Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service • Hacker News Board

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#131

Post by DFHippie » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:51 PM UTC

This, I think, is a useful perspective for all those here talking about free speech:

https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/kiwi-farms-cloudlfare-a...

The point is that if you're using your speech to silence people, not by disproving their arguments but through terror and the destruction of their reputation and social network, when you silence people by lying about them, your speech is a threat to free speech.

By protecting sites whose purpose is to silence particular individuals through lies and threats you are reducing free speech. This is a case where you have to choose which speech to protect. They are in conflict. And the site you might defend is not the one making a good faith use of the freedom you wish to protect.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#132

Post by fullstop » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:54 PM UTC

concordDance wrote: post #126

fullstop wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not here to define hate speech, and I think that you'd agree that HN was not designed to encourage and promote hate speech. You absolutely can not say the same thing of Kiwifarms. Let's not be deliberately obtuse here.

Depends on what you mean by "hate speech". It's a literally Orwellian term designed to be bad but not specific.

In this case, the entire forum was created to target and harass a specific person. From there it evolved to target and harass specific people / communities.

As I said in my initial response, we all have a line in the sand that we draw. For me, Kiwifarms crosses that line.

Maybe you're okay with a website dedicated to harassing and doxxing specific people. I am not.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#133

Post by concordDance » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 1:54 PM UTC

noasaservice wrote: post #97

concordDance wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I treat these sites as cannaries. As long as they exist I can be confident that censorship isn't too bad, as they start to get shut down I start to worry. First the came for the X and I was not an X etc etc...

[flagged]

I think you're being gullible here. Look at what was actually on that site and the many others that have been shut down rather than relying on reports from their enemies (oh wait, the whole point is to make it so you can't do this).

When this hit Hacker news I actually went onto kiwifarms to find out what it was like because I suspected it would be killed soon. The descriptions given by most hackernews commentators did not match the reality. Don't get me wrong, they say awful stuff, but I saw no organised harassment, doxing, brigading or indeed any attempts to get things to happen outside the site and I checked dozens of threads.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#134

Post by concordDance » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #78

concordDance wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment.

> Have you actually browsed them? When this thing hit the front page of HN I checked it out and while they say a lot of nasty stuff about people there I couldn't find an occurrence of organising online or offline harassment. That is the organizing of harassment. That's what it looks like. People are very rarely dumb enough to post "I think we should commit a crime, who's with me" on the Internet. Post enough slurs ab…

Stochastic terrorism style?

Problem with this line of thinking is it generalises very well. E.g. talk enough about the evil things the USA does in the Middle East and eventually someone will fly a plane into some towers. Should we stop letting people say bad things about the USA?

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#135

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

flumpcakes wrote: post #127

washadjeffmad wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incitement as a tactic doesn't require a direct call to action. When someone manufactures an ideological enemy, describes a reason they are intolerable, gives others the language and the arguments to convince others, and in turn foments the making of a mob, then each euphemistically independent actor is doing so with the tacit support and blessing of a power group. Does it make a difference to you whether it's happen…

Didn't Trump directly say "we shall march to the capital"? If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example. I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrib…

> I'm not being sarcastic, these sites are much worse for a far greater number of people than Kiwifarms.

Entirely seriously in reply: yes, they are a very big problem. Just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it's not incitement. A particular author for The Times had her views cited by at least two famous mass shooters in their manifesto. But the fight has to be fought at the margins, against the most extreme examples first.

> If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic.

Not exactly. It's "dehumanization": constantly hearing/reading that some group of people are inferior and/or dangerous makes it much easier to commit crimes against them. There's a whole literature of study into this from people asking "how did the holocaust happen", eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

> Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example.

This is a US-specific problem and has US-specific problems. There are particular forms of US politics that are (a) incitement to violence and (b) entirely "mainstream" and "legitimate". That's why the US has a mass shooting problem over and above countries with comparable levels of other crime or gun ownership.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#136

Post by Krisando » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

prvit wrote: post #74

Krisando wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can DDoS TOR it self, but not a specific service easily.

Complete nonsense. You can easily DoS a specific service by flooding it with rendezvous requests.

As I understand, KF have been under attack for quite some time including employing techniques here discussed on this post.

https://blog.torproject.org/cooking-onions-reclaiming-onionb...

If it was easy, I wouldn't expect them to still be online on TOR after all this time.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#137

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:04 PM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #123

Borgz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if they decide to become platforms exclusively dedicated to harrassment, stop prohibiting and removing that type of content, and actively encourage it. Until then, it doesn't seem likely.

Reminder: a 13 year old minor survivor begged Twitter to remove a video sexually exploiting him. Twitter reviewed the content and said NO. They had his government ID showing that he was a minor at the time. The video had over 160k views. Over 2k retweets.

This was also wrong of them.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#138

Post by prvit » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

Krisando wrote: post #136

prvit wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete nonsense. You can easily DoS a specific service by flooding it with rendezvous requests.

As I understand, KF have been under attack for quite some time including employing techniques here discussed on this post. https://blog.torproject.org/cooking-onions-reclaiming-onionb... If it was easy, I wouldn't expect them to still be online on TOR after all this time.

Onionbalance doesn’t solve anything, the attack remains asymmetric so you’ll have to spend significantly more on hardware than the attacker is.

> If it was easy, I wouldn't expect them to still be online on TOR after all this time.

You seriously overestimate how many people care enough to DDoS kiwifarms.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#139

Post by bombcar » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

flumpcakes wrote: post #127

washadjeffmad wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incitement as a tactic doesn't require a direct call to action. When someone manufactures an ideological enemy, describes a reason they are intolerable, gives others the language and the arguments to convince others, and in turn foments the making of a mob, then each euphemistically independent actor is doing so with the tacit support and blessing of a power group. Does it make a difference to you whether it's happen…

Didn't Trump directly say "we shall march to the capital"? If we are going for the stochastic terrorism angle I don't know where to draw the line, as anything could incite some unhinged lunatic. Look at the 200+ school shootings in the US as an example. I have seen more attempts to get a group of people do something against Kiwifarms than I have seen on that site to do something to other people. They just have horrib…

It’s unlikely the GDPR applies to a US company. And in the US it’s hard to get “facts” removed (otherwise people could remove their bad credit scores by claiming it as PII against the credit bureaus themselves).

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#140

Post by Mezzie » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

flumpcakes wrote: post #111

_dain_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm not sure on all of your claims, and frankly I can't be bothered to get any more into this drama but I will say one thing: I found it shocking that the person behind the dropkiwifarms campaign does openly say they are making home-made drugs, and proudly say they will organise for children to take it without parental consent. I'm sure this must be illegal? This is entirely ignored in all reporting of the Cloudflare…

> I found it shocking that the person behind the dropkiwifarms campaign does openly say they are making home-made drugs, and proudly say they will organise for children to take it without parental consent. I'm sure this must be illegal?

It is. She's distributing controlled substances/substances that require a prescription. Essentially she's practicing medicine without a license. This would be true even if she were helping adults.