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I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

rasbora.dev

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Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#191

Post by danShumway »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #106
Borgz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These defenses of Cloudflare's behavior are getting very silly. Is there anything that Cloudflare could protect that you wouldn't be OK with? Because a DDoS-for-hire service is illegal, unethical, and contradictory of Cloudflare's stance that "cyberattacks, in any form, should be relegated to the dustbin of history."[1] Most importantly, it should be obvious to anyone that a company that has a purported goal of prote…

I don't really give two hoots about Cloudflare, I just don't like false statements, like when "Cloudflare helped me run a DDoS network" actually means "Cloudflare kept my website from being DDoSed", with the addendum "and I'm bad, therefore, not protecting KiwiFarms is hypocritical." It's just dumb.

> with the addendum "and I'm bad, therefore, not protecting KiwiFarms is hypocritical."

Is that the takeaway people have from this article? My reading wasn't that the author is advocating that Kiwi Farms should have been left up. They're asking for DDoS sites to be added to the ban list.

The "hypocrisy" that they keep bringing up is Cloudflare's claim that inaction in these instances is a neutral stance, and that in actuality Cloudflare is an active participant in helping these sites stay online.

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#192

Post by danShumway »

BrainVirus wrote: post #62

Exactly as expected. The more websites CloudFlare bans, the more its reputation will sink, the more enraged and demanding the pro-censorship mob will become. I note this one more time: almost no posts talking in favor of banning stuff here specify any objective limiting principle of where it should stop. It's like an exercise of deliberately creating a slippery slope.

The slippery slope is banning DDoS-for-hire sites?

This is like complaining, "if Apple removes hate speech from its app store, then next people will ask it to remove malware."

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#193

Post by dmatech »

Ygg2 wrote: post #126
BrainVirus wrote: post #62

Exactly as expected. The more websites CloudFlare bans, the more its reputation will sink, the more enraged and demanding the pro-censorship mob will become. I note this one more time: almost no posts talking in favor of banning stuff here specify any objective limiting principle of where it should stop. It's like an exercise of deliberately creating a slippery slope.

But Brain virus, the slippery slope isn't real. It's a fallacy /s

Twitter seems to be the social lubricant that makes all slopes it touches slippery. It massively accelerates social change and was basically the only place the KF story ever gained any traction at all. It's hard to overstate just how powerful that site is in the USA.

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#194

Post by Justsignedup »

JUST ONE SINGLE NOTE:

Cloudflare is a private company responsible for a product that they sell which they can choose not to sell to someone as is any company's rights.

The Fire department is a public sector entity, funded by our taxes, and we don't have any choice in which fire department we choose.

Anyone can come up with a cloudflare competitor for nazi materials, they have all the ability, money, and ability to build out data centers. All they need to do is to find people willing to build/fund it all. And it turns out those leading the charge don't know how to run a good business, and don't want to put money in, and can't find talent willing to work for them.

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#195

Post by mmmpop »

cedilla wrote: post #112
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #77

The deplatforming logic is practical but pretty shaky as a long term strategy. Kiwifarms absolutely may have been a despicable place causing real harm to people. In that case, the police should initiate a request to take them down that Cloudflare or ISPs etc. are obligated to follow. The problem is the government is completely ineffective and regularly offloads their responsibility to platforms like Facebook, Cloudfl…

You're focusing so hard on the rights of kiwifarms that you completely forget that cloudflare also has rights. Cloudflare has the liberty of association, and that includes the right to terminate contracts with others who actively harm Cloudflare and its costumers. And if Kiwifarms sending out bytes to the internet is free speech, then compelling cloudflare to send those same bytes is impernissible forced speech.

I like this argument and situation if only because it makes people admit that forced speech is tyranny… but I like it besides that too.

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#196

Post by afrcnc »

Justsignedup wrote: post #194

JUST ONE SINGLE NOTE: Cloudflare is a private company responsible for a product that they sell which they can choose not to sell to someone as is any company's rights. The Fire department is a public sector entity, funded by our taxes, and we don't have any choice in which fire department we choose. Anyone can come up with a cloudflare competitor for nazi materials, they have all the ability, money, and ability to bu…

There already is one in Russia called DDoS Guard. They're collecting all the nazi sites under their umbrella lately

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#197

Post by [deleted] »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #189
cedilla wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're focusing so hard on the rights of kiwifarms that you completely forget that cloudflare also has rights. Cloudflare has the liberty of association, and that includes the right to terminate contracts with others who actively harm Cloudflare and its costumers. And if Kiwifarms sending out bytes to the internet is free speech, then compelling cloudflare to send those same bytes is impernissible forced speech.

To steal a line of discussion I heard on a podcast some time ago—at what point along the chain does this stop being acceptable? In other words, which of the following scenarios are you okay with? • A data center refusing to host Kiwifarms. • An ISP refusing to provide internet to the data center that hosts Kiwifarms. • A power company refusing to provide electricity to the data center that hosts Kiwifarms. • An ISP r…

[deleted]

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#198

Post by Justsignedup »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #189
cedilla wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're focusing so hard on the rights of kiwifarms that you completely forget that cloudflare also has rights. Cloudflare has the liberty of association, and that includes the right to terminate contracts with others who actively harm Cloudflare and its costumers. And if Kiwifarms sending out bytes to the internet is free speech, then compelling cloudflare to send those same bytes is impernissible forced speech.

To steal a line of discussion I heard on a podcast some time ago—at what point along the chain does this stop being acceptable? In other words, which of the following scenarios are you okay with? • A data center refusing to host Kiwifarms. • An ISP refusing to provide internet to the data center that hosts Kiwifarms. • A power company refusing to provide electricity to the data center that hosts Kiwifarms. • An ISP r…

I am okay with 100% of these scenarios.

If I am a Jewish Doctor and a card-carrying Nazi came in, I should have the right to say "he can sit over there and I will not treat you". And if that causes him to die, that is his fault not mine.

If I am a Jewish contractor for a power company and I enter the home of a card-carrying Nazi, I should have the right to say "I will leave now, and you can sit in the dark until you find someone willing to do the work."

If I all the ISP administrators threaten to leave the IPS leaving them without workers because they are also serving Nazi websites, they should have the right to cut off that internet and tell them to find an ISP with Nazi workers to keep things running. And the same can be true for their homes.

Point here is: If you are a danger to society, society is not obligated to work with you as-is. You can certainly make your argument, but society isn't obligated to accept it.

People think just because they exist, they are owed. They are not owed. They are part of a collective, and if the collective deems they are a harm to itself, the collective will absolutely have the right to refuse to work with them. Think about the converse, would any of these Nazis help out Jews out of obligation to some sort of freedom doctrine? Hell no. They operate in the mentality "right for me, wrong for thee!"

So point is, there is no slippery slope. If you ask should the police arrest Nazis? Probably not, not unless they are breaking freedom of speech limitations. But since the _state_ is not blocking their speech, doesn't mean private citizens have to listen to it.

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#199

Post by Justsignedup »

afrcnc wrote: post #196
Justsignedup wrote: post #194

JUST ONE SINGLE NOTE: Cloudflare is a private company responsible for a product that they sell which they can choose not to sell to someone as is any company's rights. The Fire department is a public sector entity, funded by our taxes, and we don't have any choice in which fire department we choose. Anyone can come up with a cloudflare competitor for nazi materials, they have all the ability, money, and ability to bu…

There already is one in Russia called DDoS Guard. They're collecting all the nazi sites under their umbrella lately

And there you go, and if DDoS Guard is not sufficient for your traffic in say... the United States... Well you can certainly pay DDoS Guard a couple of hundred million to expand into the united states. I'm sure your lord and savior will happily foot that bill (/s).

Re: I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

#200

Post by nindalf »

One thing I don't see covered here - cost. Specifically, the cost of providing DDoS protection vs the cost of processing every complaint and evaluating if the complaint is legitimate.

At Cloudflare's scale, providing service to one additional site costs exactly $0. It's actually beneficial because it spreads their fixed costs (hardware, staff) over more customers. Great (for Cloudflare and the site).

But that only works if they don't have to do any marginal work for each site. Actually investigating each new website, going through potentially each page on the website, making a judgement call on if there is sufficient moderation to allow it or they shouldn't - it could take several hours or days of a skilled worker for each website. Just putting an example out there - how long would it take you to evaluate if reddit.com adheres to all the terms in Cloudflare's TOS? There's a different standard for user generated content, but it gets a pass if there's a good faith attempt to moderate the site. This stuff is actually hard.

If they actually had to process every complaint, regardless of where it came from, the economics of their business might not make sense. And of course, they open themselves up to false positives. They might ban a forum that looks dodgy but ends up being a leukaemia support group, which spawns yet another #dropCloudflare. And lastly, if they're going to listen to outrage from Twitter, they don't have a leg to stand on if they receive lawful requests from sovereign governments in Turkey, Saudi Arabia etc.

They hoped to sidestep all of these issues - money, false positives and state sponsored takedown requests by saying "we don't take down anyone for any reason". Well, it didn't work out.

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