Any news on a fight against targeted harassment and murder attempts?
Prior coverage of Near's incredible dedication to accurate emulation via decapping actual SNES ROMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675123
Worth noting is that the admins of that forum removes anything illegal and they make fun of everyone acting silly regardless of politics / ideology.
They have been having some trouble with n00bs trolling. What do you expect when the media and, frankly, most of you spend 7 years telling everybody it's a 'trolling and harassing forum', i.e. lying through your blueteeth, just because you want to see the site gone. The thread I was going to link is the sole site admin literally begging the n00bs (people who've joined relatively recently and think trolling is cool) to stop trolling the subjects. There are a lot of joke threads and the Kiwis are ironic in the extreme, but that thread is not a joke thread. It's been Josh's stance forever: look and laugh, don't mess with them. If you're an asshole and you want to make dumb trolling plans, do it elsewhere. It isn't just the admin and the mods, either. Pretty much all of the OG users have always tried to quash trolling talk as much as they can. What the hell else can they do? They can't control what a few of their thousands of users do off-site.
Ask yourself if you want a global pseudo-public internet where any one of its critical private infrastructure companies can de facto censor the planet-wide web at the request of aggrieved Twitter mobs. Ugh. I don't think I have the energy for this today.
It sucks for the people using it in the way it was intended but I would hope that they would agree their "fun" stops being fun when it's actively harming people.
In fact, even the person posting something like medical misinformation can't normally be sued.
This is a tremendous misunderstanding of LibsOfTiktok, for starters. The vast majority of content posted by LOTT is no longer social media content to be mocked. The majority is:
1. Event announcements, particularly for queer events, accompanied by a call to shut them down; naturally, their followers do so via a combination of attack threats and actual attacks on the events
2. news articles, some real and some hoax, framing the targets of (1) as acceptable targets
"The account, run by Brooklyn real estate agent Chaya Raichik, tweeted on August 11 that “Boston Children's Hospital is now offering ‘gender-affirming hysterectomies’ for young girls.” The claim has been widely debunked by fact-checking groups—but as is typical in anti-trans rhetoric, facts rarely matter, and the claims were shared widely on right-wing social media accounts."
What fun, silly stuff they have going on over at LibsOfTikTok. no one should have to be tolerant of intolerance.
They treat hosting like a utility and I’m glad they do. It’s not Cloudflare’s job to determine what I’m allowed to read online.
2. https://clarionproject.org/wp-content/uploads/islamic-state-... (Warning this is very NSFW.)
Do you expect the power company to cut off power to that forum? The water company? How about the power and water companies cutting power to known members of the forum, to "fight against targeted harassment and murder"?
Or has Kiwi Farms been shown in a court of law to have engaged in the behavior you describe?
But we should still be cautious about how broad a TOS it might be, what evidence is required, what due-process and appeals are available. Every other day there is some post on HN saying "Big Service provider shut down my site overnight without warning!" but that is consequence anti-abuse systems policing customer activity and badly implemented systems are going to have negative consequences. The obvious cases make it seems easier than it actually is to build fair systems.
We learned this the hard way during the Civil Rights Movement: there needs to be some public participation in the restrictions that private businesses can place on their customer base.
Sometimes you have to move forward without 100% agreement and stop listening to trolls making slippery-slope arguments.
Targeting a politician they don't like in-case it actually worked breaks the narrative and makes the red-flag more obvious though..
Secondly, I forget where but somewhere in the site rules or in Josh's Plea it explicitly states "DO NOT UPSET THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IN ANY WAY". So again. A current moderator SWATing MTG - WHILE the site is under intense and very possibly existential scrutiny already? Come on.
It's been an ongoing issue for quite a while but in the last few days there seems to be some effort to make them not ignore it and spread the knowledge.
The behavior of Kiwifarms and their users has been documented often and deep enough to say that this is no longer a "he said they said" territory.
The rule of law and due process are important factors. While you are personally free to refuse your own business to anyone based on any criteria you like, demanding and expecting others to do so based on what is ultimately hearsay is pure entitlement.
Operating a global business does not absolve the business from the need to prevent harm caused by it, in fact some form of abuse management has been expected from any good Internet citizen since its inception, e.g. in Usenet [0] or e-mail in general [1].
Or for a real-life equivalent: if I were to stand outside of the home of a person and blaring into a megaphone that she deserve to die... I'd at least get the cops called on me for a noise violation or a harassment charge, and if I were to incite others or coordinate their behavior, I would get a conspiracy charge. Why should Internet trolls enjoy legal protection for the same behavior?
They shouldn't, but why would a coffee-shop down the street be held responsible for not serving them? This is the equivalent of what some people are asking of Cloudflare.
I fully support people suing, or demanding the police or whoever is responsible investigate, KF. By most accounts, they are a horrible organization that are attacking and causing harm in the world. But we call the police when someone harasses us, we don't ask strangers to stop doing business with our harasser.
Who is to say that they haven't done this already? It's been almost an entire week - not taking action could be very well be the reaction. Albeit not the one you are hoping to see. They don't owe you or anyone an explanation and anything they state could just be turned around against them by the next angry Twitter mob next week.
> Or for a real-life equivalent: if I were to stand outside of the home of a person and blaring into a megaphone
No. That is not equivalent to what is happening here. It's more like a bunch of people making fun of someone in a backyard, with the subject frequently walking by, taking offense, and then calling for the offender's landlord to break their lease with the occupant for allowing mean things to be said. If someone in real life called the police over this they'd be laughed at and told to walk down a different street next time.
> Why should Internet trolls enjoy legal protection for the same behavior?
They don't. If an internet troll commits a crime then they have no special protection from prosecution. And on the civil side if an internet troll is posting untrue defamatory content then there is also recourse for the victim.
In fact as far as the legal system is concerned, the call by "Keffals" to attempt to intentionally damage the business relationship that kiwifarms has with Cloudflare falls dangerously close to tortious interference [0] in the US and something similar in Canada. The owner of kiwifarms may even have a civil case against them.
The problem is, trolls always escalate their behavior if left unchecked - the best example is actually 4chan. Eventually the most notorious user base moved over to 8chan/8kun, and then Christchurch happened. Or they hound people so aggressively that they see no other option to escape than killing themselves, because the police can't help when hundreds of peopple call in pizzas, delivery services or the police themselves. Hell even moving away doesn't help, some stalkers doxxed Keffals from the linen pattern of her hotel bed, others have doxxed people based off on reflections in their window.
What the hell was I trying to say... Oh. Yeah I really didn't want to get into the moral side, but I had to say a bit. What I really wanted to say here is simply that you will never hear one single word of protest from me if law enforcement ever investigates Lolcow LLC, charges, and convicts. Or any individual user for that matter. The admin himself has made it as clear as anyone can to his users that if they commit crimes he won't hesitate to hand over evidence if he has it. And as I said elsewhere, do not make the mistake of thinking that's some wink, wink, nudge joke to him. The guy is already tied up in litigation constantly and he doesn't enjoy it. I'm just sick and fucking tired of mob justice on the internet and in the media, and I am neither a pragmatist nor a consequentialist so to me the ends don't justify the means unless my own blood family are in the crosshairs. Sort it the fuck out legally, preferably without trashing the US Constitution.
Well, no one forces him to run a forum for the world's most vile scumbags. Maybe, just maybe, being embroiled in lawsuits for years is society's moderate way of telling him "hey, what you're doing is widely seen as unacceptable". If it's worth the stress and money for him, okay, but he's not in any position to whine around. He can sleep in a pig sty all he wants, but ffs don't complain when other people say he stinks like a pig.
> so to me the ends don't justify the means unless my own blood family are in the crosshairs. Sort it the fuck out legally, preferably without trashing the US Constitution.
Well, there we have the classic dispute between people from the US and partially the UK on the free-speech absolutist side and the Continental European viewpoint that some sorts of speech and actions need to be banned for a healthy society, given the learnings of the NS dictatorship and the Soviet gulags on just how depraved humans can act upon each other.
Personally, as a German I see way too many parallels between the current USA and the pre-1933 Germany for my liking, in particular the regular bloodshedding and the attempt of the far right to deny marginalized people (especially Jews and LGBT, it's disturbing how history repeats itself) their right to a peaceful existence. And platforms like the xChans, Kiwifarms, but also due to their inaction on moderation Facebook, Twitter and Youtube play a massive role in this.
I don't have much else to say that's worth arguing about. I just wanted to say that I acknowledge that you have a perspective on it that I can't have, and if I were in your shoes I'm pretty sure I would not ignore my intuition on this. As far as what I would do about it.... That's going to take some number of sleeps to think on.
Oh and Josh doesn't whine. He's kind of the dutiful servant. I think if you read his writing you'd see he actually speaks with a consciousness of the other side's point of view that almost nobody ever does when they're embroiled in this type of war where nobody will cede an inch. But that isn't enough for people. They won't accept anything short of him changing his mind.
I'm whining for him :)
When cloudflare accept provinding service to a customer they are linking their brand to whatever their customer do.. Should they not have the right to stop serving this customer if they are doing indirect damage to cloudflare business??
If someone get murdered because someone did something in a site hosted by cloudflare, sure cloudflare is not direct responsible for causing that murder but they do share the moral repercutions of it.. it sure get people asking, would that person not have being murded if cloudflare did not provide this site with the plataform they used to achieve this murder??
Having their brand linked to a site like this can be damaging to their brand\business\moral stance and they would be totally within their right to stop proving service for that..
as for the site/company/organization, cloudflare is not the only player around, if cloudflare stop providing service they can move somewhere else, they can even buy their own servers and host it themselves if no third-party hosting is willing to provide then services..
If you don't like a website, don't use it. Don't try to prevent others from using it.
Sure Cloudflare could drop them but the reason people want Kiwi Farms to loose Cloudflare is because they are DDoSing them. What is a DDoS protection worth if all it takes to circumvent it are a few people screeching on social media?
>buy their own servers and host it themselves
They are doing it already [0]
[0]: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-10-28/where-sidewalk-end...
The people screenching need to convince the company leadership that keeping this customer will do more damage to their business then dropping then..
It is not like cloudflare could this this left and right all the time.. If cloudflare started dropping any customer for even the smallest issues it would cause massive damage to their brand and no one would use then anymore.. So they need to weigh in the pros and con every time they make this decision..
>They are doing it already [0]
Then if the problem is DDOS they could go to someone else to get their DDOS protection from, cloudflare is not the only solution around..
As last resort they even are free to buy the necessary link withstand a DDOS attack if no one is willing to offer their DDOS protection service..
Or they could distribute their servers around the world so a single ddos is unlikely to take then out..
They have many options other then cloudflare..
I guess you haven't read the article because the whole article is about why it's not that easy as you portray it. I don't want to to recite everything but for instance "NTT refuses to peer with any company that peers with my subnet" He can't use anything that peers with NTT (a Tier 1 transit provider).
But why should they be entitled to ddos protection??
If they want to keep a site that many people find nasty in the air and that other companies refuse to have their brand linked to they have to deal with the technical hurdles of it..
Same way you can’t get to a newspaper and demand they publish you, same as you can’t force tv channel to give you air time..
While you can still publish your own newspaper and have your own tv channel, it is still hard and expensive as hell..
Internet access sure should be neutral like a utility, hosting other people content should not..
So sure, they have the right to have access to the internet and keep their site in it.. this does not means they should be able to force other help then against their will to keep it online when they are unable to do so, like in the case of a ddos..
You have te right to say what you want, but this does not give you the right to force other to provide you with a platform..