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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Why is moving to Cloudflare dangerous?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

Moving to cloudflare gives cloudflare veto power over any attempt to access your site.

It's pretty simple, don't say Cloudflare are nazis are you will be allowed on their platform. They have been very vocal about being neutral in almost every case.

What if I say something less hateful but still negative about Cloudflare? What if I run a website like 8chan?

Why though? If you don't like a service, move elsewhere. They're not obligated to serve your site. It's the same as any brick and mortar business. If my clients attack me, I cut them loose.

There's a long way between "neutral" and "neutral in almost every case".

Not being able to speak badly about a powerful entity is a sure bad sign for things to come.

I don't think speakly badly of is the same thing as "framing" though

If we agree on what you mean by "framing" [1]:

> To make up evidence or contrive events so as to

> incriminate (a person) falsely.

I disagree that calling CloudFlare Nazis is framing them, as the purpose (assumedly) is not to incriminate. Criticizing them by likening their behaviour to that of Nazis or suggesting that the company is filled with fascists may be in reality false, but a valid criticism regardless.

[1] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/framed

But you are completely free to leave if they don't like you.

There's an overblown meme floating around that cloudflare is a man-in-the-middle attack on your SSL connection. But even if you don't use cloudflare, your SSL connection typically terminates at your cloud provider's load balancers anyway. Would people then say the load balancer is a MITM attack? At some point you just have to trust the cloud infrastructure you paid for.

That's not the issue. The issue is that as more of the web uses cloudflare, it becomes a gatekeeper of the web. Any person that cloudflare kicks out will be cut off from much of the web. (It's already happening, with people having to solve captcha like it's their day job)

Even if cloudflare doesn't misuse their power, something worse happens. Cloudflare becomes an easy OFF Switch for laws, warrants and copyright trolls to track people or kick both content and people off the internet.

I'll go one step further and simply call it a voluntary (by server owners) centralization of the web. Blocking the Daily Stormer (rightly or wrongly) shows that they are a political entity.

Or that they're a business that doesn't want that kind of publicity. Just because you have a loudspeaker and a podium at your business doesn't mean you need to let everyone walking in to your office use it. Just as Chick-fil-A chooses not to be open on Sundays, Walmart chooses to sell bullets not guns, and Dunkin chose to make their company name really stupid sounding they're allowed to make business decisions good, bad, it otherwise because they think it will be the best thing for their bottom line.

CF have booted off a neonazi site, and general filtering will very likely occur at the DNS level. At the very least, some filtering of internet content probably isn’t the worst thing in the world.

I’m not disregarding the possibility or risk, but there are far greater problems that deserve our communities attention more than CF.

So, rethorical question, how many people don't know that and have login credentials sent over a plaintext link (inside your provider but even then, between CF and your site)?

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