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

rasbora.dev

91–100 of 244 posts

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

#91

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, Cloudfl…

> A private company should not be making decisions on essentially freedom of speech On the other hand, a private company has limited obligation to uphold what is essentially a government concern ... Unless we start redefining a lot of things related to private obligation.

This particular private company wants to get out of being forced into a role of content moderator for a fifth of the Internet. This is an infinite time sink with no good outcomes for them.

More importantly, this seems to have no good outcomes for us, the viewers. I also don't want Twitter mobs and DDoS-ers to have a say in what I can and can't read.

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

#92

Isn’t DDOS pretty illegal? In my opinion, selling illegal services is a strong case for CF to kick them out because they quite clearly break the law.

The issue that arises with "thats illegal, CF should ban them", is that they need to pick some jurisdiction, and become an executing power in that. A lot of wacky things are illegal in some less free countries - if a website clearly breaks a saudi arabian law they care about a lot, does that count? What about a german law that is very important to germans?

Does CF have to be an executive force in keeping the law of the US regarding non-US customers, or should the laws of the country the customer is in count instead, ...

You see the issue. The solution is that CF should remain as neutral as they can without breaking the law in their country themselves.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

crime.to is a bit different in that the owners and moderators themselves are involved and eventually get caught, whereas kiwifarms love to pretend it's merely a gossip site (even if people on it are not notable and the conversation exceeds gossip quite often). It's more the spiritual successor to 1337crew or carders (the later of which had a policy of all staff using names of greek OR roman gods - sometimes duplicate…

I was active quite a lot in that scene a few years ago. The dude who threw eggs at drachenlord was someone from cnw. The dude who broke into his house was from cnw. BasedGod was from cnw too (he’s fortunately in jail today).

But yes, the userbase of cnw and pr0gramm is overlapping. But pr0gramm is at least „only“ allowing bullying. Not the hard stuff such as actual murder, trading narcotics and your grandma’s credit card number + ID. And yes, cnw is way more ruthless than 1337crew ever was.

Anyway, I wanted to point at this because cloudflare said they took KF down because they felt like legal enforcement wasn’t moving fast enough. CNW destroyed lots of lifes too and it isn’t a secret that a few of cnw‘s users are well connected to rocker gangs which pull of murder for hire.

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

#95
post #74

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.

Not pyromaniacs necessarily but definitely “firestarter for hire”. Also a fire department that can scale and is paid privately. More fires mean more business.

More fires mean more business, but that’s kinda irrellevant to the goal of the fire department, which is to prevent burned out houses.

If the police never does anything about the firestarters for hire, it’s a bit hard to see how that would be the fire departments fault (and certaily not something they should solve by not fighting fires any more).

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

#97
post #59
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…

It's a great argument against the scale that cloudformation has, and regulation would help. If you can't figure out that one of your clients is doing this bad things, you shouldn't have so many clients

> It's a great argument against the scale that cloudformation has, and regulation would help.

Agreed. It's very annoying that such services like ddos protection have an ever-growing scaling advantage (because the sizes of ddos attacks grow).

> If you can't figure out that one of your clients is doing this bad things, you shouldn't have so many clients

What kinds of entities would you extend this to? I would guess you wouldn't day the same thing about hardware stores (which sell dangerous tools).

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He’s right you know. Let’s not forget all the evidence of CP reported [0] [1] [2] that Twitter has failed to remove and they seem to have a problem taking it down and hosting it and allowing this CP content to spread is illegal.

No outrage here of course, even when the fact is that it is all true.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...

[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...

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

#99
post #78
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…

> And why isn't law enforcement stepping in?

Because 1) they have limited resources and must prioritise and 2) America law enforcement seems to have a distinct lean towards the transphobic / homophobic / white supremacist / right-wing, etc.

Just because something is not being actively policed does not mean it's not an actual crime (cf motorists running red lights for an easy example.)

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

#100
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I expect if they said "I want to rent a car to use as a getaway vehicle for a bank robbery" whilst standing next to a TV showing a picture of them committing a bank robbery, yes, the rental company would have some culpability.

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