people in the comments don't understand what Kiwifarms is. I say this as someone who occasionally browses there and gets some (admittedly sick) enjoyment from it: the main draw of the website is a place for people to get together and bully mentally ill "weirdos". It's not just about people posting offensive shit in their own little corner of the internet - what happens there spreads out, by design, i…

Is it like libsoftiktok?

[deleted]

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#679
post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>rather than free speech i encourage anybody who is calls themselves a "free speech advocate" to consider what kiwifarms has been doing to "free speech". their intimidation campaigns have been doing a lot more to harm the cause of free speech than this decision by cloudflare is. if you really believe in free speech, you understand that trans people deserve free speech too, and kiwifarms harrasment campaigns have been…

Free speech is about giving people the freedom to say things I find disgusting. It's about giving each individual the choice to listen to what ever influence they wish. It takes the the power of ideas and elevates them above physical force.

Free speech isn't speech without consequences. All that the first amendment protects is government making laws restricting free speech, but if you're a customer and you're doing shit that I don't agree with, I have every right to boot you from my platform. I don't have to stand idly by and not take action.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#680
post #344

Well I run a service with 100 million registered users and this is why we don't use Cloudflare. We use VeriSign BGP DDoS mitigation which is more expensive than Cloudflare (about 27k per year with our traffic) but i don't have the luxury of losing the business on a Saturday afternoon on a whim of an anonymous Cloudflare censor, their lawyer or even his Majesty Matthew Prince Himself making a preemptive liability deci…

I think a downside of their CEO & C-level spending so much time on Twitter and HN (spending any time there at all is already "a lot" for C-suite) is that they might overestimate the size and importance of social media mobs. Practically every hashtag is botted these days, especially ones people feel passionate about.

The crux is that even if IT decisionmakers have become more left-wing and pro-top-down-control, they're still very unlikely to ever pick Cloudflare even after they complied. Best solution is to ignore.

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