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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

I tried their enterprise tier out about 9 months ago and was entirely unimpressed. Moving a site from Akamai -> CF increased page load times dramatically. We ended up quickly switching back.

CloudFlare's complicity with ISIS, however, was what turned me off permanently. For those unaware, CloudFlare was providing proxy shielding of ISIS's propaganda websites. The CF CEO publicly refused to discontinue their service, taking an anti-censorship, pro-free-speech stance. His absolutist views didn't sit well with me and I consider their servicing of these domains to be aiding and abetting this criminal organization.

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Interesting. This is the first I have heard of this and CloudFlare's reputation has just gone up my eyes because of it.

Is ISIS dangerous and deplorable? Sure. Are there ideas so dangerous that they do not deserve to be exposed to public discourse and judged on their merits? I don't think so.

I don't follow; CloudFlare is not the government, therefore freedom of expression isn't really the issue here. Who they choose to give a voice to says a lot about them.

I would oppose the government censoring ISIS; however, I would be proud of any company that refused to to business with them.

Shouldn't you also be upset over all the other service providers including your own ISP that also doesn't block those sites? Unless it's specifically against protecting people against criminal activity, in which case we are really going down a slippery slope.

>Shouldn't you also be upset over all the other service providers including your own ISP that also doesn't block those sites?

I would argue that the moral dilemma is different if you choose to allow ISIS traffic to pass through you, vs have them as a client.

I would argue it's better for them to have their own site rather than fostering a samizdat culture.

It might, but the business model Cloudflare is on makes the distinction less clear. For example with their free plans would they need to identify all clients, scan their content and judge accordingly?

For paid clients, I might be more sympathetic to the argument, but even then the (moral?) rules (for nonbusiness) are incredibly tricky to figure out and keep consistent. Selective enforcement is bad for everyone in the uncertainty it spawns.

>For example with their free plans would they need to identify all clients, scan their content and judge accordingly?

Ever heard of this little thing called abuse reports?

> Who they choose to give a voice to says a lot about them.

I don't think they're choosing to give anyone specific a voice. I think they're choosing not to make judgement calls.

Once you start blocking anyone, you've weakened your ability to refuse to block others. You'd see greater demands for blocking Wikileaks, censoring articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime, enforcing Europe's right-to-be-forgotten, etc. on the basis of "well you were willing to block ISIS".

CloudFlare isn't the government, and so they are under no legal obligation to allow certain content. But their hands-off approach is precisely what gives them the rational standing not to censor any website any group finds distasteful. Furthermore, the threat of censorship does not only come from governments. I don't want to live in a world where a handful of corporations can decide what speech is allowed to be disseminated. Opinions like yours lead us head first to such a world.

If no ISP will host your content, then your message cannot reach anyone, and you effectively have no freedom of expression.

I wonder why you oppose government censorship, if you applaud private businesses achieving the same effect? Certainly your reasons cant be the same as the post you're replying to[0], and so you're missing their point.

[0] in particular Are there ideas so dangerous that they do not deserve to be exposed to public discourse and judged on their merits? I don't think so.

How about sites that let you remove someone else's free speech? Cloudflare provides services for those too (DDoS-as-a-service).

Cloudflare may be under court order by the DoD to keep ISIS on their network and protecting classified information with the free speech rationalization. Anti terrorist operations are much easier to conduct when the terrorists are using American communications infrastructure.

I actually get this. If they don't take a hardline on censorship, they would be inundated with "offended" people wanted every site on the Internet removed from their edge caches because someone in the world found them offensive. Much better to just say, "We don't censor, take it up with the website owner!"

What would you prefer their policy on censorship be? Though I was unaware of CloudFlare and this situation, I believe that one compromise can easily lead to a slippery slope.

How do you see protocols (bittorrent or ipfs, for example) where content can not be removed as long as someone has a copy - are we better off without their existence in your opinion?

ISIS, for all we know, could become a legitimate government in a context where legitimacy is clearly unclear. Why do we want CloudFlare to be involved in international politics and middle eastern wars?

Should an American business have an opinion on what Muslims, and other interested parties, ought to be viewing over the web with respect to ISIS? I would hope not. CloudFlare should not be in the business of judging whether Muslims and others are vulnerable to brainwashing from ISIS and need the protection of CloudFlare censorship, lest their fragile worldviews become corrupted.

Let the people of that region judge for themselves the future of their land.

CloudFlare is also complicit with DDoS for sale websites. People have asked them to remove them or reveal their ips to report but they have refused. Here are a few of them.

http://cyberstresser.com/

https://spboot.net/

https://alphastress.com

https://vdos-s.com/

I'm curious if you think ISPs should block ISIS websites, domains, and IP addresses.

It should be entirely up to the ISP. Consequently, the ISP's customers can judge (with their spending) whether they approve of such blocking.

No they can't, at least not in America.

Actually they could, but they would lose their common carrier (see a sibling comment) protections.

To the extent that they are not prohibited from doing so, they would also not lose common carrier status if they did. The rules applied to ISPs under Title II -- the FCC's recent Open Internet Order -- do not prohibit blocking unlawful content, only lawful content.

Common carrier[0] as a concept exists for good reasons, while cloudflare is not technically required to act as one, it just makes perfect sense to not have to make a ambigious content based judgement call for each of your clients.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

In many many places, especially in the states there is no such thing as being able to judge with their spending because of monopolies.

On the flip side, if they were offering TLS services to these sites, they're literally man-in-the-middling encrypted comms to those sites. And in scope of US law-enforcement/intel collection.

Might be that they were asked to continue to provide services.

I think it's perfectly valid ISIS have a platform. Gagging angry people is not going to calm them down or prevent them from communicating.

That's not entirely true. ISIS fuels its ground combat force with angry young people recruited via predominately through social media. The social media often consists of video sharing and much of the video is served up from sites like isdarat.tv (now apparently gone) that are/were fronted by CloudFlare. YouTube and Facebook are efficient with their censoring; ISIS needs stable hosting for these videos for maximum efficacy and CF provided them with that.

Gagging these people certainly won't calm them down or stop their communication but it has a real effect on their recruitment, which is directly driving their combat operations in the Middle East and as a second-order effect, the flood of refugees to Europe.

Citation, please. I hugely doubt censorship has clear, measurable effect on recruitment. Among other things it's got to increase resentment of the western world.

Finally, there may be extenuating circumstances of which we aren't aware. Perhaps CloudFlare is granting them use of data in exchange for not cutting cables. When you're that big your presence is indistinguishable from the internet itself.

EDIT: Have a look at this: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA18/20150127/102855/HHRG-...

I cannot readily cite any scholarly papers on this subject; this is from my observations as a frequent reader of /r/syriancivilwar, jihadology.net, and Iraq/Syria-related social media content. The typical pattern is for ISIS to release a video to their propaganda sites and for jihadist social media users to tweet the link.

al-Ḥayāt Media Center (ISIS's media outlet) relies on the ease of distribution via protected (proxied) channels to reach their large audiences. The reach of this content would be more limited if companies like CF wouldn't shield it.

That's doesn't sound much different than UK asking Facebook and Google to censor "extremist speech" on their platforms.

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