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

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

#71

Post by BrainVirus »

mccorrinall wrote: post #48
oivey wrote: post #34

This article seems to have been posted to make a false equivalence with the current Kiwifarms situation. There’s a pretty clear difference in urgency between taking down DDOSers and deplatforming a forum that is a gathering point for a mob engaging in mass harassment, stalking, and SWATing. One is a nonviolent crime. The other is a crime targeting an individual that had already escalated to the point of a high risk o…

Cloudflare still protects all those forums which harm people. Kiwifarms is the only one which was sensationized by the twitter crowd. Look at crime.to. They still send bomb threats [1], exchange stolen credit card data [2], harass people to the point where they lose their houses [3] (SWATing, breaking in into their house and much more included), and probably more on a daily basis. Still protected by cloudflare. Prett…

Twitter hosts Antifa types who use it to recruit and coordinate political violence. Takes about 2 minutes to find an example, so they clearly don't moderate this stuff:

https://nitter.net/zelda_in_black

Let's disconnect Twitter from the Internet!

The same people gravely concerned about an infrastructure website being neutral are perfectly fine being on a social media platform that's used for coordinating all kinds of sketchy shit.

"Whataboutism!!!" is the only reply one usually gets when pointing it out.

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

#72

Post by staticassertion »

firtoz wrote: post #58
paganel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something very wrong with the game community. I've learned enough during stupid internet fights I have had on reddit to never continue a conversation with an avid gamer, no matter the subject. Stories like this one you linked to on merkur.de (read via Google Translate, but I think they got it right) confirm to me that that was the correct call.

Why game community? It's more like all of the world enjoy games, including these sociopaths. You are chasing a red herring.

I think you have to be really in denial if you think that, on average, gamers are not a more toxic community than others. I think it's not that video games make people bad or something like that. But you probably have some demographics - like young men, for example - who have a lot going on in their lives and aren't always well equipped to handle it. The internet desensitizes everyone and I think that that can be a really bad mix with some people who spend time online and might have a hard time in their actual lives.

Online harassment would presumably be cathartic for some of those people. People lash out for a reason and this is just lashing out at scale.

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

#73

Post by msh »

8note wrote: post #63
msh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want to put everyone on a metered internet connection? And then hit them with massive bills if they have a device that gets hacked? Seems unreasonable given the current state of security.

If you don't hold people accountable for their devices, what reason do they have to care about that security?

I think that it's morally wrong to push the burden to end-users. If anyone should be accountable it must be the companies producing the devices and software.

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

#74

Post by Aeolun »

What a weird argument.

Cloudflare is like a fire department that still fights fires in the homes of known pyromaniacs. Whether or not they set the fires themselves is irrelevant to the job of the fire department, if someone needs to stop them it’s the police.

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

#75

Post by staticassertion »

roenxi wrote: post #35

This article is not very articulate on the point, but goes to the real touchy point with the Kiwifarms decision. Based on what I know it seems Cloudflare made a good decision, but: 1. The internet is vast. 2. Figuring out what someone is doing on the internet even if you did somehow have full transparency over the data they send/receive is hard. 3. Any policy of intervention is going to leave behind a stream of poorl…

(2) doesn't seem important. This problem is easy - take down kiwifarms. No one is asking for Cloudflare to take down 100% of every single site that may or may not be classified as "bad" - they're asking for this one site to be taken down. Maybe even some others, too. There's a huge grey area of "bad", but there are also plenty of sites that very clearly fall to one side or the other. Solving "grey" is hard, solving kiwifarms is not.

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

#76

Post by Borgz »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #64

So he ran a DDoS network that wasn't behind Cloudflare, but used Cloudflare to stop his website being DDoSed by competitors, and this means Cloudflare was helping him DDoS others? No, it means Cloudflare was helping keep his website up, in a neutral manner. In other words, exactly what Cloudflare have stated their policy is. Now if Cloudflare allowed him to run DDoS code on its Workers, then yes, that's Cloudflare he…

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 protecting its customers from some harm should not also be attempting to facilitate that same harm.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...

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

#77

Post by zaptheimpaler »

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, Cloudflare etc. A private company should not be making decisions on essentially freedom of speech. Its just one more responsibility that law enforcement has completely shirked leaving others to clean up the mess.

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

#78

Post by blfr »

oivey wrote: post #34

This article seems to have been posted to make a false equivalence with the current Kiwifarms situation. There’s a pretty clear difference in urgency between taking down DDOSers and deplatforming a forum that is a gathering point for a mob engaging in mass harassment, stalking, and SWATing. One is a nonviolent crime. The other is a crime targeting an individual that had already escalated to the point of a high risk o…

> a forum that is a gathering point for a mob engaging in mass harassment, stalking, and SWATing

I keep hearing this allegation but it seems to be supported only by a poorly sourced twitter thread[1] and some articles that dance around the issue. How do we know this, especially the swatting?

And why isn't law enforcement stepping in? The operator is an American afaict. It's not like he's some bond villain living in a cave on the other side of the world.

[1] https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...

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

#79

Post by yardstick »

8note wrote: post #61
fareesh wrote: post #52

Political neutrality is important for the tech industry. I appreciate Cloudflare trying its best to be neutral. When harm is done, the fault lies at the feet of the perpetrator. Blaming their utility company, hosting provider, DNS registrar, grocer, butcher, barber, etc. is lunacy.

In the US at least, the getaway driver is to blame even if all they did was drive a car and receive payment for their driving

Sure, but what about the company that they rented the car from? Or the company they bought car insurance from?

In the eyes of the law, the intent of the person is often (not always) extremely relevant.

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

#80

Post by rdtsc »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #64

So he ran a DDoS network that wasn't behind Cloudflare, but used Cloudflare to stop his website being DDoSed by competitors, and this means Cloudflare was helping him DDoS others? No, it means Cloudflare was helping keep his website up, in a neutral manner. In other words, exactly what Cloudflare have stated their policy is. Now if Cloudflare allowed him to run DDoS code on its Workers, then yes, that's Cloudflare he…

> No, it means Cloudflare was helping keep his website up, in a neutral manner.

I think it's more subtle than that. It was keeping his website up to make a profit. It benefits Cloudflare to have powerful, well run bot networks out there ready take out any site which do not have Cloudflare's protection.

Yeah, it's a neutral manner on one level, but at a higher level it's bit more nuanced.

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