Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

141–150 of 1001 posts

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

#141
post #78

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…

> Post enough slurs about queer people and somehow the harrasment happens without anyone having been explicitly told to do it. Post enough slurs about Muslims and someone will eventually shoot up a mosque in New Zealand.

They'd do that anyway.

Personally, as a gay woman, I prefer letting people say slurs because then I know who to avoid. (Which isn't to say that I think services/people can't set their own rules - Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard are within their rights to drop KF as a customer). Stopping people from calling me a dyke or carpet-muncher doesn't make them not homophobic, it makes it harder for me to suss out who to avoid.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that a TOR service is easy to DDOS. Anyone know if that's true?

Tor services get DDOS’d all of the time - you generally have a single host somewhere that is the first hop in relaying traffic back to the service and that is easy to overwhelm. There is a hackish way to have several of those hosts but I think it tops out at a dozen. You lose a lot of audience going to Tor so might not be worth it.

32 hosts officially but there are ways of protecting onion websites (caching reverse proxies with some sort of challenge) that protects drug market places that have governments trying to DDOS them offline. Not to mention that Tor has been working on anti-DDOS (From what I remember that will be based on proof-of-work) which will massively increase the cost of DDOS attacks against hidden services.

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

#143

I personally have never seen any content on Kiwifarms that would lead to statements as we saw the other day from Cloudflare. It is a place where people say some horrible stuff, but I think 4chan is worse (including CSAM) and they are protected by Cloudflare as far as I know. I don't know much about the people who post there, other than that they say some nasty things. I have also seen such content on Facebook and Twi…

The difference is probably that KF mocks individuals in easy to locate and follow threads. 4-Chan's set up is just too chaotic; proving that 4-Chan is going after a specific person would be...difficult. KF organizes its mocking into easily discoverable forums and threads, which makes it easy for the individuals in question to find all the nastiness.

Finding ANYTHING with any kind of historical evidence on 4-Chan is difficult. The thousand+ posts about keffals are all collected together where she and others can read them all at once, which also contributes to making it look 'worse'.

A haystack may have more needles in it than a sewing kit, but you KNOW which ones are in the sewing kit.

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

#144
post #143

I personally have never seen any content on Kiwifarms that would lead to statements as we saw the other day from Cloudflare. It is a place where people say some horrible stuff, but I think 4chan is worse (including CSAM) and they are protected by Cloudflare as far as I know. I don't know much about the people who post there, other than that they say some nasty things. I have also seen such content on Facebook and Twi…

The difference is probably that KF mocks individuals in easy to locate and follow threads. 4-Chan's set up is just too chaotic; proving that 4-Chan is going after a specific person would be...difficult. KF organizes its mocking into easily discoverable forums and threads, which makes it easy for the individuals in question to find all the nastiness. Finding ANYTHING with any kind of historical evidence on 4-Chan is d…

I agree with this. I think the aging-off process on the 4chan boards has probably protected it from a lot of heat. The heinous stuff will be gone and forgotten in a few days but any comments on Kiwifarms remain forever.

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor services get DDOS’d all of the time - you generally have a single host somewhere that is the first hop in relaying traffic back to the service and that is easy to overwhelm. There is a hackish way to have several of those hosts but I think it tops out at a dozen. You lose a lot of audience going to Tor so might not be worth it.

No, that's not true. The first hop (last from the service's PoV) is basically randomly selected. Unless you restrict it, there will be thousands of possible IPs.

Each hidden service has its own circuits to the Tor network. You can't their side of the connection.

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you agree that Daily Stormer should not have been banned? They were created to opine about white ethno-nationalism, etc. and not to target or doxx or harass specific people. Is your line moving now?

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

#147

The thing is, it's hard to feel bad for kiwifarms. They seem to be one of the worst sites there are. But freedom of speech/expression/opinions aren't about defending those who speech/expression/opinions you like but all of them. Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it's hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and…

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...

[deleted]

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

#148
post #28

Real principled stance there from their CEO - 3 days to totally flip-flop? I mean, if your stance is we will ban content we arbitrarily find bad then just state it as such. Put into your agreement terms precisely what is and isn’t allowed. Be consistent. This “conflicted” act makes them look weak and of questionable leadership. Either take a principled stance on speech or put into your terms how you censor speech.

My headcanon is that Price wanted to take a stand, but the legal team actually took a better look at the situation because of the pressure and had a long meeting, explaining to him why it's a really bad idea. I hope we learn what really happened in a few years. Reason: twice I sent messages directly to appropriate teams at (large-companies) with something like "are you aware of what your ceo is doing at (link)" which…

Legal? I think you mean PR team. They realized it would have an impact on income. There was obviously no legal issue.

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

#150
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the speech that people are objecting to, it's the part where they get people killed.

Quoted post unavailable.

Doxxing to facilitate swatting is attempted murder. They aren't unearthing this information because they're devoted archivists; they operate within a broader culture of harassment, and when one considers the modern arsenal of digital harassment that's enabled via doxxing, the SWAT team is front and center.
Post reply on HN