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

rasbora.dev

211–220 of 244 posts

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

#211
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

How is that not an indictment of basic internet infrastructure such that basic freedom of association has tradeoffs with needing to pay protection money to anti-DDoS companies in order to stay online?

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

#212

Cloudflare is oddly political for an infrastructure provider. Every few months or so they seem to be forced to explain why they have decided to deplatform this or that website contrary to their no interference policy. You don’t see AWS or Microsoft having the same frequency of these sorts of reports. What am I missing?

Normal service providers normally remove violent/hate sites as a matter of course, which makes it not news. Cloudflare has set themselves up as a sort of refuge of last resort, for [redacted] reasons. Fill in the blank yourself.

The kinds of sites that need a refuge of last resort often have dedicated haters. Cloudflare can then monitor the patterns in DDoS attempts to better improve their enterprise services. It's a better picture of realistic attacks from motivated attackers than if they only hosted morally-acceptable sites.

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

#213

It's incredible that cloudflare compares itself to a firefighter answering all calls wherever they come from. They are more like a private security company working for a mafia boss that pays them well.

The fact that DDoS protection is a viable market and losing it is tantamount of kicking a website offline belies fundamental flaws with the infrastructure of the internet.

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

#214

> As the infrastructure provider for over 20% of all www traffic traversing the internet today, CloudFlare is in a position to enforce it's beliefs on a global scale. > Who interprets what qualifies as hate speech? Exactly the issue. We should not give “activists” a free pass on this one. I wonder now which one(s) of them will commit the crime of actually DDoSing KiwiFarms. We probably will never know. Vigilante “jus…

> Vigilante “justice” is problematic because it leaves room for people to harm others without proper evidences of wrong doing.

Isn’t this exactly what the people are KF were doing? Only instead of trying to get a website kicked off the internet, they were trying to get people fired from their jobs, weaponizing the police, trying to drive people to suicide. And not in the service of any sort of justice, but for entertainment. That is sick and it is evil.

They should absolutely be shunned and ostracized for their antisocial behavior. Free speech means that other people have the right to show you the door if you are acting like a jerk.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A private company should not be making decisions on essentially freedom of speech. This comes up a lot and makes me think I’ve misunderstood US free speech dynamics. I thought the USA traditionally limited the government’s ability to regulate free speech, leaving it to private / social regulation. In other words, it was up to individuals, communities, companies and so on to decide what was acceptable. But perhaps t…

You’re confusing the First Amendment — a particular law about the government’s requirement to uphold the principle of freedom of speech — with the principle of freedom of speech more generally. In this context, the First Amendment is irrelevant - it doesn’t apply here; it says nothing about the actions of private companies. Instead, people are discussing the principle of freedom of speech, and in particular the exten…

[deleted]

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

#216
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that DDoS mitigation requires centralization. There aren't cheap alternatives. Same goes for any utility. Would it be okay for Visa to permanently turn off all your current and future credit and ATM cards if you used Visa in objectionable way, say you paid a meth dealer and then resold at scale? Because it's "much faster" to turn off Visa than to do a police investigation and issue an arrest warra…

Visa et al. already do this for legal business/speech: see Patreon[0], OnlyFans[1], Gab[2]. Payment processing is not regulated as a utility and probably never will be in the States. 0: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqwwj/patreon-suspension-of... 1: https://www.protocol.com/policy/onlyfans-visa-mastercard 2: https://bitcoinist.com/coinbase-paypal-ban-gab/

Even though they aren’t regulated as a utility, they are very highly regulated. The examples you gave are just highly-politicized examples of a now-common standard and practice that all processors operating in the US have been required to uphold (not that it was involuntary) for decades. That’s part of why Stripe and other Payment Facilitator services have exploded: it’s not easy to open a traditional payment processing account, and very easy to get it shut down for seemingly random reasons.

Despite the online fervor over this, payment processors are clearly within their legal rights to shut down payment processing for abuse - even if it is only suspected.

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

#217
post #109

The linked post by Prince is pretty frustrating. “This is not our stance, but we do it anyway for all the reasons we just said are bullshit.” I have a ton of respect for Prince but this spineless double standards stuff is BS. PS: I have no idea what the deal is with Kiwifarms and frankly I don’t care. If it’s really that bad then we need to have a judge order an injunction.

I thought it was pretty clear that they basically said "Things went from 'freedom of expression we don't like that we find questionable' to things that are almost certainly illegal, so we are forced to move, even though we would prefer law enforcement did it."

I would expect a lot more detail from Cloudflare like a list of alleged crimes and some supporting facts. Maybe even an injunction from a judge, perhaps? You know, the stuff you would normally expect in a case like this before law enforcement decided to intervene.

Honestly anything supporting the “there was an emergency and deplatforming kiwifarms just avoided it” claim would help.

They weren’t forced to do anything.

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

#218
post #210

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…

> 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. That approach is fairly easy to work around. Just make sure your site is in a country whose police cannot issue requests that Cloudflare is obligated to follow. For added protection pick a country that your victi…

I currently for for a Fintech and our investors don’t want to do anything with asbestos companies. That includes asbestos removal companies. Which is pretty idiotic considering these companies are actually doing a good thing. This is the kind of solution that the industry will tend to if it is expected to self-police.

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

#219
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The text better supports GP's understanding: > Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. This is explicitly about what sorts of laws Congress may not pass, and not about the conduct of priv…

Further, the Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Because the Constitution doesn't delegate the power to regulate speech to the US, but rather prohibits it, by definition the power to regulate speech is reserved by the States and the people.

That’s interesting. Would the Tenth Amendment prevent the federal government regulating free speech in the opposite direction, e.g. a law saying “companies can’t do anything to limit free speech”?

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

#220
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are they? People. Me. Others. I don't have a list. > Why are Cloudflare listening to this "they" instead of all the alternate "they" who object to alternate sites? They're presumably listening to both? I don't understand the question. > There is someone group organised to go after every "bad" site and a lot more besides. How do you even know that they've correctly identified Kiwikarms as a problematic site? Bec…

>> Who are they? > People. Me. Others. I don't have a list. >> I can find people who are willing to call ~30% of any country neo-nazis > Irrelevant. I mean, the vibe I'm picking up here is they are the ones who decide, but not them? Who are these they? > I don't understand why that would be relevant. Again, long documented history. There is a long documented history of the US being the Great Satan, or technically Sha…

You're focusing a lot on "they", and I don't really get why. You can instead focus on the argument being made and at that point it'll be a lot easier to engage. If you're trying to say that we shouldn't make decisions based on the feelings of vague interest groups, ok, but I wasn't making the argument that we should.
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