Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

"Doxxing" doesn't restrict someone else's free speech. It just discourages them from conducting speech under their public identity.

If you ask me, what they ought to do is "counter-dox" the KiwiForum users and give them a taste of their own medicine.

Ex: we have a pretty clear innocent until proven guilty justice system. This means there will always be people who are guilty who will not be punished. We can make that less likely by just throwing every suspect into jail. This protects the general public better then the current system. But most will agree that the cost of this is too high. So we don't do it. That doesn't mean we don't want the protect the public from criminals.

The people who are against cloudflare banning kiwifarms aren't debating for who to protect. They are debating about the cost of that protection.

That's seems like a false equivalence to me. They don't have nearly as much as power and influence as the Twitter mobs. Which entire major websites do you think the KF "mob" can get off the internet by political/social pressure?

Also, if there's no avoiding the existence of mobs in the current political climate, it's better to allow all sides to have their own.

> I know who I think is more worthy of protection.

People with backing from almost all social major institutions, corporations, and academia?

>[...]

>Domain Registrar

>Cloudflare was both our application-level DDoS mitigation and our domain registrar. They have given me a way to transfer my domains to another registrar. I do not know what registrar to send it to because I do not have faith in any company.

>DDoS Mitigation

>DDoS-Guard will drop us dropped us while I was writing this post. This meme about Russia being a free country is a joke. The US is a free country, but with no stewards to protect it. Without the US, there is no second best. I did not expect Cloudflare to crumple so quickly and I don't have a Plan C for DDoS mitigation.

>Resource Allocation

>I own IP addresses. Our IP allocation is from APNIC. APNIC is one of the 5 private companies which allocate Internet resources around the world. APNIC happens to be based out of Australia, which recently passed draconian censorship laws. There is an effort to get our RIR to revoke our allocation. This would be unprecedented in the history of the Internet, and considering China is in APNIC's region, an absolutely horrific standard which will echo throughout the upcoming decades. There is a non-zero chance of this happening.

>Hosting

>We have one host and I am looking at two more. It is likely that the host will give up too. The two hosts confident they can handle the Kiwi Farms are probably wrong. DDoS-Guard was confident they could handle the Kiwi Farms and said "bring it on" for less than 24 hours

>[...]

It seems like this guy is getting completely unplugged from the internet infrastructure because every company sees him as a liability. Well, there's always onionbalance for these types I guess.

[0] http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz...

That’s frankly terrible. Sites infamous for promoting harassment can’t be hosted anymore. Clearly a tremendous loss for the internet. /s

Nobody puts him in jail. Nobody takes away his right to make a living or his children or his home. They just send a clear message: Don't bring that sort of thing around here. Don't bring it around us. There's no point in engaging in a dialogue with that person. Sure, you allow them to speak, in that you don't respond to that speech with violence or prosecution. But you don't have to make room for it.

We can't and shouldn't have the government stepping in to say what speech is or is not allowed. And in the United States, we don't. Russia is another matter, but as the post says, the idea that that means every Russian person or company is OK with things this awful is not true.

What that means, though, is that if there are sentiments so odious (and in some cases, literally dangerous, but not illegal) that our free society doesn't think it's appropriate to support a venue for their discussion, it's up to that society writ large, not government, to limit that discussion. There is nothing wrong with fostering a societal sense that there is no room in our world for the kind of shit that Kiwi Farms spewed, even if it is legal. There is nothing wrong with expecting large companies to live up to that standard.

So I don't see this as scary, at all. I see it as a relief. I see it as a free society working the way it's supposed to, with some caveats. (I still don't love how much power large corporate entities have, but not for this reason, exactly.) And I think there are a lot of people out there whose lives are safer because of it.

Edit: For people who haven't seen it, here's the scene I reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA

Kiwi Farms is a societal antagonist. The paradox of tolerance shows us that we need to not tolerate assholes like them.

This whole idea that there's a "mob" that's "screaming loud enough" is, in this case, is just the rest of well-adjusted society refusing to tolerate these assholes.

I think of it this way: if I build something that's "agnostic" and still offer it to someone I know is harming others, and in some cases committing crimes or enabling them, that means a part of my labor is helping that act, and my service is no longer agnostic. It's almost like I am working for them.

If I know who my customer is, and I know what they do, I can no longer claim ignorance. If I sell Internet service to Adolf Hitler and I know who he is, I'm complicit.

Cloudflare is not the biggest player at these services. Any other major competitor does not allow services like KW. This whole ordeal is stupid.

Free speech is working as intended. There is legally nothing wrong with saying what you want on the internet, but that doesn't mean everyone else needs to listen to you or agree with you.

If Kiwifarms is worried about free speech, they can stand on a milk crate and hand out free newspapers, completely legally.

And this is not @dang or other moderators fault. Its the changing times and the changing opinions of the user base.

I saw a good analogy the other day [1]. Cloudflare is a bartender throwing out a brawler. They called the cops, but nobody is arrested. And while yes, brawling on the streets may be riskier than brawling inside, it’s extreme to insist the brawler be sheltered because their right to brawl overrides others’ physical safety.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708253

Your analysis is absurd. First, supposing we only care about "free speech" and no other values is absurd from the outset*. It should be obvious that people can't make use of any right to free speech" if they get swatted and killed, so the idea that free speech as a value exists in a moral phantom zone of its own where no other ethical considerations have any weight is pretty much false.

Let's put aside for now the incredibly insincere enforcement of 'free speech' principles that exists in the US, where black community organisers like MLK and Fred Hampton are blackmailed and murdered (respectively) intentionally by top levels law enforcement for their speech, and put aside the historical record that shows how the anti-war movement of the 1970s was suppressed by an intentionally manufactured war on drugs (as admitted to by ringleaders), a war on drugs that is still costing lives 50 years later. Let's put aside the clear legislative efforts to suppress speech (in the forms of suppressing speech of say the BDS movement) that is occurring at the moment. Let's put aside the decades of law enforcement targeting gay and trans people.

Let's pretend, just for now, that we sincerely felt only "free speech" was the only relevant ethical concern. We still have to ask: Whose? Who is speaking, is it more than one party? Who is being protected for their speech? Against who?

I cannot see a planet on which the speech rights of kiwifarms forum members is somehow relevant but the speech of trans people who they target is either not relevant or is 'less' relevant.

If trans people get harassed, stalked and even have the armed apparatus of state sent to have them intimidated into silence or murdered, for the speech of posting what amounts to "I am trans, and I think that's good", then it is incoherent even for 'free speech adovcates' to place the speech of kiwifarms users (up to and including stalking and harassment) as some noble idea worth protecting while the speech rights of trans people to say even benign things like "i exist" *isn't even part of the ethical considerations*.

Basically, there are two ways of approaching 'free speech' issues. For it to be genuine, it cannot be concerned about protecting the speech of one of the groups, and not the other. It cannot be concerned about the speech of one group and think that the speech of a different second group isn't important if that second group gets killed or is forced to move out of the town or nation due to the clear threat to their wellbeing. Anything less than this sincere interest in all parties and a clearheaded interest in how the abstract moral position plays out in practice and our 'free speech advocacy' becomes an insincere figleaf for perpetuating the violence of thugs.

Maybe I'm just pissed off because kiwifarms users have harassed and stalked people I care about for over a decade, chased them into their homes, accosted them at their places of work, for literally nothing except being trans, and then I come to HN and see people willing to dismiss all that, or dismiss the rebuke of the unfathomable damage that has been done by this site as this as "twitter outrage" without so much as acknowledging the extraordinary grounds for that criticism.

* we should pretty surely concede that further considerations like safety, privacy, health, life, the right to the "pursuit of happiness", etc have relevance here

Reason: twice I sent messages directly to appropriate teams at (large-companies) with something like "are you aware of what your ceo is doing at (link)" which was followed by the team sending a new response and ceo disappearing from that conversation.

Everyone has a different line in the sand. For me, a platform designed to promote hate speech crosses that line.

You can think of many other examples, but the point is, if you think there's an easy-to-create and easy-to-enforce content policy on the Internet, I think you're mistaken.

The thing is that just about every company and individual is going to have the caveat "be bad enough and I won't deal with you" in practice. Kiwi Farms is pretty horrible but you could have an even more awful site - say real murder for hire - and it would be dropped even faster.

Do really expect someone to offer a "principled position" that no matter the real world consequences, they'll never stand against some horror getting out onto the Internet?

Edit: I want to add that Cloudflair's original statement and it's recent statement have involved a consistent point of "we shouldn't be the one to suppress this" which is fundamentally different from "nothing should be done about these problems". They're basically saying "we should be doing this but we should be doing this based on a court order rather than on our own". Which is to say there are never any "free speech fundamentalism" in these statements.

The reality is, we're moving from an early pseudo-anarchic ideals of early internet free speech mode to the pseudo-feudal setups where if you want to have an internet presence you must have a liege lord and must live at their sufferance, or you'll quickly fall victim to one of the roving mobs that live to collect the scalps of the likes of you. It's not a fun place to be in, but that's where we're at. And as a vassal you don't have too much position to make demands on your lord. You can change the lord, for sure, but there aren't many and if none of them likes you, you're out of luck. Welcome to the Web 3.0, it's not what you thought it'd be.

So, they can in effect decide who is allowed online and who will be DDOS'ed offline by services protected by them.

The more website use them, the more power they have to abuse and they are already going down the slippery slope..... Soon even countries will have to decide if Cloudflare and DDOS-Guard are national security risks for protecting the DDOS-for-Hire industry that helps fund botnets (The resources for that industry provides would likely have helped Russia in their DDOS attacks against Ukraine) and if arrest warrents needs to be issued for their leadership.

We're collectively worse off when the pitchforks come out and the mob allowed to erode our hard-earned freedoms. It doesn't matter if it's Kiwi Farms or someone else, capitulating to the demands of the mob is a slippery slope that doesn't lead to progress.

This is not true at all, and educating yourself on the matter is trivial. "Free speech absolutism" is a very niche, unpopular, and unrealistic (some forms of speech ultimately limit other's speech, e.g. the dead don't speak) form of free speech.

Spreading this pro-KF propaganda needs to stop.

The question to me isn't why did it take Cloudflare so long to make this decision. The question is why hadn't governments stepped in and _forced_ Cloudflare to take action, given the illegal activity taking place on the site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

And the "you" is meant as in general, or in this case Kiwi Farms.

The fallacy of tolerance. This isn’t about supporting or not supporting a certain ideology, it’s about perpetuating real world violence. I don’t know and don’t care if kiwifarms is “liberal” or “conservative”. What I do know is they’re terrorizing and perpetuating violence upon people in the real world and there’s just no place for that. That’s beyond a philosophical discussion about freedom of speech.

Should the government itself offer these services?

Yes, the internet is very centralised these days. The question is what you would find acceptable to change it.

What if the freedom of speech you are defending is impeding on the right of others to speak freely?

While I agree with the sentiment, that we have to be especially observant how we treat the freedoms of the people whose opinions we dislike, I don't think just defending those and forgetting about the grand picture is in great service of freedom of speech as it stands.

Maybe this is my liberal (?) European bias, but I don't think for example there is much value in definding some extremist political group that goes after some other people whose opinion they don't like. In the worst case, you are defending a group who has a huge chilling effect on the free speech of the other group, by making them afraid of speaking publicly about their cause.

Let's be clear about a few things:

Either Cloudflare is a utility, and therefore it acts as one and is regulated as one - or they're not.

Whether or not they are a utility, they want everyone to believe they were coerced in to doing something that's horrible - CENSORSHIP.

Non-rhetorically, is termination because of violation of a company's or utility's terms of service censorship? If you use your phone to call people and harass people non-stop, and dozens of people complain to your phone company, and they terminate you, are they censoring you? Or have you violated their TOS?

The problem here is that Cloudflare wants their cake and wants to eat it, too - they want to say their terms of service can be wildly lax when they're acting as a "utility" and they'll DTRT when legally compelled, but there are plenty of examples where they terminate for significantly less than a violation of their TOS, plus plenty of examples of where they don't terminate even when legally compelled.

They claim they don't host by trying to redefine the definition of hosting. They want us to believe they don't host, and that providing material services which facilitate presence on the Internet is neither hosting nor should in any way be their responsibility.

Their TOS for proxy services is bullshit, because they're basically saying that someone REALLY has to do some criminal shit before Cloudflare will take action. They want a district attorney to convene a jury to indict a John / Jane Doe before they'll do anything. In other words, they want to be a safe haven for any illegal activity that isn't serious enough to warrant that a district attorney to take direct action.

What happens if they become the monopoly they want to become and they're a safe haven for 90% of the illegal activity out there? They make tons of $. You can't block bad sites by IP because they serve all the legitimate sites from the same IPs as the illegal sites. You can't block bad sites by DNS, if they have their way, because DNS-over-https has taken control of that out of our hands.

So any claim of "censorship" is bullshit. Cloudflare wants to be the victim here, when it's their own attempts at manipulating the market that have brought us to where we are.

Freedom of Speech is not absolute.[1] There are limitations, and it sounds like KiwiFarms members crossed that line many, many times without KiwiFarms doing anything about it.

But more importantly, CloudFlare is not a government entity. There’s no First Amendment right to speak on social media, because free speech is a right guaranteed against government censorship. Though in an astounding overreach, courts have declared the Internet a "Free Speech Zone," (whatever that means), courts have also ruled that platforms have a First Amendment right to ban those they wish to ban.

So the outrage here is really about the long-standing Constitutional and case law limitations on Freedom of Speech and not about anything CloudFlare did in exercising their First Amendment right to dissociate from KiwiFarms and its members.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations

Random Person is typically some very minor e-celeb or individual that finds themselves in the news, as opposed to an accountable official or someone credibly accused of a serious crime.

The point of such harassment is to drive Random Person off the internet and/or out of public life, so arguably it's just censorship-by-intimidation. I can't help noticing that the people who complain about DDOS being internet mobs seem indifferent to the fact that KF is itself an internet mob, and I'd be pretty surprised if most KF members haven't done their own share of raids, DDOS attacks etc.

I personally think DDOS and forum raids are both a part of internet culture, and pretty civilized compared to in-person harassment, swatting etc., and don't agree that everything should be turned into a police/legal matter given the various downsides of that.

Is the internet a better place without this site? Who knows. But that's not the question we should ask when making censorship decisions, because these panics invariably exaggerate the immediate harms of keeping a site and minimize the longer-term harms of terminating it.

Moreover, I don't think it's new for a communication company to suppress such things. The problem as Cloudflair notes, is that while this isn't their job, the courts and states who should be suppressing and prosecuting Kiwifarm are falling down on the job.

This 12 years old comment describes the situation in 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947648 , although neglects to mention that things were this way due to strict moderation on 4chan.

Finding ANYTHING with any kind of historical evidence on 4-Chan is difficult. The thousand+ posts about keffals are all collected together where she and others can read them all at once, which also contributes to making it look 'worse'.

A haystack may have more needles in it than a sewing kit, but you KNOW which ones are in the sewing kit.

For example, appending ".moe" to the ".onion" in that URL:

https://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificed...

Which also allows it to be archived (as the mainstream archive sites don't recognise Tor hidden services):

https://web.archive.org/web/20220905153904/https://uquusqsaa...

(https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1566729178807926785)

It helps it's the easiest way to do damage to a website and you just can pay someone to do the tech part of the hack. A DDoS attack is as easy to buy as the web hosting you're attacking now, back in the day you had to set up the botnet yourself

If they end up running the site on a server with no DDoS filtering at all, people will probably DoS them because it will be super easy.

It takes literally one disgruntled person to pay $5 to take down most IPs that don't have DDoS protection. Sometimes a free booter is enough.

A bar owner can kick out a troublemaker, and people won't think "first they kick Shitstarter Steve, and next thing you know they kick you out because you order the wrong beer". Other patrons are relieved that Steve will have to start shit somewhere else.

It's fine to show some people the door.

Edit - clarifying that 100k pps per core would only be achievable if the vast majority of the traffic (>95%) could be filtered out.

[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

How is that even possible? Would the Tor project hard-code an onion-site it won't resolve?