Comment by stevenicr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenicr | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the most disturbing things I've read this year. Now I definitely do not feel like any of my sites are safe on cloudflare.

I would appreciate even more transparency details to be published. When talking about cloudflare following the rule of law - will you all be more specific about which countries and which locales?

There are rules in the UK I have read about that people wanted to bust through cloudflare to get to people.

Will the countries that have anti-gay laws be included in this rule of law thing? What about ones that have laws about sex info? How about religions?

How many people need to be up in arms about something before cloudflare ejects something? If we get enough of religion A to be angry about the lawless killing espoused in Religion B's texts - can we get all of the various religious sites ejected?

To read that this is all going on with cloudflare is terrible - but I am glad you all decided to share that you have also monitoring web site content and sending information to multiple law enforcement agencies as well.

I'm shocked, but not surprised at this point. As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will. It's been rolling down that hill ever since it seems.

Cloudflare has really opened the floodgates to be used for additional censoring by many other groups and gov agencies at this point.

The internet needs more anti-ddos options aside from this has been company.

I have personally suffered months of agony from people using 4chan in the past, but I would not ask internet companies to shut them down. Around that time is when I started looking for a service like cloudflare. It was too easy to dox and ddos - cloudflare helped.

Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well.

There will likely be an 18chan dot com and a 818chan dot com and a blackerhatter dot net and a... I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places.

"Now I definitely do not feel like any of my sites are safe on cloudflare."

Now I definitely have some idea, what your sites are all about ;-)

>Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well.

They have done this several times in the past, but don’t talk about it publicly.

>As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will.

So what makes the nazis special to you? Cloudflare had banned many other sites prior to that.

oh, I did not know. It's not the nazis were special, that was the first take down that I was aware of - so to me that take down was the crack in the damn that would make it so all the other groups around the world could now point fingers and say take down 'xyz' and 'abc' because you can do it, that proves that you can.

> As soon as stormer was removed you changed from being a dumb pipe infrastructure company into one that can eject and censor at will.

You're defending the Daily Stormer, do I read that correctly?

> I look forward to an updating listing of sites that are not reachable via the cloudflare internet in various places.

Cloudflare is not "the Internet". If Stormer or 8chan get kicked off of them, you can still access them if they find an upstream provider - which Stormer managed to do and 8chan likely will, too.

> Are you guys also going to pull service for blackhat hacker forums? I've suffered from posts on those as well.

I would seriously hope that this happens rather sooner than later.

> You're defending the Daily Stormer, do I read that correctly?

I don't think that's a fair reading of it - he's attacking CloudFlare's decision to remove it, not defending the Daily Stormer per se (in a "I will defend to the death your right to say it" sort of way was my reading of it).

  You're defending the Daily Stormer,
  do I read that correctly?

No, you're reading that incorrectly.

stevenicr is referring to Cloudflare's values of "total content neutrality" [1] where they argued they were similar to a 'common carrier' and should provide services to everyone, like a phone company or mail service would.

Such values have been articulated by Cloudflare's CEO himself [2].

Hence, the DDoS protection service would protect the Taliban, child pornographers, stolen credit card sellers, DDoS-as-a-service providers and, yes, neo-nazis. So this policy had odious consequences, but was at least consistent and clearly articulated.

The new policy seems a lot less clear - drop service to neo-nazis, by all means. But why haven't they dropped the Taliban and paedophiles and DDoS providers and carders at the same time?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cloudflare&oldid=... [2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/

> stevenicr is referring to Cloudflare's values of "total content neutrality" [1] where they argued they were similar to a 'common carrier' and should provide services to everyone, like a phone company or mail service would.

...in the US

All of these free speech arguments need to be really clear that they're talking about the extremist version of freedom of speech used in the US.

Other countries have postal services and phone companies that place limits on what can be sent over them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com