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Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

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Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#71

Post by rolandog »

tensor wrote: post #60
john_strinlai wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cloudflare is not hosting the infrastructure doing the actual attacks. the attack is coming from residential proxy servers, not from the webpage being hosted by cloudflare, which is just a marketing page and a login portal. that clause is not really applicable. in any case, its not a question of whether cloudflare can remove a website. of course they can, for whatever reason they want. its a question of whether we wa…

[flagged]

I think you may have missed the forest for the trees; the concern is about the slippery slope that may lead to a for-profit company (also the risk in case it's non-profit; see OpenAI shenanigans) controlling what content you can read, what operating systems you can download, etc... and the fear is about protection rackets leading us to being stuck with a monopoly or an oligopoly at best that enforce that censorship.

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#72

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #58
idle_zealot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like one of those cases where you need to assign responsibilities and obligations to those enabling the damage, even if their offerings also enable a lot of good. If you have the capacity to offer cheap/free VPS, then you also need to cover the cost of protecting against the DDoS attacks that service enables. You don't get to offload that burden on to the victims. If that makes your VPS offerings more expe…

So if your kid downloaded a shady app, and it turned out that app had some residential VPN SDK, are you on the hook too? Does it stop at DDoS attacks? If it turned out they were scraping linkedin, can they sue you for a thousands of dollars of "harm" that you enabled?

[deleted]

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#73

Post by dogleash »

john_strinlai wrote: post #51

people will always be able to pick a handful of sites they think shouldnt be allowed to use cloudflare hosting services. the problem is that every person will have a different handful of sites. cloudflare should host everything and anything unless and until a lawful order is received. if they start sticking their fingers into sites and determining whether the site's content is "appropriate" or whatever, based on some…

>if they start sticking their fingers into sites and determining whether the site's content is "appropriate" or whatever

They already pick and choose. They have not decided to sit outside of it. Any claim about them not getting involved should be read as tacit approval. Because we know they will drop users they sufficiently disapprove of.

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#74

Post by hdgvhicv »

peanut-walrus wrote: post #62

Articles like these seem to hold a weird belief that Cloudflare does not react to security reports or legal orders? From my experience, they react appropriately and relatively quickly compared to rest of the industry. Could Cloudflare be more proactive or add more friction to their signups? Yes, probably, but the reasons they have outlined for not playing internet police make sense to me. I don't think it should be a…

I don’t think it should be a requirement to talk to cloudflare at all to host content on the internet. I certainly don’t.

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#75

Post by rini17 »

john_strinlai wrote: post #63
tensor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> We already live a world where your service is terminated for illegal activity. Of course we want it, how is this even a question? you are misunderstanding me, but im not sure if you are doing it on purpose. if they receive a lawful order of course they should oblige. and without a lawful order they should not make content-based decisions on what to host. > The mental loops people in these comments are using to supp…

Your account can get terminated for any other random nonsense though. Happens all the time, with cloudflare, google, github, everywhere. Everyone just pretends that "this can't happen to me". You want cyberspace free from any "evil" state jurisdiction, nor "coddling" so this is what you get.

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#76

Post by tensor »

john_strinlai wrote: post #63
tensor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> We already live a world where your service is terminated for illegal activity. Of course we want it, how is this even a question? you are misunderstanding me, but im not sure if you are doing it on purpose. if they receive a lawful order of course they should oblige. and without a lawful order they should not make content-based decisions on what to host. > The mental loops people in these comments are using to supp…

> if they receive a lawful order of course they should oblige. and without a lawful order they should not make content-based decisions on what to host.

You are ignorant of the law. You cannot host user content without being required to police it for at a minimum things like child porn.

But this is also not a remotely ambiguous case. Any normal service would instantly terminate a client account if the client is blatantly and openly advertising their service to disrupt the business. This is not some "slippery slope grey area" where maybe they are breaking the law but who knows. They have a website that says "Here is our service to disrupt cloudflare." It's as black and white as you can get and any normal service would instantly terminate them as soon as they became aware.

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#77

Post by TomatoCo »

collingreen wrote: post #70
gruez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if your kid downloaded a shady app, and it turned out that app had some residential VPN SDK, are you on the hook too? Does it stop at DDoS attacks? If it turned out they were scraping linkedin, can they sue you for a thousands of dollars of "harm" that you enabled?

Seems petty clear the intent of the post you are replying to isn't to hold random parents accountable for thousands and instead to hold app developers (add maybe too open app marketplaces) accountable for malicious app behavior

This road seems to lead to the exclusion of third party app stores and/or the ability to load apps that aren't signed by Google/Apple.

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#78

Post by somewhatgoated »

john_strinlai wrote: post #51

people will always be able to pick a handful of sites they think shouldnt be allowed to use cloudflare hosting services. the problem is that every person will have a different handful of sites. cloudflare should host everything and anything unless and until a lawful order is received. if they start sticking their fingers into sites and determining whether the site's content is "appropriate" or whatever, based on some…

One of the few reasonable comments on this thread.

I don’t see how cloudflare could have prevented this at all. Even if they took down the info site of the attackers they could just host it on GitHub pages, or a million other free static site hosters.

Zero evidence that cloudflare actually enabled the attack itself from what I can tell.

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#79

Post by tensor »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #68
tensor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No. You want it because you are shortsighted. Others don't want that. If it is illegal, go and sue.

You don't sue for criminal activity, the police come and collect you and you go to jail.

Re: Can someone please explain whether Cloudflare blackmailed Canonical?

#80

Post by john_strinlai »

rini17 wrote: post #75
john_strinlai wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already live a world where your service is terminated for illegal activity. Of course we want it, how is this even a question? you are misunderstanding me, but im not sure if you are doing it on purpose. if they receive a lawful order of course they should oblige. and without a lawful order they should not make content-based decisions on what to host. > The mental loops people in these comments are using to supp…

Your account can get terminated for any other random nonsense though. Happens all the time, with cloudflare, google, github, everywhere. Everyone just pretends that "this can't happen to me". You want cyberspace free from any "evil" state jurisdiction, nor "coddling" so this is what you get.

was this meant as a reply to someone else?
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