Cloudflare Pressured to Drop Kiwi Farms After Latest Doxing Effort | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare Pressured to Drop Kiwi Farms After Latest Doxing Effort

dailydot.com

55 pointsIfOnlyYouKnew27 comments

A reminder that Cloudflare kicked off Switter, a social network for sex workers with zero notice, and zero evidence of any harms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876040 https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla...

A reminder that Cloudflare is a private company. They can choose who to do business with. They are fully entitled to kick any entity off their service for any reason or no reason at all.

A reminder that private companies are not exempt from criticism merely because their actions are within the letter of the law.

Criticism is detrimental to the originator if it is not valid. My reminder was pointing out the invalidity of the "criticism". It is not a criticism to point out totally normal behaviour of a company. It is like saying "American Airlines kicked out two people not following the crew's instructions from their flight, even though they had paid for tickets!".

It's their company, their plane, their website, their platform. Obey the rules or GTFO.

Let me get this right: private companies/citizens can drop business from anybody with zero notice and any amount of harm because "they're private", but private companies/citizens can't express criticism because harm? Do I get that right, is that your reasoning?

Private entities you like can do anything and private entities you don't like can't do anything to the ones you like, because?

People can criticize. I never said they can't! I'm just saying the particular criticism in this case was quite lame and didn't make any sense.

Where?

How many articles, podcasts, tweets, and comment replies did it take to finally put a dent into the endless repetition of the myths about Section 230? Cloudfare is continuing to use the very same faulty logic: that, somehow, preventing the most egregious misuse of their service would create some sort of requirement to do so perfectly, in every case, or to assume liability for everything crossing their servers.

There is no such mechanism in either law, logic, or morality.

Morally, rescuing a drowning child does not create a requirement for you to rescue every person in danger of drowning, everywhere. Because that would obviously disincentivize anyone from ever helping, and it would also just be impossible to do.

Legally, there just is no law or principle of that kind. The laws that exists, for specific domains, do the opposite: Good Samaritan Laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law) protecting individuals rendering help, as in the drowning-child example, from any liability, including for failing in that very rescue effort, for whatever reason.

More similar to the Cloudflare case, Section 230 does exactly the same, but for publishers on the web.

As to logic: if you once jumped into the water and got that child out, just in time, people may indeed expect you to do it again, under similar or easier circumstances, because they remember that you are a good swimmer.

But in the Cloudflare case, acting in the obvious case does not change anything, because there is absolutely no doubt that they have the ability to shut down any customer they do not want on their service. Doing so therefore does not give any (valid) extra ammunition to further requests to act.

Is this like going after the frackers supplying natural gas to the power companies that heat the homes of nazis?

No, it's like going after IG Farben for supplying Zyklon B.

Preventing ddos is like manufacturing Zyklon B?

Cloudflare is not used to prevent ddos in this case, but to hide the identity and the actual hosting service of kf, so that they can't be pressured/sued. And apparently for legal defence since cloudflare was happy to proactively protect them in court.

No. Kiwifarms requires cloudflare DDoS protection to stay operational. Denying them that service would pose a serious issue to its continued existence, possibly leading to it going off the internet.

Have we really reached a point where DDoS mitigations are useless unless they're done by cloudflare and nobody else has a chance of keeping a site from being forced offline by these attacks?

I'd like to think that cloudflare isn't the final word on who is able to maintain a web-presence, or at the very least that they have competitors capable of offering a sufficient (if unequal) level of protection, but I honestly don't know.

There are other companies providing this service. It's not the ddos protection they're after though, but rather the identity / origin protection. Everyone else has been dropping them pretty quickly - only cloudflare is ok with using their lawyers to actively protect the attempted murders.

The person who runs Kiwifarms is deeply, deeply mentally sick. As are the users he's cultivated on that twisted ecochamber of hatred

https://i.imgur.com/cpk8z8W.png

He posted to the forum decrying his users for immolating anyone they could possibly get their hands on. Talked about how they've been booted from hundreds of hosting providers over the years and how he's spent thousands of dollars keeping that hateful raft of shit afloat

And then concludes by saying "we are in the right"

The person who lead the charge to cause Byuu/Near, a person who spent over 20 years of their life on a Super Nintendo emulator to end their own life proudly proclaims they're "in the right"

These people need to be sectioned

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