Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

Post by sophacles » Mon, May 11, 2026, 7:07 PM UTC

mjd wrote: post #11

jpereira wrote: post #6

This is insanely dumb. Cloudflare is providing free hosting services, not materially supporting the attacker. You can argue that cloudflare needs to be better, or adopt different values towards, taking down sites they host, but this organization could absolutely just serve elsewhere (or just advertise their services over telegram or the like). Maybe there is a point to be made about monopoly power in hosting and ddos…

It's not dumb. There's a conflict of interest.

Post by bayindirh » Mon, May 11, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

PcChip wrote: post #17

I always assumed ubuntu was brought down to prevent ubuntu servers from patching copy.fail, so that hacking group could exploit as many targets during that time as possible

Post by altairprime » Mon, May 11, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

AntiUSAbah wrote: post #18

Completly agree, cloudflare protects scammers on a huge scale and no one cares... All the faceshops I have reporeted to cloudflare, all these phising pages behind cloudflare I reported, never came down. None of them. For a company making billions, protecting people, they should take this stuff serious.

Post by idle_zealot » Mon, May 11, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

okanat wrote: post #21

wood_spirit wrote: post #16

The article puts it very succinctly: Cloudflare fronts attackers for free and bills the victims for relief. Ddos protection services can be cast as a digital protection racket where they have a perverse incentive to keep attackers attacking. “It's a dangerous internet out there; you'd better pay us to protect your website from the attackers using our free tier.” At the least, even if there is no active collusion or p…

The thing is, you can control a neighborhood, a country etc. from attackers and establish control over violence. How can we do that, if we would like to preserve relative anonymity and global nature of the internet? People can indeed form cooperatives to handle the protection, but this is hard to manage globally as an entity. DDoS protection is done by primarily having too much capacity to tank it and then filter it.…

Post by CrazyStat » Mon, May 11, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #10

gruez wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They protect (from legal consequence or even discovery) the attackers and host them on their infrastructure so they're untouchable Victims can't file a subpoena to get account details?

I've never tried a subpoena. I've tried reporting them to ICANN for whois abuse contact violations and never received a response (after I recieved a response from cloudflare saying, "Go away, we don't care, sign up for our services and pay us to care."). Perhaps I should set up a gofundme or something for the thousands of dollars needed to get justice via subpoena. If I were hosting illegal malicious actors doing thi…