Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

So, when someone does a thing that's designed to hurt both Kiwifarms and MTG and your assumption is that KF is responsible?

> More generally, swatting people is bad (and also illegal!), people should not do it.

I'd agree, anyone caught doing this should be imprisoned for attempted murder. I worry more about people trying to expand this list to anyone adjacent to them or critical of that person who does not engage in such harassment or any platform they use to speak, even when that platform removes anyone doing such things.

That said if we do go down that road, FB, Twitter & co. should be first on the chopping block and I won't miss them.

> Sites that encourage it should not be supported.

I don't visit KF, except that I read their response earlier regarding the byuu thing (when they were being DDoS'd which prevented them from responding much) and it didn't seem like the platform had meaningfully encouraged this or interacted with byuu in any way.

It's a sad loss, because I was loosely acquainted with byuu and byuu's work and you can see some of those comments between us here on HN. I also did what little I could to try to help find that package of lost video games, not that I actually was able to contribute anything, but I tried.

Despite KF getting lots of blame, I didn't actually see any proof of them participating in that in any meaningful way. Maybe I missed something, because again, I don't actually use that site and I only went there to look at what was going on with the story since it involved byuu.

But the response was pretty clear that there was a small thread with people not even interacting with byuu and it's hard to see a link between that and driving someone to suicide. None of the articles I read about the whole thing actually did anything but quote someone who said there was a link, so with no evidence but some person I don't know's say-so, I'd say that case is rather weak by people who already hate KF.

Feel free to point to more showing that KF is bad, because to me they're just another angry part of the internet, kinda like FB or Twitter, that I tend to avoid for that very reason. I'm suspect that they in particular should be deplatformed compared to the other platforms, though, because to me they're all angry nasty things that have driven people to suicide.

And I'm pretty sure that on FB in particular, someone was successfully sued for that, which already puts them a level worse than what I've seen proven of KF so far.

When I worked at Malwarebytes we had regular issues with malware being hosted on Cloudflare. Now I don't mean like "hey download this file so you can learn"- that kind of thing we fully supported. I mean that these files were being explicitly used in drive by exploit attacks- if a user with a vulnerable browser went to the wrong webpage, that webpage would load exploit scripts from the Cloudflare network and then inject the malware.

To me this is a very simple example of abusing a network. It is not a free speech issue, unless you think punching someone in the face is free speech. We proved that this was happening by providing pcap files showing the entire network transaction and the fact that users were not initiating this on purpose.

Their response was to ignore us until we started blocking their end nodes, at which point they came to our forum and straight up lied.

> Unfortunately, the new system is unlikely to resolve the current controversy which is more political than technical in nature. The current controversy involving Malwarebytes blocking CloudFlare IPs is centered around one site. To be clear, this site does not distribute malware itself and visiting it will not infect your computer. It does, however, provide information on how to create malware. Philosophically, we believe there is a difference between distributing malware -- which we will prohibit through our network -- and distributing information about malware. We do not believe our role is to play censor to any information on the Internet, even information we find disturbing. Publishing the Anarchists Cookbook does not make you a terrorist. Blocking sites based on the information they contain, as opposed to the actual harm they do, takes a step down a slippery slope I find deeply troubling.

https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/108447-my-site-using-c...

This was a 100% dishonest lie, and it's the same pattern Cloudflare has been following for a decade now. In this case they lied claiming we were blocking educational material, which is something Malwarebytes never did. He said all of this after we sent the pcap files proving that this wasn't an issue with educational sites.

From my perspective Cloudflare has always been willing to hide behind free speech even if it isn't relevant. It's their go to excuse for any bad behavior.

I don't want to force cloudflare to be a public utility, but it is probably bigger and more dominant than any company needs to be, like many others it should be broken up into smaller pieces.