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Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

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Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#221

Post by dc396 »

DoctorOW wrote: post #199
ipaddr wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't they kick off far right websites like stormfront? They still block from personal preference it's just preferences you agree with.

(in)famously they refused to do that until ordered to by law enforcement.

Err, no. At least not according to Cloudflare:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

TL;DR: "The tipping point for us making this decision [to discontinue service] was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology."

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#223

Post by ethbr1 »

foobarchu wrote: post #119
ethbr1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it's stupid doesn't make it untrue. Under-resourced public sector entities often reach for the easiest solutions: Facebook and Twitter. Consequently, those channels are a major portion of their disaster communication plans. If services don't want to assume the responsibilities of being critical utilities, then they shouldn't work so hard to establish monopolies.

In this case cloud flare is clearly willing to be the responsible party and has acknowledged that blocking them instead of requesting takedowns is the issue. Who are you chastising?

The post I was replying to

> It reminds me of when they fear mongered about lives being at risk when twitter was down

Where, yes, Twitter and Facebook and Cloudflare do have responsibilities to the public.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#224

Post by SoftTalker »

phoronixrly wrote: post #194
SXX wrote: post #162

Many will disagree here, but I really respect Cloudflare fight against government-enabled censorship and abuse of power by anti-piracy whatever. Yes, sometimes CloudFlare used for some actually bad stuff, but same can be said for any cloud service. Having major internet infrastructure provider react to every whim of every single government in the world is not a good idea.

They aren't really fighting against censorship and especially anti-piracy censorship. If they were, they'd refuse to take down sites. Instead they've a streamlined process for just that purpose, and are only fighting because they have been censored, affecting their bottom line.

Piracy only flourishes when the content is priced too high. Most people don't want to bother, pirate streams tend to be glitchy, low quality, and unreliable. But they will if they feel they are being bent over a barrel. Drop the price and most people will pay it. I.e. make it easy for people to do it the right way.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#226

Post by neilv »

brookst wrote: post #213
neilv wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can’t be done. If someone is on a home network whose router has been compromised and is part of a ddos attack, there’s no way their innocent HTTP traffic is getting through. Ditto if their machine has been compromised. To me, this sounds like giving up way too easily on engineering problems. One distinction to start with: Let's say grandma's router isn't part of a DDoS attack. Even if she might be trying to talk…

Great, please start a service to do this. From my perspective, it can’t be done. I would be thrilled to be wrong!

I would be thrilled if this one pest control company stopped kicking puppies.

I bet they could figure out a way to check for fleas that doesn't involve kicking puppies.

But I don't want to get into the flea-checking business myself.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#227

Post by thayne »

DoctorOW wrote: post #180
thayne wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anubis is affective against certain kinds of bots and abuse, but wouldn't be that affective against large scale DDoS attacks. And it does have a negative impact on usability, as users have to wait for the browser to do the proof of work, which may or may not be worse than cloudflare's captchas.

Anubis is a partial mitigant of DDOS attacks, since it's less resource intensive to serve the Anubis page than the origin[1]. Cloudflare's captchas are only convenient for a subset of users, I'll bet there'd be decent money in one of the competing CDNs (Fastly maybe?) including an Anubis-like captcha. [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864108

Yes, it's a partial mitigator, but it isn't as complete of a solution as a CDN, for a number of reasons. For one thing, with Anubis your server is still responding to requests, so a full scale DDoS could potentially take you down without having to actually complete the PoW, they just have to make enough requests.

Using a CDN for DDoS typically has multiple levels of protection:

- caching reduces load on your server

- In the event of a (D)DoS attack, the cdn can absorb the attack traffic with their much higher capacity than your server(s)

- The CDN can block certain kinds of attacks, especially low level (D)DoS attacks without the traffic ever touching your servers

- Since the CDN fronts many sites, it can have more information about which IP addresss, and user agents are more suspicious. This one is a little controversial, because there is a conflict between getting an accurate profile of how suspicious a request is, and preserving the privacy of users.

- It may have built in support for some kind of bot detection, such as captcha or a proof of work. IDK about the free tier of cloudflare, but for paid offerings at least, this is usually optional.

In short, Anubis could be part of a DDoS mitigation plan, but if you are worried about a targeted attack, it probably isn't sufficient. And critical services are potentially a valuable target for attacks.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#228

Post by jedberg »

JambalayaJimbo wrote: post #215
jedberg wrote: post #155

How come no one is mentioning the obvious solution -- LaLiga needs to make their product as easy to access as piracy. If they offered worldwide streaming of the matches available on an easy interface at a reasonable price, then none of this would be a problem. Piracy is almost never about the price -- it's almost always about the availability. Especially when it comes to live sports.

This solution clearly does not actually work. Musicians make pittances off of streaming in comparison to the money they made with physical media. Hollywood has seen strikes and streaming services continually raise prices.

With piracy they make nothing, so they'd still make more than they make today. Almost all of the pirates are people trying to watch from outside the coverage area. It's not like stopping piracy gets those people to pay.

They just stop watching.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#229

Post by necovek »

KomoD wrote: post #171
spookie wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard enough of this anti-american talk, and it sure smells like propaganda. The huge majority of europeans have nothing against the american people. Please, do not propagate these claims.

[flagged]

Is there a source for a counter claim that there is a majority (or large minority, if you are only contending the "huge" part) of Europeans who have something against the American people?

Note that even running a survey with "negative" question would bias the results in that direction (eg. difference between "how do you rate this?" and "what is bad about this?")

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#230

Post by maeil »

globie wrote: post #99
neilv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I've tried to get a customer of CloudFlare to fix a consistent block of their site -- not safety-critical, but mission-critical, and costing them a SaaS sale -- nobody seemed to care. My impression is that everyone knows that Cloudflare is blocking some legitimate people, but nobody -- neither the customer, nor Cloudflare -- cares enough to solve that problem. It's similar to why Google doesn't have much tech su…

Do you ever find that advocating for these tenets feels "weird" nowadays? As in, don't you know these publicly traded companies are legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust? What do you expect them to do? To start acting silly?

> As in, don't you know these publicly traded companies are legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust?

Based on your first question, I think you might already know this, but just in case you don't: This is a myth.

> The idea that choosing a 1% strategic internal investment over a 4.5% T-bill constitutes actionable "financial malpractice" or a breach of fiduciary duty leading to successful lawsuits is incorrect. Courts recognize that running a business requires strategic choices and risk-taking, not just maximizing immediate, risk-free yield. A lawsuit would fail unless plaintiffs could show the decision was tainted by disloyalty, bad faith, or gross negligence in the decision-making process, none of which are implied by simply choosing a lower-yield strategic project.

> Hence why no one ever gets sued for this. It doesn't happen. It lives in the minds of HNers and Redditors to provide a very convenient excuse for their employers, or in general companies, making abhorrent decisions purely based on feels and short-term next-quarter profits/stock price, regardless of the negative externalities they inflict on society.

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