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Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

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Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#151

Post by costco »

lxgr wrote: post #104
mobilemidget wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of shady websites hiding behind cloudflare's services. Some used .tk domains too but just in general, many shady websites are hiding behind Cloudflare and at least I know from personal experience if you contact cloud flare about it, they pretend not to be home. "We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying…

Cloudflare is a US company. If they provide hosting (or reverse proxying; I don't think there's a material legal difference) services for anything illegal under US law, shouldn't it be possible to compel them to stop doing that through the legal system? And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of cont…

They can. You can also subpoena them for information on an account, there are literally lawyers with blogs talking about how to do this. The people complaining essentially think that they should have the right to take anything they want down with an abuse report.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#152

Post by Unfrozen0688 »

KomoD wrote: post #29
gadders wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've definitely refused to help far right sites and sites like Kiwi Farms.

Yeah, because of the pressure after it all blew up. They even said in their own blog post that it was an "extraordinary" decision and did not believe terminating them was appropriate. Kiwi Farms used their services for at least 6 years before anything happened.

[flagged]

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#153

Post by dingnuts »

diggan wrote: post #142
internetter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation. Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"

> Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law Isn't that somewhat of an oxymoron? What are some examples of something that is against the law but not handled by the courts of law?

Maybe that commentator lives in a country without common law, so precedent doesn't matter, but in a country like the US a law without precedent is considered "untried" and a lot of the details are worked out when the law is first enforced.

If the legislature doesn't like the court's interpretation, they can then amend the law and the process restarts.

So basically, at least in the US, nothing is clearly illegal until it is handled by a court -- so yes I think you're right

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#154

Post by toast0 »

Caligatio wrote: post #148
toast0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule of thumb is governments where Cloudflare has equipment, personel, or banking. There is a procedure to get a foreign case recognized in the US, too, but it has to be serious, and it's not an easy process.

CloudFlare has equipment in 120+ countries, including China: https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ I again ask: is it desirable for any of those countries to be able to unilaterally force a company to enforce its laws regardless of where the individual in question is?

If the equipment is in country X, it seems reasonable to enforce the rules of country X. Plenty of companies refuse to operate in specific countries, including China, because they don't want to follow rules of that country.

If CloudFlare chooses to do business in China, that's a choice they're making and it comes with consequences.

Maybe they can offer service where customers will only be served from equipment outside of China, maybe that's not something they choose.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#155

Post by jacurtis »

bastawhiz wrote: post #60

> The affected domains represent a big loss for Cloudflare, with .tk, .cf and .gq previously accounting for 23.1% of all domains hosted on its platform – and nearly all of these have now gone. I'm not sure in what way this is a "loss". I doubt cloudflare is losing money (or revenue) here. Especially if many of these domains are spammy, it seems like this is probably not much of anything for them.

This was my thought while reading this. Overall I think this is a net-win for CloudFlare. I suspect that exactly 0.00% of the 12.6 million domains they just "lost" were paying customers. Considering the people didn't want to pay for a domain, they probably weren't paying for a CDN either.

I'm sure Cloudflare will be able to wipe away their tears of this loss using the extra dollar bills they have from reducing their bandwidth costs.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#157

Post by umbra07 »

Unfrozen0688 wrote: post #150
jesprenj wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember this. I started using TK domains as a kid in 2017 and you set your own nameserver records and they didn't serve ads.

>kid >2017 fucking hell

I know right! I feel so young.

there are people on this site that were born in the previous millennium! :O

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#158

Post by stef25 »

xeromal wrote: post #68
thangngoc89 wrote: post #2

Unrelated to the article but seeing .tk brings back many memories. As a kid without a bank account let's alone an international credit card (VISA/Mastercard), dot.tk is the only way to put a website online with your name. I created countless of websites with .tk for classmates, school and families.

I remember in the early 90s telling Mom that I built my own website. Mom was like noway that's impossible. I can't remember exactly where it was but it was like zoogatyler1.go.com or something. I think it was owned by Disney? I must have been around 7 or 8 but I remember being so excited. I think it was more of a homepage than anything. I started delving into those .tk sites when I was around 11 or 12 probably.

I launched one on a compuserve domain (I think) around the same time. Built it with FrontPage Express that came for free on a cd with a magazine my dad bought. Day after I launched it I had like 20 emails from random people with questions & comments about the site, crazy. Build it and they will come was def a thing.

Later on in the UK I put a site on a madasafish domain.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#159

Post by stef25 »

lxgr wrote: post #104
mobilemidget wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of shady websites hiding behind cloudflare's services. Some used .tk domains too but just in general, many shady websites are hiding behind Cloudflare and at least I know from personal experience if you contact cloud flare about it, they pretend not to be home. "We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying…

Cloudflare is a US company. If they provide hosting (or reverse proxying; I don't think there's a material legal difference) services for anything illegal under US law, shouldn't it be possible to compel them to stop doing that through the legal system? And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of cont…

A while back there was an interview with someone at Cloudflare and they were asked what about these Al Qaeda sites you guys are in front of, dude just answered "no comment". Seems that at the time they didn't ask many questions at all, like you said cause they don't want to go in to content moderation.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#160

Post by stef25 »

AlienRobot wrote: post #50
overstay8930 wrote: post #18

The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it doesn’t like. You can’t win with these people, I personally think this is the best outcome and shows our systems work (albeit slowly). Sure it took a while, but now there doesn’t have to be a precedent of Cloudflare acting as the internet police more than it…

This seems like such a weird problem to me. If they're criminals, just send the cops? If you can't send the cops, then they aren't criminals? How do you end up in this limbo where you need critical infrastructure to play judge?

Who you going to send to an online pharmacy hosted say in Egypt?
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