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Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#821

Post by Dylan16807 »

causi wrote: post #56
hammyhavoc wrote: post #3

If this is in response to Kiwi Farms, I would say this is very disappointing. Love CloudFlare, think they are amazingly innovative, huge amount of respect for the people who work there. I see where they're coming from, but I don't see how KF is defensible whilst 8chan et al aren't.

8chan literally had sub boards dedicated to child pornography. Kiwi Farms is where people make fun of other people. They're really not comparable unless you believe "not being made fun of" is a human right.

That depends. How many lives were ruined thanks to those boards on 8chan? It's plausible the answer is anywhere from "very many" to "zero". The harassment caused by Kiwi Farms is serious and located somewhere in between.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#822

Post by pvillano »

vorpalhex wrote: post #743
pvillano wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private companies are allowed to do a lot of immoral things because lobbying prevents the law from accurately reflecting the values of the voting public. Nazis shouldn't get a website, even if the law permits it, and everyone has a moral obligation to fight fascism.

Everyone has a right to speech, even speech that is not good. That applies to gay people at Stonewall and the KKK marching in DC equally. If you would restrict one then you restrict both. The freedom is absolute or it does not exist for anyone except the current favored group. It's like laws on the treatment of prisoners of war - we don't have those rules because we love our enemy, it's because we want our brothers t…

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_excepti...

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#823

Post by DoctorOW »

stormbrew wrote: post #796
DoctorOW wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't a political action group that takes donations and lobbies. It's a site where people's personal information is offered up to anyone who wants it, knowing that many of those people want to do harm with it. The owners and moderators know all of this and both allow and encourage it. I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan. > Yes, this should be an issue for law enforcemen…

> I don't think that specific passage was in reference to KiwiFarm's paid plan. I didn't say it was? I don't see why the fact that cf is paying for their ddos protection instead of kf paying for it themselves is really relevant to the enablement of harm. Honestly that makes it even worse: in the other situation, cf is taking money from a bad actor and funneling it towards a good one (both allegedly). Here cf is payin…

> in my perfect world (...) cf isn't even in a position to arbitrate speech

This is literally the only thing I'm advocating for. I'm a trans woman that openly speaks about my and others' experiences. Trust me when I say, codified systems for reporting abuse are themselves the target of the same abuse. I've gotten the "Sorry, we're leaving this up" from reporting anti trans content on Facebook. I've had comments saying sex != gender reported/removed so many times, a Reddit account I used straight up isn't allowed to comment anywhere anymore. All the YouTube shit you hear conservatives whine about straight up just scans the autogenerated transcript for any mention of political phrases like "LGBT" or sexually explicit language like might come up in discussing my transition. All these reasons are why I'm fine with Kiwi Farms coming down but I don't think Cloudflare should change their stance on avoiding it in almost all situations.

The donation thing is that Cloudflare refuses to profit off of this and is therefore incentivized to avoid such customers. Companies are always going to pick the path of greatest profit so engraining morality in that path is better than not doing it.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#824

Post by shadowfacts »

almost_usual wrote: post #13
shadowfacts wrote: post #8

That’s a lot of words to say they’re not dropping Kiwi Farms. In spite of the fact that I think they plainly meet this condition for removal: > Is otherwise illegal, harmful, or violates the rights of others, including content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public.

That was under “Hosting Products”, KW probably falls under “Security Services”. > Hosting products are those products where Cloudflare is the ultimate host of the content. This is different from products where we are merely providing security or temporary caching services and the content is hosted elsewhere

It's an artificial distinction, and I reject it. They know inciting violence is wrong, but they argue that providing services to people who do so is okay because they have a higher purpose of preventing cyberattacks. I think that's absurd.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#825

Post by Dylan16807 »

_-david-_ wrote: post #676
pseudalopex wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Difficulty preventing it at much larger scale does not make them equivalent to Kiwi Farms.

KiwiFarms has a policy against illegal behavior. If your argument is that having a policy and half assing it is sufficient for Twitter then you should be consistent and allow KiwiFarms the same excuse. The size is irrelevant. If anything it should mean Twitter should be held to a higher standard due to the sheer reach of the platform. Twitter has significantly more resources to stop this behavior through both automat…

KiwiFarms doesn't half-ass, they ignore. They need to try before they can be excused for trying.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#826

Post by Dylan16807 »

remarkEon wrote: post #735
FullyFunctional wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you file a restraining order against an unknown group of unnamed people? It seems like a very privileged victim-blaming POV.

The FBI, and increasingly police departments, have fairly large cyber forensics capabilities. If someone is doing something illegal, report it.

Do you actually think there is any chance they would investigate?

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#827

Post by devwastaken »

zja wrote: post #651
devwastaken wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when that happens, Cloudflare is in the perfect position to provide evidence. Your unwittingly advocating for these websites to use more sophisticated methods, where their actions will be much harder to prove and prosecute. If not Cloudflare, then someone else, that's the reality of it. We do not live in a world of no harm and never will we. All we can do is manage it.

> If not Cloudflare, then someone else, that's the reality of it. When has this ever been a valid excuse for bad behavior?

Nobody said it was.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#828

Post by endtime »

freeone3000 wrote: post #815
endtime wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule of law and due process are the best way of doing things, and are not exclusively American concepts.

Absolutely, but, Canadian law would absolutely allow illegally-collected evidence. The trial against the officer invading the defendant's privacy is a separate matter; the goal of a trial is to determine the truth of matters, after all, and if the defendant did kill someone, all evidence to support (or refute) that is generally admissible.

Nitpicking the details of the example isn't really a reputation of the more general point, though.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#829

Post by Dylan16807 »

krapp wrote: post #538
sschueller wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a cooperation becomes a de-facto monopoly the rules that apply need to change. If there is no competition you can go to and there is no way around it then the government has to step in.

Cloudflare is not a de-facto monopoly. There is plenty of competition. Simply being popular is not having a de-facto monopoly.

They're not a monopoly right now but they're concerningly large.

Re: Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

#830

Post by XorNot »

defen wrote: post #523
XorNot wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a HackerNews user, goes by the handle Chris2048. And I just don't know what his problem is you know? Back in my day we had a solution for those types of people. If he wasn't hiding behind the internet I bet he wouldn't be so tough. Just imagine if we knew who he was and he couldn't hide like that, wouldn't that be great? I recommend you all go look up his posts. That's Chris2048 on HackerNews, have a really g…

This is called fedposting and it's basically the message board version of what the FBI does to entrap Muslim terrorists and white supremacists IRL. The problem you're going to have with making it a crime is, where do you draw the line? If someone gets in front of a big crowd and says "Donald Trump is a fascist, he's the next Hitler", and then one of those people takes the matter into his own hands - do you think the…

The speaker is pretty obviously guilty of incitement to violence if they were inciting violence. Which my parody above is demonstrating pretty clearly. Now, is one incident sufficient cause? Probably not.

What if I launched a sustained campaign across multiple media against that HN user? What if that user starts receiving harassment and death threats? I am running a sustained campaign of making specific, targeted references to how desirable "doing something" about that user is with specific violent imagery, but stopping short of directly declaring that I want something to happen.

You're far too comfortable pretending this can't be a crime, or shouldn't be a crime, because in reality you're pretty comfortable it won't happen to you.

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