It is worth remembering that DS had claimed that Cloudflare's management secretly supported DS ideas/worldview/etc. There was a reputation problem brewing for them, so they decided to drop one customer to keep a lot of others.
Cloudflare's CEO has basically come out and admitted that now it was powerful well connected individuals threatening him instead.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/24/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-princ...
"The Daily Stormer then raised the stakes with a claim that Cloudflare's management was supportive of its ultra-nationalist ideology."
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
>“The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
I suppose Cloudflare customers should make sure to censor what gets posted on their sites if it refers to the political opinions of Matthew Prince.
Please source it directly. Where did we make this claim? We have not removed any Cloudflare related content from any of our articles. Our site is currently up at dailystormer.cat -- you're free to search it, as well as archive sites like archive.is for dailystormer.com. We never made any claim like this. It is simply a lie on the part of Matthew Prince, trying to spin the fact that he isn't an anti-DDoS company anymore as long as the DDoS traffic comes in the form of valid SMTP from powerful individuals and SJW mobs.
I ask that in light of two recent HN articles that explain how IPFS works.
It's a bit surprising to hear your assertion, as I've only ever heard that "Daily Stormer" egged Cloudflare on. This was easy to accept, as it falls into the general pattern of trolling. But if this tidbit was actually malinterpreted and amplified by the media to flesh out their narrative, it gives a whole new face to the situation - don't let a good crisis go to waste and all that.
(FWIW I'm not in agreement with your specific political view here. But most people in the world are some type of asshole, and yet I still believe in their right to communicate freely).
We never made any such claim, but it is obviously irrelevant even if we had. Did we also claim that GoDaddy, Google, RU-CENTER, 101domains, Zoho, Sendgrid, Namecheap, Dreamhost, and a dozen other things I can't even remember were secretly Nazis supporting us? No, but Cloudflare dropped us with them and came up with a really fucking lame excuse to try to pretend that we were a special case.
We're not a special case. We're the only legitimate opposition to the establishment. The establishment came to him and made him an offer he couldn't refuse. If he had integrity, he would be honest about it. Now he's a bitch and a liar, whereas he could have been just a bitch.
It also hinges greatly on what you mean by "The establishment came to him and made him an offer he couldn't refuse". This reads as if you're referencing a top-down collusion to silence your type of speech, whereas I think it's more likely that these companies are worried about populist/democratic outrage affecting their image. Same result for you, same chilling effect on free speech, same dynamic where centralized communications administrators are ultimately forced to censor. But stemming from a completely different power mechanism and thus needing a very different approach to tackle.
From TFA I posted:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/24/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-princ...
>The CEO who pulled the final plug on the neo-Nazi web site Daily Stormer said he removed it from his company's Internet service to protect his firm's business in the run-up to a potential initial public offering (IPO). >"We were worried that people would say, 'We won't work with you anymore,'" Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told CNBC.
..
>But then comments from others forced the hand of Prince, who co-founded the company with COO Michelle Zatlyn in mid-2009. >First, another CEO "whom I admire," Prince said, tweeted that Cloudlare should boot the Daily Stormer off its services, as its rivals had done.
It doesn't care at all about the mob (the same mob is right now demanding that they shut off other sites, and they are ignoring them) but rather about the enterprise clients that comprise the majority of their revenue.
Really though, this is just splitting hairs. The difference between "CF was angry that DS claimed CF supported their views," "CF was being pressured by its biggest and most valuable customers," and "CF was concerned that keeping DS as a customer would negatively impact their IPO" is just a small detail. The point is that having DS as a customer is bad for business and CF, like all those other companies, decided that it was time to protect their business. What specifically prompted that decision is not too important -- it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
Don't play coy about the nature of your site. Almost nobody actually wants websites like DS to exist and DS is toxic to the brand of any company that does business with it. The existence DS is merely tolerated as an unfortunate consequence of free speech, something which is outweighed by the various benefits of a democratic society. Your ability to remain online at all is tolerated as an unfortunate consequence of the free and open nature of the Internet. Maybe you cannot see that, but it's not hard for the rest of us.
As to your counter claim ("We never made such a claim.") you need to understand that you are asking us to believe you rather than Cloudflare. As the Daily Stormer you have zero credibility.
What you do have is legal recourse. If you feel you've been libeled then sue Cloudflare. That is your right in a court of law. But your expectation of credence, no. Moreover, the lack of this lawsuit lowers your credibility below zero.
You are suing for damage to your reputation such as it is. You may be able to find some law firm to take you on pro bono or for a substantial cut of the proceeds. The Berkeley Patriot found a lawyer (and they have zero money) to take on UC Berkeley [1] (who has hella money). However, if you will not protect your reputation then asking reasonable people to believe you, The Daily Stormer, well, that is a bit much.
[1] http://www.dailycal.org/2017/09/22/berkeley-patriot-files-ci...
He's not asking us to believe anyone. Cloudflare made an accusation that should be easily provable. The fact Cloudflare and nobody in this thread has been able to come up with a single quote supporting Cloudflare's accusation is pretty damning.
Where/when did they claim that?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/16/cloudflare_ceo_dail...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
We have 1. Cloudfare has a powerful need to justify their actions, 2. The person they're making these claims against has drastically reduced ability to provide his side of the story, thanks to Cloudfare's actions, 3. They already did one thing that most people believed they would never do, in arbitrarily terminating services to a site they didn't like, are we really going to make the claim that they would absolutely never twist somebody's words to serve their own purposes?
I don't think they straight made something up, but I can certainly believe that they took a quote out of context, interpreted something creatively, or misrepresented a post on their forum as an official statement by the site owner. In what other situation with such a powerful conflict of interests would we take the word of somebody in Cloudfare's position at face value?
> 2. The person they're making these claims against has drastically reduced ability to provide his side of the story, thanks to Cloudfare's actions…
Given the clickbait / pageview drive of modern “news” online, I think that someone at the middle of a hotly debated issue such as this could find many outlets happy to quote them on a perceived scandal. It has the potential to the flames and generates yet more controversy.
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
>“The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”