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Comment by nawgz | Hacker News Reader

Not a lawyer, but this seems like a good result for the internet.

You were downvoted at my time of reading this; but, I have to agree. We constantly talk about how copyright enforcement on memes, etc, would break the internet, and we're constantly yelling about YouTube breaking Fair Use exceptions of copyrighted material, and so on.

Cloudflare not being forced to take down content due to claimed copyright infringement seems exactly in line with protecting the internet and freedom of thought and creativity as a whole.

I'd love to know why people are against it.

They can still choose to take down copyright infringing material, but they're not obligated by power of the gun / legal / monetary / use-of-force rammifications.

Edit: disclosure: of course I'm not a lawyer, etc, blah blah.

You know cloudflare still chooses arbitrarily to remove sites from their service, right? What we are talking about here is one small sliver of the pie, so while this one thing (piracy) wont get you yanked, your political beliefs will (and have).

Cloudflare has great utility that benefits a lot of us, but I think some day we will realize how much this centralization is a tradeoff that hurts the internet as a whole, no matter how cool the people are who work there.

The centralisation isn't Cloudflare's fault, it's the consequence of a world where botnets can pump 100gbps at you.

What's the trade-off here? They protect you from DDoS attacks and it's great, vs they don't and your site goes down? I don't really understand what's being traded off here.

They protect you from DDoS attacks, except:

• They see – and usually HTTPS MitM, all the traffic. (I trust them not to abuse that… just about.)

• When Cloudflare goes down (which it does), lots of stuff goes down at once. Your redundancy is for nothing.

• Centralisation of power enables abuse of power; no matter how good you are, you will abuse your power. I (a generally well-meaning person) have relatively little power, so my small abuses basically harm nobody. Cloudflare has massive power, so its small abuses can harm tens of people each.

• Their CAPTCHA walls reduce accessibility, discriminate against Tor users, and make Cloudflare-“protected” sites unusable on a wide variety of systems. Since Cloudflare's the only Cloudflare, a webmaster who doesn't like this basically has to lump it.

All a webmaster who doesn't like it has to do is not use Cloudflare. If you need Cloudflare then you need TLS MiTM and those Captchas and you are glad they exist. If you don't need Cloudflare and don't like them then just don't use them.

Like it or not those features exist to fill actual needs from the sites Cloudflare protects.

There are ways to make accessible CAPTCHAs. It's possible to not discriminate against Tor users unless somebody's attacking the site from Tor. Cloudflare does neither of these things.

Cloudflare's CAPTCHA is now hCaptcha, which uses Cloudflare. If you want to get an “accessibility token” (or whatever) to bypass the inaccessible CAPTCHAs, you may have to first complete CAPTCHAs.

The need for having Cloudflare is itself, to some extent, result of too much centralization. The massive DDoS attacks, which Cloudflare protects you from, require some amount of resources or at least risk taking, and are worth it only for big enough targets. No-one orchestrates a huge attack against a website with 1000 visitors per month; DDoSing an IRC network is pretty useless, because if one server is taken down, another can be used and the attacker doesn't really achieve much.

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