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Blocking Kiwifarms

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#791

Post by skissane »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #760
eastdakota wrote: post #391

Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…

Quoted post unavailable.

Do you have any evidence to support your claims that Cloudflare donated money to Westboro Baptist Church? Unless you have good evidence, your claims are slander.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#792

Post by drewbug01 »

convery wrote: post #522
alfor wrote: post #404

What is kiwifarm? It think it should be the first paragraph.

LibsOfTiktok-esque forum that laughs at people being silly on the internet. Just archiving publicly available information.

> Just archiving publicly available information

…as part of coordinated, targeted harassment campaigns with the ultimate goal of forcing the targeted individuals to kill themselves.

I don’t know if you think calling it “just archiving publicly available information” is clever or something, but it’s incredibly transparent.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#793

Post by pseudo0 »

eastdakota wrote: post #391

Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…

How do you intend to generalize this case to other websites with user-generated content? Because the precedent set today is that a single threatening user-generated comment is enough to pull Cloudflare security services for the entire site, regardless of how quickly the website performs their own moderation, as long as it stays up long enough to be screenshotted and passed around on Twitter. That's basically carte blanche to deny service to any website with user generated content whenever you want.

Cloudflare's post the other day seemed like a very reasonable framework for making decisions on issues like this, but Cloudflare's actions today just severely undercut your credibility on this issue.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#794

Post by s_ting765 »

A shameful decision was made. It had to be justified obviously but still not any more or less terrible.

BTW Cloudflare is effectively hijacking kiwifarms.net by re-directing visitors to their blog page.

When government agencies bust websites associated with criminal activity the most they do after taking control of the homepage is put up a jpeg of the taskforce responsible and a few notes then call it day.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#795

Post by bombcar »

_vvaw wrote: post #731
_vvaw wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the actual threat? Was it posted on Kiwi Farms, or transmitted via another channel?

Kiwi Farms is back on an alternate domain. Posters in the Keffals thread believe the fake bomb threat was to blame for Cloudflare’s reaction. The account which made the post barely had any other activity on the site. The post itself was removed quickly by moderators. If it’s true that an obvious fake bomb threat which was swiftly removed was the cause for this action, Cloudflare has some hard explaining to do to its…

IF the above is true, it sounds more like a convenient excuse to do what you’ve wanted to do all along.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#796

Post by ripley12 »

c3534l wrote: post #426

I have to wonder if everyone calling this site a cess pool has actually visited it. It was, in general, more civil and better moderated than, say, Twitter or Reddit which regularly generate a circlejerk of hatred and violent rhetoric. The subject matter may be distasteful, but the website was not at all what you everyone seems to be making it out to be.

Are you for real? It takes 30s on KF to realize that the whole purpose is harassment. It has entire subforums targeting individuals. The quality of the moderation is not the issue here.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#797

Post by _-david-_ »

nematode_tech wrote: post #627
eastdakota wrote: post #391

Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…

Quoted post unavailable.

That is fine until your side ends up on the unsafe list.

Maybe you think if there is a place that is too critical to these marginalized groups that is unsafe and should be blocked. Ok, but then what happens when somebody who doesn't agree with you gets into the a position of power? They could easily say if you support trans then you are indoctrinating kids and that is unsafe and block all LGBT websites.

You are advocating for an arms race. Are you sure you can win?

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#798

Post by concordDance »

pornel wrote: post #655
wikitopian wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the Daily Stormer, it was free speech and you very clearly and directly made the incorrect call. I'm a big fan of your thoughtful speeches while you grapple with these sticky situations. But why not just invest some pocket change in helping solve TOR's name resolution problem so that removal from the clearnet isn't the death sentence it currently is? There's a simple and obvious solution to this which…

[flagged]

There are at least five orders of magnitude more people who are called Nazis than there are actual people who hold all the main Nazi ideals and beliefs today.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#799

Post by Nathanba »

concinds wrote: post #680
cft wrote: 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'r…

I agree, I think in his attempt to be overly transparent he's made himself a target for these social media mobs. At the end of the day he's a businessman and if his business' financial needs require it to shut websites down then that's unfortunate but that's life as a business. But to air out all their thoughts and deliberations makes them seem vulnerable to persuasion efforts.

I actually think the other half of the reason why Cloudflare became such a target is because of their 404 cloudflare site that displays when the origin host goes offline. It's essentially an ad for cloudflare, there is no technical need for them to show this. Only: if my site protected by akamai goes down, I dont believe my users will see that it was protected by akamai. It's just offline. The best protection cloudflare has is to stop making it so easy to see who is protected by them. In fact, they should even stop giving out information on who they are protecting and put it into their TOS that social media sites are not allowed to broadcast the fact that they are protected by cloudflare.

These would be practical steps to massively help Cloudflare mitigate further risks.

Re: Blocking Kiwifarms

#800

Post by mccorrinall »

eastdakota wrote: post #391

Reading over the comments I see everyone thinking this is about “free speech.” It is not. It’s about what in the US you’d call “due process” and in all the rest of the world you’d call “rule of law.” Our decision today was that the risk created by the content could not be dealt with in a timely enough matter by the traditional rule of law systems. That’s a failure of the rule of law on two dimensions: we shouldn’t be…

While I agree with you that the content on kiwifarms is not covered by free speech, you should not play law enforcement and wait for a court order instead.
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