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Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

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Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#531

Post by lenkite »

sneak wrote: post #457
_heimdall wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing for a system where employers consider your political views before hiring you? And no this is not an attempt to in anyway belittle what Nazi German did during WWII. Assuming the employee you are referring to has never been engaged in such acts, though, that feels like a very slippery slope.

Yes. Discrimination in hiring with regard to personal viewpoints (ie adult decisions, not built-in traits) is one of the best ways we have to shape society for the better. As private entities, we have freedom of association - including freedom to shun certain groups. Use it!

What is a "built-in trait" ?

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#532

Post by godelski »

ldoughty wrote: post #483
qmr wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fan of XYZ service deciding what you can or can not say / host online. Freedom of speech is not about protecting speech you find agreeable.

Businesses are not expected to protect your freedom of speech. If you want to say stuff that no one wants to print, you can't sue a business for not printing it. The government can't stop you from requesting a permit and saying it on public lands, though... And back when telecoms were common carriers, you could have done such from your home Internet, now you can only do it from your voice line.

Sorry, but sometimes they are. Laws are reactive so can only be updated when harm is done. But if businesses and people act to hold up the spirit of those laws then the harm doesn't happen in the first place. It's proactive vs reactive.

Plus, bring proactive saves everyone a whole lot of time and money. So many things would be better if people (and every entity) was just trying to do their best and no one was trying to fuck each other over. You may call it a dream and that's fine, but also remember that the vast majority of people already operate that way. A small number of people do the most harm

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#533

Post by _heimdall »

array_key_first wrote: post #522
_heimdall wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I go online and trash talk anyone, that might prevent me from getting hired. > Similarly, if I work someplace, and I call my boss a jackass, I might get fired! Those examples have nothing to do with your specific political views. Both issues there are about how you engages with others and are a reasonable example of why you might cause problems on a team. The specific views you would have shared rudely have noth…

> Those examples have nothing to do with your specific political views. Yes they do - as I've said, you can't invoke politics as a shield. You can be fired for your beliefs. Politics are a belief. So you can be fired for politics. If you're trying to say that you can just be an asshole in private - sure. If you share your political beliefs, it's no longer private. Most companies don't want to hire people they think a…

Okay, I'll try to take this from the top.

> Yes they do - as I've said, you can't invoke politics as a shield.

That isn't the issue at hand. You are describing using ones political views against them simply for them holding those views, not someone being an asshole and attempting to justify it as a political act.

> Most companies don't want to hire people they think are assholes.

Sure, though they would base that on behavioral tendencies rather than a political survey.

> Ultimately, it's very simple human behavior. I don't want to work with people who suck. You don't either. Okay, so we must discriminate based on politics or other beliefs.

Ultimately you're the one worse off for viewing people this ways. Views and beliefs don't make a person suck, actions do.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#534

Post by jedberg »

parliament32 wrote: post #520
jedberg wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a lot of FUD around how mail is "hard", but it's much less complicated than, say, running and maintaining a k8s cluster The main difference is that you're fully in control of the k8s cluster, but no matter what you do, you don't have control over the email infrastructure, because deliverability depends on the receiver. On every receiver you send to. People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how…

Meh, one could also complain they don't have control over backbone networks, transit, peering agreements, and intermediary routing therefore hosting a service on k8s is futile without using a managed provider / PaaS. > People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how do you know? Because people reply to my emails.. because I email documents to family/friends/landlord/etc and they receive it as expected.. >…

> intermediary routing therefore hosting a service on k8s is futile without using a managed provider / PaaS.

Except that a managed service doesn't solve that for you. They are no better at that than you are. Email services are better at deliverability than you are, because they spend lots of time building their IP reputations and more importantly negotiating with mail providers to guarantee their emails show up.

> Because people reply to my emails.. because I email documents to family/friends/landlord/etc and they receive it as expected..

I'm guessing you don't confirm every email you send with every person though.

> Of course they do, this is what DMARC is for.

I was involved in the creation of DMARC (and SPF and DKIM) so I know how it's supposed to work, but in the real world, most providers do not honor the "reject" flag and actually send the bounces. Last time I dealt with it was a few years ago, maybe it's better now.

For context, I started my career at Sendmail, and I worked on the SPF and DKIM specs, so I've dealt with deliverability for 25+ years. I also ran my own mail server until around 2009. But I switched to Gmail as my primary around 2008, when deliverability just got too hard. But I still worked on commercial deliverability for years after that.

Granted, SPF and DKIM wasn't widely adopted at that point (and DMARK didn't exist), so maybe it's easier now. But at the same time, most of AWS/Azure/GCP are marked as bad automatically, as well as most home internet blocks.

So if you want to run your own mail server, you can't do it on your home router anymore, you have to rent a server in a rack and get a clean IP that's just for you. That costs $$$.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#535

Post by cookiengineer »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #498
stingraycharles wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.

So far Cloudflare have generally been good guys on the web. They're in an incredibly abusable position, but so far have refrained from doing that. So far. The problem with Cloudflare is that institutions change over time. It's a slow process, doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen to almost all of them sooner or later. Building institutions that stay good is one of the big unsolved problems for humanity. The pr…

I've got a treat for you, cloudflare's business model moved heavily towards crime as a service during the last decades, including DDoS botnets that host their own CnCs behind cloudflare, while themselves even relaying cloudflare DNS data to DDoS cloudflare instances itself.

The guy behind Crimeflare, when it was still available, tried to accumulate a dataset by running his own resolver, which filtered out domains in the zones of cloudflare's known ASNs.

This was actually also part of a lawsuit against lieferando (takeaway) because they're registering domains of restaurant owners and blackmail them into using their delivery service, after they already registered the Google business entry with that cloudflare domain to a call center of Takeaway, so the actual owner of that restaurant has no chance in terms of SEO and google searches that people would find them again.

Anyways, the dataset is pretty fascinating:

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210826102143/http://www.crimef...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210826103036/http://www.crimef...

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#536

Post by godelski »

mschild wrote: post #427
_heimdall wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing for a system where employers consider your political views before hiring you? And no this is not an attempt to in anyway belittle what Nazi German did during WWII. Assuming the employee you are referring to has never been engaged in such acts, though, that feels like a very slippery slope.

Part of being a Nazi means the sincere believe that the Aryan race is superior to all others and that eradicating them is a sensible goal. Thats not a political view. Its one of racism and finding genocide acceptable. I would sincerely hope that any sensible person would refuse to hire someone like this.

Be careful with your reasoning. Remember that the current ruling party in America (as well as growing movement in Europe) is using the same rhetoric to go after liberals and trans people.

The problem isn't that any sensible person supports genocide, it is that insensible people can get to power and trick normal people into thinking genocide is necessary or not happening at all. They do the former by saying "if we don't commit genocide then they will commit genocide against us".

The problem is who gets to pick who is right and not? The problem is that if you limit the right to limit speech then good rulers won't abuse that power but evil ones will. It's because they are the ones who pick and choose. It's why you have to protect the rights of those you abhor. Because if you don't you build the powder keg of Turnkey Tyranny. Doesn't matter how many signs you put up, eventually someone will light a match. My accident or because they want to watch it burn.

So yes, to protect those groups being persecuted (trans, minorities, and Jews alike) you need to protect the speech of abhorrent groups like Nazis. You don't have to like it. And you don't have to, and shouldn't, protect the actions of Nazis, but you do have to protect the speech. It's exactly why the ACLU has done this in the past because every authoritarian loves to use abhorrent characters to justify overreaching laws.

We're on Hacker News for fuck's sake! How often have we seen the same play but replace "speech" with "encryption" and replace "Nazis" with "pedos and terrorists". It's the same stupid game!

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#537

Post by godelski »

ivell wrote: post #463
sneak wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Discrimination in hiring with regard to personal viewpoints (ie adult decisions, not built-in traits) is one of the best ways we have to shape society for the better. As private entities, we have freedom of association - including freedom to shun certain groups. Use it!

Once we start that, we cannot control if it is going to shape the society for the better or worse. Should feminists be prevented from joining a company? How about pro-choice rights activists? And one persons better society would be totally different from the other person's better society. We should aim to reduce discrimination not encourage it for select causes.

For anyone not understanding this comment and similar ones try this for me: replace "speech" with "encryption" and "Nazis" with "pedos and terrorists".

Here's the thing, authoritarians use abhorrent groups to justify authoritarian laws. It creates a power creep. Even well meaning rulers will push for more autocratic power with the justification that they can do more good with it. But unless you can place strong guarantees that no malicious ruler can come to power, you should evaluate powers as if they are the ones wielding it.

It's the entire concept of Turnkey Tyranny. A thing we are actively watching being exploited in America and across Europe. Because you can't prevent a malicious ruler from gaining power in a free society, but you can greatly limit their ability to do harm. But this can't be done with myopia.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#538

Post by troyvit »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #312
troyvit wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being blocked from a web site and having to hit a little box are two different things. Are you talking about the former or the latter? If it's the former ... that has literally never happened to me unless I'm on a VPN and even then it's rarely (if ever) CF that's doing the blocking. If it's the latter then it reflects the sad truth that we can't have nice things anymoret. I have lots of problems with the accessibilit…

> never happened to me "Never happens to me means never happens to anyone" Also it's quite amusing what if you had got hit with an infinite captcha here then you couldn't post your comment.

> "Never happens to me means never happens to anyone"

I see your point.

> Also it's quite amusing what if you had got hit with an infinite captcha here then you couldn't post your comment.

And you couldn't have hit me with that sick burn ;)

Seriously though I see where you're coming from in that I was implying that there must be something wrong with the original person's set-up that causes this, and that is not the case.

The thing is that while there's plenty of complaining about CF's approach nobody is offering a better alternative.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#539

Post by _heimdall »

hobs wrote: post #488
_heimdall wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't say that I have seen any party documents floating around, but I'll take your word for it here. A person having those views or beliefs still isn't a crime, acting on them is. A person in a workplace can have whatever views they want. Holding a view in no way prevents them from being able to do the work well. Its a different story if they cause a problem at work, but that is viewpoint agnostic - anyone starting…

Not hiring people who wish the majority of your employees death is a super low bar, you should try to make sure you can get over it. "How many people in the office do you view as vile subhumans who should be purged from the world because of how they were born?"

Not hiring people only for personal views they hold is just a weirs bar to set. Judge people by their fit for the role and their actions. Attempting to both uncover and judge a person's beliefs is a losing battle at best.

Re: Cloudflare Email Service: private beta

#540

Post by justsomehnguy »

troyvit wrote: post #538
justsomehnguy wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> never happened to me "Never happens to me means never happens to anyone" Also it's quite amusing what if you had got hit with an infinite captcha here then you couldn't post your comment.

> "Never happens to me means never happens to anyone" I see your point. > Also it's quite amusing what if you had got hit with an infinite captcha here then you couldn't post your comment. And you couldn't have hit me with that sick burn ;) Seriously though I see where you're coming from in that I was implying that there must be something wrong with the original person's set-up that causes this, and that is not the c…

The thing is what CF essentially became a monopolist and if for whatever reason you are on the CF's naughty list you are essentially blocked from a lot of resources even if the resource itself pretty fine with you. And yes, there are no alternatives because guess who isvthe first one both in Google's top search and word of mouth?
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