Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

931–940 of 1001 posts

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#931

Post by MandieD »

cowtools wrote: post #523
ChicagoDave wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the entire history here, but my understanding is that KF was a forum where doxing and swatting was openly pervasive. Sounds like a perfect example of society holding a site accountable and producing the correct outcome. There was no government involved, so it's not a "free speech" issue. I always talk about the wild west of the late 90's when the Internet was brand new. My colleagues and I all talked abo…

Free speech is more than just an amendment to the constitution. It is also a doctrine that knowledge and discussion should generally be free, and that people shouldn't be persecuted for their beliefs. It used to be that all forums had pervasive doxxing and swatting. People didn't use to have public internet identities like they do today- probably because there wasn't any way to profit from owning a public identity or…

"It used to be that all forums had pervasive doxxing and swatting..."

What kind of hell-forums were you using in the late 90s?! I never saw anything like that going on in the forums I was using back in my early days of internetting, though to be fair, I was mostly on classical music, historical fiction, and parrot-keeping forums, which tend to attract people outside the bored young male demographic, but I was also a regular Slashdot reader, where things sometimes got nasty, but I don't remember a swatting incident, or much in the way of doxxing.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#932

Post by kweingar »

_-david-_ wrote: post #384
superkuh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal? I think you mean PR team. They realized it would have an impact on income. There was obviously no legal issue.

I'm not sure that it was PR. It is quite popular to be consistent and defend anybody who isn't convicted of a crime. If you are choosing to get CDN / DDOS protection and are running any site that may not be the most popular do you want to go with the company that bends their knee when the internet comes calling?

> It is quite popular to be consistent and defend anybody who isn't convicted of a crime.

I don’t know how popular this is, or at least how popular it should be.

Conviction is based on the extremely high bar of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is the standard for depriving a person of their liberty.

Society rightly does not operate at that standard. Conviction was never meant to be a proxy for whether you ought to do business with somebody.

Think about killers who “got off on a technicality,” where everyone knew they were guilty. Or open criminals who for whatever reason were unable to face a jury, like many mass shooters. It just doesn’t make sense to say “well the courts never formally convicted them so we have a duty to defend them.”

Sorry if this is long-winded. I am just alarmed by this trend of equating legal standards with social standards.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#933

Post by rowanG077 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #892
rowanG077 wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about who is more worthy of protection. And viewing it that way is incredibly dangerous. It's about what cost you are willing to pay for that protection. Ex: we have a pretty clear innocent until proven guilty justice system. This means there will always be people who are guilty who will not be punished. We can make that less likely by just throwing every suspect into jail. This protects the general public b…

> They are debating about the cost of that protection. Sure, but the parent post is asking you to also consider the cost of not acting.

That's obvious and I'd hoped my example with the justice system illustrated that.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#934

Post by deepcyanide »

If I were ever in a good mood (because censorship bs tends to be common) I'd laugh at the fact that those who speak so loudly against misinformation (the 3 suicides, the greene swat, the sleeper agent bomb threat) weaponized it to silence an archive of their personal idiocy/crimes. It's like the usa's ministry of truth happened anyway and this is the first step to the end times.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#935

Post by raxxorraxor »

kelnos wrote: post #253
raxxorraxor wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also provide a good counter to propaganda. You don't have to believe you get Covid chipped or in evil lizard people to see serious and concerning displays of media propaganda. And yes, it is US corporations in cooperation with government far more than the Russians on the English speaking net. There is just as much propaganda in Russia in Russian of course. It is just the usual type of propaganda and works even m…

I think there are much better ways to counter propaganda than running a site that doxxes people you don't like and harasses them to the point they commit suicide. We should not enable folks like this. If these are the only sorts of people who can counter propaganda, then perhaps we deserve the propaganda.

It isn't about this site in particular. These are people that make fun of others, there is no deeper "service" the platform provides, no particular insights to be gained. It is morally questionable endeavor to stay diplomatic and I hope users can learn to moderate themselves.

The real problem is that a pretext to remove a platform is very easily found. I am not convinced there was any immediate threat here and if so it could have been posted by anyone, even activists themselves. This would not be a precedent since this has happened numerous times already. Cloudflare now is part of the problem the same way companies that pay ransoms to phishers are.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#936

Post by cywick »

rowanG077 wrote: post #839
elcamino44 wrote: post #784

I think it’s interesting that so many people see the danger in a Twitter “mob” effectively running Kiwifarms off the public, visible internet, without recognising that Kiwifarms themselves were a mob, with the precise goal of running people (including the recently targeted streamer) off the public visible internet too. The tactics were different, but the goal is effectively the same. The key differences are Kiwifarms…

It's not about who is more worthy of protection. And viewing it that way is incredibly dangerous. It's about what cost you are willing to pay for that protection. Ex: we have a pretty clear innocent until proven guilty justice system. This means there will always be people who are guilty who will not be punished. We can make that less likely by just throwing every suspect into jail. This protects the general public b…

> Ex: we have a pretty clear innocent until proven guilty justice system.

The high bar of "innocent until proven guilty" (and "beyond a reasonable doubt") only applies to criminal cases, though, and not to civil ones. The present situation is much more analogous to a civil case where you have to weigh the interests of two parties (i.e., Kiwifarms and their victims) against each other.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#937

Post by rowanG077 »

cywick wrote: post #936
rowanG077 wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about who is more worthy of protection. And viewing it that way is incredibly dangerous. It's about what cost you are willing to pay for that protection. Ex: we have a pretty clear innocent until proven guilty justice system. This means there will always be people who are guilty who will not be punished. We can make that less likely by just throwing every suspect into jail. This protects the general public b…

> Ex: we have a pretty clear innocent until proven guilty justice system. The high bar of "innocent until proven guilty" (and "beyond a reasonable doubt") only applies to criminal cases, though, and not to civil ones. The present situation is much more analogous to a civil case where you have to weigh the interests of two parties (i.e., Kiwifarms and their victims) against each other.

It was an example to show it's way too simplistic to view the situation as only "kiwifarms bad". The example cannot be mapped to the situation as you are trying to do. And it wasn't intented as an analogy.

Besides the two parties are not kiwifarms and their victims. The people who are against it make arguments about free speech and whether platforms should be responsible for the content hosted on them. If it was as simple as just kiwifarms vs the victims it would be an open and shut case.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#938

Post by throwawayacc2 »

crayboff wrote: post #909
phantom_of_cato wrote: post #889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without recognising that Kiwifarms themselves were a mob That's seems like a false equivalence to me. They don't have nearly as much as power and influence as the Twitter mobs. Which entire major websites do you think the KF "mob" can get off the internet by political/social pressure? Also, if there's no avoiding the existence of mobs in the current political climate, it's better to allow all sides to have their ow…

Who do you think has more power? A group of anonymous internet "trolls" attacking and harassing an individual or the individual who can't do anything to stop it? Freedom of speech may protect against government consequences but it doesn't protect against social consequences.

> Freedom of speech may protect against government consequences but it doesn't protect against social consequences.

Whenever I see this line, all I can think is this is the exact same reasoning used by racists and homophobes and religious fanatics in the past. Maybe it’s legal for you to be gay now, but we don’t want to welcome you in our community. Maybe it’s legal for black people to buy houses in our neighbourhoods now that doesn’t mean we have to be welcoming. Maybe we can’t kill you know for being an atheist but we’ll banish you from the community.

The reason modern societies are functionally republics ( I am counting constitutional monarchies here as well ) and not direct democracies is to protect against this very phenomenon of changing societal whims.

If you subscribe to this line of thinking, remember one thing. Societal normal are constantly changing. Just as acceptance of homosexuality waxed and waned across time, just as acceptance of foreigners waxed and waned, so to it will in the future. There will come one day, maybe in our life time, maybe far into the future, when all your values will be turned upside down and it will be people like you who will find themselves persecuted. And when that happens, just tell to yourself “Freedom of speech may protect against government consequences but it doesn't protect against social consequences”

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#939

Post by account42 »

Teever wrote: post #928
phantom_of_cato wrote: post #889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without recognising that Kiwifarms themselves were a mob That's seems like a false equivalence to me. They don't have nearly as much as power and influence as the Twitter mobs. Which entire major websites do you think the KF "mob" can get off the internet by political/social pressure? Also, if there's no avoiding the existence of mobs in the current political climate, it's better to allow all sides to have their ow…

But isn't that a catch-22? If the twitter mob wasn't successful in getting KF kicked off, than KF would have been more powerful than the twitter mob? What alternative are you suggesting, that we just roll over and let these kinds of assholes ruin lives with impunity? "Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power."

We don't need to let either mob kick anyone off from the internet.

Re: Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

#940

Post by forgotpwd16 »

e2le wrote: post #483
TOMDM wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are three people dead because of KF? Not concern trolling, a google search only turned up a kiwifarms thread that _could_ have been relevant, but is now obviously inaccessable.

I do wish people would archive these pages to dissuade any doubt of wrongdoing. For the love of god, please use archive.ph or archive.org.

People do archive those pages and have seen links were posted multiple times here. The issue is those pages posted end up going against to what the people wanting KF down say.
Post reply on HN