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Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#181

Post by mjr00 »

Borgz wrote: post #172
mjr00 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess what? They do. FTA: > Our decision to disable access to content in hosting products fundamentally results in that content being taken offline, at least until it is republished elsewhere. Hosting products are subject to our Acceptable Hosting Policy. Under that policy, for these products, we may remove or disable access to content that we believe: [...] Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of ot…

This policy seems to only apply to content that they host. It appears that they don't intend to apply this policy to websites that they are only providing DDoS mitigation to, such as KiwiFarms. Whether Cloudflare is hosting the content or mitigating DDoS attacks against it, they bear some responsibility for the content being accessible. I see no good reason for them to have different policies between their hosting an…

> I think one easy thing they could do, is stop hosting for forums dedicated to doxxing and harassing people

> This policy seems to only apply to content that they host.

Yes, which is exactly what the parent commenter was saying.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#182

Post by bfgoodrich »

DoctorOW wrote: post #22

> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. > For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation…

No post body was provided.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#183

Post by wahnfrieden »

colpabar wrote: post #173
wahnfrieden wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police are also a reason the left need a strong gun culture (I mean we are talking about the same groups of people, police and right wing extremists, terrorist groups, white supremacist gangs etc). BP didn’t go far enough and were hamstrung by lack of support from the left due to racial division within working class and those in poverty

Good thing the left is so supportive of the working class now lol

It’s bad as ever, I’m not suggesting we’ve reversed those divisions. And now the left have gained an anti-gun stance on top of it, and in typical liberal fashion, have started with giving up their own individual gun ownership before addressing ownership at large in society

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#184

Post by thematrixturtle »

phillipcarter wrote: post #127
throwayyy479087 wrote: post #35

Never thought I'd see the Left trying to weaponize corporations to suppress speech they dislike. Reminds me a LOT of Evangelicals in the 2000s - I know that comparison has been made frequently but that's the last group that made a serious censorship push. I wonder how all of this will end? I support CloudFlare here - they should act as a utility, not as an arbiter of content. This ends poorly and one day will bite th…

> I support ButtFlare here - they should act as a utility, not as an arbiter of content. So then advocate for them to actually be a utility. Right now they get to benefit from being treated like one, but not being held to the same legal standard of an actual utility.

Left your cloud2butt extension on by any chance?

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#185

Post by cowtools »

Pxtl wrote: post #103
tekla wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I support free speech except the things that I don't like"

Free speech does not cover defamation.

Interesting. I typed up a comment that mentioned the name of the person co-ordonating the DDoS campaign, and I got instantly flagged. Test.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#186

Post by greyface- »

cowtools wrote: post #179
greyface- wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> namely BGP DDoS attacks would still occur if we used a routing protocol other than BGP. It's not created by BGP, it's created by the fact that the Internet is end-to-end oversubscribed.

The weakness in the internet that allows for DDoS is that you can't tell your peers to filter incoming traffic on your behalf, so you need to discriminate on the edge. The attacker still gets to eat up your bandwidth and CPU time.

BGP absolutely does allow you to tell your peers to filter traffic before passing it to you. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7999.html

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#187

Post by hnbad »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #16
hammyhavoc wrote: post #3

If this is in response to Kiwi Farms, I would say this is very disappointing. Love CloudFlare, think they are amazingly innovative, huge amount of respect for the people who work there. I see where they're coming from, but I don't see how KF is defensible whilst 8chan et al aren't.

It's a really tricky situation. On the one hand, websites like KF and the like are utterly reprehensible. On the other hand, Cloudflare taking it upon themselves to police the Internet is a nightmare in its own, given their bot-prevention services are effectively mandatory in order to even keep any sort of larger interactive website running. What is permitted to say is something for the courts, not for the whims of p…

Except it's absolutely up to the whims of private businesses, if you want to be consistent with how businesses are understood in the US.

In the US corporations are people and money is speech. Cloudflare can try to become a public utility if they want but right now they're a corporation and they're making a political decision to continue to take money from customers that use their services to operate harmful social spaces that are used to coordinate targeted harassment campaigns and drive vulnerable people into suicide.

They frame selling DDoS protection as a neutral and good thing because it prevents cybercrime. But would you accept the same argument for selling ballistic vests? Plate carriers? APCs? Clearly selling defensive equipment to both sides of a conflict is still involving yourself in a conflict. If you want to be neutral, you don't involve yourself, you don't sell.

And to make matters worse, the general consensus is that the party they're selling DDoS protection to are "the bad guys" in this conflict. The guy operating it literally had to create his own hosting company because he ran out of hosting providers willing to do business with him. He had to resort to crypto wallets because payment providers have long banned his site.

Even if there wouldn't be any evidence that he encourages and participates in the harassment campaigns his site is known for (a site, by the way, that was literally created to harass one specific individual), the person maintaining that site still took a principled stand to allow this behavior to continue despite what it cost him. And now Cloudflare's CEO took the same stand to continue doing business with this person.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#188

Post by yanderekko »

robert_foss wrote: post #168
systemvoltage wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, we have a justice system based on what we agreed as a society. The rule of law. If you want to prohibit speech to white supremacists, fine, let’s pass a law and if it doesn’t hold constitutional muster, go ahead convince everyone to amend the constitution. But since our founding fathers made this process difficult on purpose, let’s take a different approach: that’s what social justice is. It is anti-democrati…

I do believe hate speech is illegal already. Certainly online harassment leading to someone committing suicide is. KF is a platform that facilitates these activities.

>Certainly online harassment leading to someone committing suicide is.

Documenting people's lives is not harassment.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#189

Post by a_shovel »

DoctorOW wrote: post #22

> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. > For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation…

> ...we worked with our Proudflare employee resource group to identify an organization that supported LGBTQ+ rights and donate 100 percent of the fees for our services to them.

I'm sure their LGBTQ+ employees will appreciate that when they get doxxed, swatted, and harassed every hour of the day and night because they're providing critical resources to the groups doing so.

Their position probably really does come from genuine belief in principles of anti-censorship and free speech, but the version that LGBTQ+ people are gonna hear from them is that every death threat, every picture of them taken without their knowledge, every coordinated campaign of harassment, every SWAT officer pointing a gun at their face when they wake up, every suicide after years of abuse, has the full backing and support of a multi-billion dollar corporation, and there's nothing they can do about it. And they're kinda right.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#190

Post by sealeck »

weberer wrote: post #108
DoctorOW wrote: post #22

> Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. > For instance, when a site that opposed LGBTQ+ rights signed up for a paid version of DDoS mitigation…

And let's be real. DDoS attacks are acts of digital terrorism. They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives. These people who want to revoke DDoS protection for groups they don't like are essentially promoting terrorism. Why else would they fight so hard to remove DDoS protection, if not because they simply want those attacks to succeed?

> They're attacking infrastructure due to political motives.

They're attacking KiwiFarms for their agenda of trying to drive people to commit suicide.

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