Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
twitter.com
twitter.com
Someone here at HN at least posted this link which told more of the story than I have seen anywhere else. Also search the HN archives (for now at least it seems) for interesting discussions on KF prior to these latest events.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32720162
Sorry but this feels like book burning to me.
I find interesting they took the archived copy down instead of keeping it publicly available since it was the only way to prove what kiwifarms has done instead of having as only source "trust me bro". Either way I don't think it matters since nobody actually bothered to link or prove any of their claims so I don't think it really changes much.
[0]: http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz... [1]: https://kiwifarms.top [2]: https://t.me/kiwifarms/29?embed=1 [3]: https://t.me/kiwifarms/28?embed=1
One can also use a Tor proxy (tor2web), there is a list here: https://gist.github.com/adulau/5caf188bb1f63263bf7ac00c4a19f...
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...
Perhaps this will lead to a successor site with a similar "mission" that consists only of what would be a thread OP on KF, without the thousands of pages that follow wherein people say the n-word as many times as they can.
There is clearly massive demand for content about people like Chris Chan and Keffals, and these people have a way of constantly generating new controversy and attention (this obviously doesn’t justify harassment or IRL threats). If the drug war taught us anything it’s that demand can’t be squashed by playing wack-a-mole and then putting your fingers in your ears until it pops back up again next week.
After Byuu, the emulator dev of bsnes, higan and more was harassed into suicide [1], harassment almost exclusively organized on KF, I've lost patience for weak defenses of a site that causes threats to folk's lives.
I don't want to live in a society where law enforcement is left to big tech vigilantism. There's a reason that governments are granted a monopoly on violence, they have democratic legitimacy and accountability that other entities do not.
Because law enforcement (at least in the US) is woefully bad at their jobs and don't care. I have first-hand experience with this when I had a close friend who was being harrassed by someone local (we knew who it was) and LEO refused to lift a finger. I've talked about it multiple times before on HN [0][1][2][3] but even with this guy graduating to physical actions (keying the friend's car, following/stalking them) the police did nothing.
So if our only options are "Have the police do nothing" or "Have a private corp decide to not do business with a company anymore" then I know which one I'm picking, which one will actually help reduce harm. Even if they spin up under a new name they will lose users along the way. Deplatforming works.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521976
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31610876
People desperately want the world to be different, and it isn’t. It isn’t, and it won’t change massively within your singular life. So you can grandstand and congratulate yourselves on “winning” with the IA and CF decisions, but KF is still online and all you’ve done is make more people aware of their existence.
Furthermore, this idea of banning objectionable content ultimately ends in tyranny as the only way for you to possibly succeed on your mission is to add fundamental filters to the internet. No thanks.
It would be great if there were some other record keeper so we could ensure the church didn't "lose" any records that made them look bad.
But I'm sure you would have stopped any 3rd party back then who was setting out to transcribe the inquisitions' trials. After all, they were just giving the church yet another platform to spread their intolerance.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jun/16/artsandhumanit...
The best that could have been done is if CF continued to proxy it, and answered discovery and court orders, that way users could be unmasked and prosecuted. But now they got away free.
> But now they got away free.
That was always going to happen. Keeping them/old content online was never going to change that. Our "justice" system is horribly broken.
But what you may ultimately accomplish is ushering in tyranny and government regulation of the internet in the name of censoring objectionable content.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Archive.org now provided more shade.
What I don't know is if Kiwi Farms _requested_ to be removed from Archive.org. As a publicity stunt, I could see a request for removal and then a wailing that they've been removed.
There was a minor kerfuffle with Snopes and a fact check of theirs which embarrased them. They later revised their fact check to no longer be embarassing. Problem was, archive.org still maintained the original. You can no longer find the original article from 2018 on archive.org. I'm sure that the only people who wanted the embarassing fact check removed were Snopes themselves. Archive.org was apparently happy to help them revise their history, by limiting how far back you can see anything in their library from Snopes.com.
Also, info like someone's phone number and home address are only a click away once you have their full name and approximate age/geographic location, at least for people haven't taken extraordinary steps to limit discoverability on Spokeo or White Pages. People post full names and locations to Twitter all the time. They call it "unmasking" when it's someone the ruling consensus dislikes, while they know the info will be used to look up the "dox." This is not Twitter or Kiwi Farms' fault. It is the result of flaws in our legal system which allow sites like Spokeo and White pages to operate.
Whether it's legal or not is unimportant. My question is for the internet archive: is it ethical for them to knowingly rehost dumps of PII? Just because it's public doesn't mean it's right for them to treat it like any other page. The goal of the KF users is to harass by putting that information out there: if IA rehosts that intentionally, they're making an active choice to further the goals of KF users.
I see you've backed off from "bank account numbers" to "bank account details," perhaps after Googling the same Twitter screenshots I just found in an attempt to verify your claim. Those screenshots show a user describing a hacked bank account's balance and recent purchases. That's pretty bad; hacking into bank accounts is very illegal. The individual who broke into the account very likely committed a crime. Regardless, the screenshots don't show any credentials or account numbers. I'm not sure if posting someone's bank balance is illegal, but I'm guessing it isn't; maybe it depends on how it was obtained... don't know, not a lawyer.
Of course, the screenshot is totally unverifiable now that KF is wiped from the Internet Archives, which is the point of the submitted link.
How? The site is down and now the archives are too. This strikes me as a bizarre lie.
> "Short version: [Kiwi Farms is] A very edgy forum ... where users cruelly gossip and post public information on niche online oddities (lolcows) that thrive on the attention KF gives them." [Emphasis mine.]
This piece of egregious victim-blaming should have been your cue to ignore this article. If it wasn't, the victim-blaming in the rest of the article (such as "She probably genuinely enjoys it. Or she has a death drive, a martyr complex.") should have cued you in.
There's a lot more people who were targeted by KF than Keffals. The majority were ordinary people who were part of a minority and had just enough of a platform to be on their radar (or were related to/had a similar name to someone who was). "They put themselves out there, online", but that doesn't mean they "have no one to blame but themself" for the harassment and death threats they received. They didn't do anything wrong. The fault lies fully on the users of Kiwi Farms and those who created and supported a community that allowed them to organize and coordinate their harassment.
Taylor's uncle is Roger Macdonald, apparently a fairly prominent operator within the internet archive:
Note that I do not defend any ill action that anyone on KF has done. What I am trying to point out is how the Internet is becoming a playground for few big tech to do as they see fit. Maybe our regulation/laws didn't catch up, or that they are inefficient, and that opens the space for tech staff/CEOs to make judgement calls and execute the judgment.
When it comes to threats to freedom of expression, I'm much more concerned about the religious right's abuse of government authority to censor education, ban books, and suppress the vote, than I am about private institutions taking steps to protect human life.
Cloudflare has ever right to open Pandora's Box, but I want nothing to do with it. Much like Namecheap's fumble earlier this year, the way they handled this situation showed their true colors, and made it evident that I don't want to ever do business with them.
Terminating services to Kiwi Farms was completely in line with Cloudflare's TOS as-written.
Failing all that, KiwiFarms doesn't need a business to stay afloat. The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network. To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website. Websites don't harass people, people do.
At the end of the day, businesses gotta eat. They're not a charity or a benevolent public force. If your user generated content impacts their bottom line, you're gonna get kicked to the curb.
>The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network
I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor. Both CDNs are primarily concerned about business risk with hosting content and calls to action that could be found illegal.
Epik hosted 8chan in the interim after Cloudflare dropped them. This cause Epik's hosting provider to drop them, and since Epik doesn't own their datacenters they had to abide by their hardware provider's decision: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754943/8chan-epik-offlin...
I'll still eat some crow, though; I forgot the entire business was owned by Rob Monster (a veritable idiot by most definitions of the word), and I completely forgot that they even provided hosting in the first place.
> I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor.
I'm certain they don't. That's the problem, though; this moral panic response to KiwiFarms has achieved nothing. Cloudflare knows that this is a zero-sum game, but they bent anyways. As businesses, their choices make plenty of sense. I disagree with businesses all the time though (check the comment history), and frankly I think Cloudflare made the wrong decision here. In my opinion, their actions here will be more destructive to queer populations in the long-run.
I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
Yes because the police were doing such a great job at monitoring and responding to threats from KF. Wake up, this is such a weak argument that has no basis in reality. We hear these same tired arguments over and over that are not backed up with facts (or, you know, arrests).
> The majority of KiwiFarms users simply aren't solely enabled by the website existing, either.
Yes they are.
> I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
What part do you not "believe" in? Deplatforming absolutely works. These rats might scurry to another platform/provider but each time fewer and fewer jump through all the hoops. You are letting perfect be the enemy of good.
This approach is making perfect the enemy of good. There is no perfect way to solve this problem.
> If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate.
It's still a website, it's still accessible. That part hasn't gone away. If the contention is that launching TOR somehow means it's "harder to monitor" then I have some news for you: Lots of monitoring of darkweb stuff goes on every day.
If I need to be prevented from knowing what the monsters say in order to avoid turning into a monster myself, then I promise you, we've lost. The monsters are going to eat us all.
Tolerance for ideas is not a suicide pact.
And Cloudflare had no problem hosting Kiwi Farms and Daily Stormer until they crossed a line. Cloudflare's history doesn't exactly paint it as bleeding-heart liberal who can't deal with 'icky feelings.' I'm sure Epik and Vultr have their lines as well, it just happens that none of their customers have crossed it yet.
>To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website.
Slowing them down is still a valid goal.
>Websites don't harass people, people do.
Guns don't kill people, people do. Except people with guns can kill a lot more people faster. That's why guns are a thing.
Whether or not you want to be a free speech absolutist, you have to concede that the platform and its reach matters. If it didn't, no one would be up in arms about deplatforming. Yes, it's literally and technically true that a website can't harass people, but having a platform meant to organize and facilitate harassment is a force multiplier for the people doing said embarrassment. Without the website, the people couldn't harass as well as they could with it.
And the size, reach and convenience of the network matters in that regard, just as the capacity, rate of fire and caliber of a gun matters, even if it is a person pulling the trigger.
Indeed they do, which makes me a happy customer. Knowing how inflammatory their other customers are, it brings me great comfort in knowing that their free speech is honored as much as mine. If either of them pulled a "Cloudflare moment" at the same scale, I'd probably start looking for other hosting providers.
> Slowing them down is still a valid goal.
...did we do that, though? The past 2 months have done nothing but put KiwiFarms in the spotlight. Instead of privately petitioning Cloudflare to change their policy, we drew battle lines and took to Twitter. All KiwiFarms ever wanted was attention, and we gave them more attention than they could have ever hoped for. Do people seriously think they're going to struggle to bounce back after an attack like this? Giving online organizations a platform has been a huge mistake in the past, like treating "Anonymous" as anything other than the default name for 4chan posters.
> you have to concede that the platform and its reach matters
Absolutely. That's why I'm afraid that attacking the platform now will cause it to become harder to attack. It's already increased it's reach, the recent media hubbub has ensured that everyone knows about KiwiFarms. I guess the Streisand effect is lost on modern internet users...
> Without the website, the people couldn't harass as well as they could with it.
Right. Now imagine how much worse things would get if there wasn't a website, but a Tor hidden service. Or a closed Matrix homeserver. Or an IPFS bulletin board. The sky is the limit, and I'd go as far as to argue that they were the least harmless on the surface web. Only time will tell, though.
> And the size, reach and convenience of the network matters in that regard, just as the capacity, rate of fire and caliber of a gun matters
Well... no. This is something that has been proven time and time again in America; banning certain types of guns doesn't work. Banning an AK doesn't stop someone from chopping their Glock 17 and clearing a room at half the price. Gun legislation doesn't correlate with a reduction in firearm violence. The capacity, rate of fire and caliber never mattered, just the fact that the gun existed in the first place. If we're not going to ban guns outright, what's the point in picking-and-choosing which ones are-and-aren't perceived as harmful?
Obviously it's a reductive argument, but the same thing goes for free speech. By choosing to draw the line somewhere, we're giving other people the go-ahead to draw different lines. We're giving world governments the tools they need to oppress LGBT users. We're drawing the blueprints for a new era of information suppression, and nobody seems to care since both sides have started beating the "muh terrorism" and "think of the children!" drums, respectively. And when has that ended well for internet freedom in the past?
I do not subscribe to bullying or doxxing or anything like that, but now kiwifarms will get a fair chance at showing me what they are about, they had zero chance before, as I did not know they exist.
Having the power to shut that place and therefore behavior down but choosing not to means they were complicit. Deplatforming works, the influx of new bullies shrinks when you make their place less public.
Therefore it would seem that this particular removal is motivated by erasing the documentation and performing a cover up.
A dozen children died because of the Tide Pod challenge-- and that's just one campaign. We could talk about planking falls, cinnamon poisonings and more if you like. That's before we get to the rise in runaways and child exploitation directly attributable to the "legitimate" platforms. Kids are being solicited on Roblox FFS.
How does a community of bullies deliberately targeting (internet celebrities) have a lower kill count and merit higher priority than a handful of individuals conspicuously encouraging ignorant children to engage in lethal acitivities?
This is clearly a crusade.
If you're a shithead in a club, you get kicked out. If you're a shithead with your family, you get kicked out. If you're a shithead on the internet, you also get kicked out.
This whole mess has some real rabbit holes, but anyone who does a little research will find a lot of the claims used to drum up hysteria are quite wanting in the way of facts or proof.
This is true, in some jurisdictions, in the same sense that it is true that homicide is not illegal.
Doxxing with particular intent is illegal in those jurisdictions; e. g., California where Penal Code § 653.2 was adopted specifically to address harassment by doxxing.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
Not really; showing that rules like that are conscious fig leaves and actually indicators of knowledge and intent is... not at all uncommon. Lots of sites taken down by law enforcement for deliberate facilitation of prostitution or human trafficking had “don’t use this platform for prostitution/trafficking” rules, too.
I agree regarding the freely available information (which often involved self-made drama). There is nothing bad about archiving it per se. With one interjection: some of this information is decades-old. While the right to forget does not exist on the internet, if people reflected on things, admitted they made mistakes and changed their perspective, it should be possible for any sensible webmaster/reader, to allow some kind of redemption.
This was exactly the case with byuu - he realized past mistakes, openly admitted and wanted a somewhat fresh start. But KW's webmaster did not allow it. At this point I percieved KF as openly cruel and kind of showing their true colors.
From what I've seen it wasn't as straightforward as that. The operator, Null, shared the email exchange and there seems to have been less than 24 hours between Byuu's first message and his last.
Null's last message was this, after which he went to bed (apparently, idk the timezones involved in this). It doesn't seem like a "no".
> I feel like you're being genuine. There's a fear here that you're just trying to prank me to show people "look, Josh just wants money", but it's one of the small subsets of concerns at play here. > > So hear me out: Send me your resume, I'll make you a counter offer.
IA is not being "bad", here. They're just being inconsistent. Either doxing/harassment is casus belli to scrub content, or it's not.
We do know that Kiwifarms was doxing people, but I would like to see proof of these "antifa forums", please.
"Antifa" has become such an umbrella term, it's almost mythological at this point.
Google (and facebook, twitter, paypal, etc) does that with regularity today, every once in awhile someone with reach in the tech community has it happen to them, some programmer or researcher, etc and it makes the news here but political commentators are banned every day off google sites because some one with enough influence on twitter targeted them for being a "shithead" in their view.
What legal actions could anybody went after? They don't allow illegal activities and don't even allow interaction from the site. Even talking about it is banned. Why do you think so many attempts to take them down have failed. They follow the law and openly work with it if something illegal does happen... Including the FBI.
And in the context of KF, harassment and even interacting is against the rules. Attempting to do anything illegal, making threats or swatting etc are literal instant bans with your info being handed over to law on request.
There was a follow-up: Why? KiwiFarms clearly allows this doxxing to occur on a daily basis, and I know that you know this. While it's not illegal, if you don't feel that doxxing is generally OK, why do you feel that it's OK for KF users to continue to go to the extent that they do?
>More importantly, doxxing isn't illegal and is done by major media and orgs
Two wrongs do not make a right.
>Not to mention it seems like ~95% of what is being called doxxing here is posting publicly available (usually posted the the person themselves) info.
There is a significant difference there. A lot of the information that is publicly available is information that has to be compiled. Someone has to go to the effort to look through all of the nooks and crannies to obtain what they want. KiwiFarms saves time and compiles general publicly available data that might be "difficult" to obtain to some degree, often times alongside otherwise private photos and information that individuals might not want widely disseminated, even if they did share it. This compiled data can make it easier and more likely for bad actors to do harm than if they had to go to greater lengths to obtain that info.
The fact that massive, multi-page forums threads can exist with tons of users providing all of this data and talking about these people is enough to cause mental damage to the targets of these threads. Actions need not be direct nor illegal to be harmful, and you know just as well as I do that there have been plenty of examples of people claiming harm from the existence of such threads.
Even if the behavior is not allowed and banned, the environment is still rife to encourage it. The further you allow people to go, legal or not, the more comfortable they're going to get with the boundaries that they push. This is evidenced by the historical instances of swatting and direct harassment that have stemmed from KF despite it's own rules against it, even apparently as recently as a few weeks ago.
>My feelings are irrelevant to my arguing.
That might be the case, but arguing in support of KF here is essentially arguing in support of what I just described above.
They weren't being hosted by CF, they were getting protection against illegal DDoS attacks. CF DDoS protection is an infrastructure service. Infrastructure level services picking and choosing who is allowed and not allowed, is a very dangerous thing. Such action quickly risk unraveling the entire net.
How old are you? Surely you're aware that this has been an option for all infrastructure level services since the inception of the world wide web? And that this is by no means the first (there have been thousands upon thousands of decisions made like this, large and small), nor the last, time this will happen? And that in the 30+ years of the web's existence these kinds of infrastructure level services have been executing these options, the "entire net" has yet to "unravel" and sites like KF and 8chan, et al continue to find homes on the internet?
If you care about censorship-resistance, support decentralized projects.
Here's an example of a site that was retroactively excluded by webmaster request, but was later (forced?) to remain in the searchable archive:
http://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims-...
edit: to answer my own question, seems like retroactive exclusion has, at least since 2007, not been interpreted to be a mandate for actual data removal:
https://archive.org/post/133690/robotstxt-only-gives-tempora...
> Hello, I want all old content from immortal ia.com REMOVED permanently from The Wayback Machine. So I read the exclusion policy, placed up a robots.txt file and requested the Alexa bot go to my website. Then checking The Wayback Machine, I got a notice that the site was blocked by the robots.txt file. But after I removed the robots.txt file, the archived pages reappeared. Is there a way to permanently purge all old pages of a website so that they will NEVER reappear in The Wayback Machine? Am I obligated to keep the robots.txt file in place forever?
Even spam stays in.
Damnatio memoriae is devastating to a public figure, but it is doing KiwiFarms a huge favor. It lets them scurry away under some new rock and keep going under a new name. The worst thing you could do is probably just shine the brightest spotlight you can find square at their activities.
There is a good reason we erect monuments and museums to atrocities. It's not for ease of rubbernecking, but so that we can learn and avoid them in the future.
My personal semi-conspiracy theory on this is that the search warrant served on Keffals (no, not a SWAT call, a search warrant) contained some note that they got probable cause from evidence on a kiwifarms thread. Since then, Keffals has been running to countries with no extradition treaties to Canada and trying their hardest to erase that evidence from the internet under the guise of stopping suicides.
If the note references probable cause from a thread and the evidence is on kf, wouldn’t the authorities already have that evidence or be able to get a search warrant for it? Why would they search someone’s house for it?
Basically, they had the allegations and enough substantiating evidence to go to the point of looking for more evidence, but not to get all the way to an arrest/conviction. A search warrant is the next step.
EDIT: Also, the police have most likely downloaded the information, but you never know.
Now consider that Isabella's father Mike Janke is a former Navy SEAL who has a professional relationship with Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1wio7sDDBA
These records have been wiped from the Internet Archive. I wonder how long they will remain on archive.ph.
Although it does enhance my point, which is that Kiwi Farms benefits from this.
If you try to convince them, likely you would get an unbelievable amount of negative online attention sent your way. Ironically the same thing they hate Kiwifarms for.
In practice: The abstract entity KiwiFarms takes all the shit, very few of the people actually constituting its membership seem to take much flak; meanwhile its critics look completely unhinged, even though they're absolutely right and KF is incredibly reprehensible, they still do their best to undermine the credibility of their own cause by acting and behaving like a frothing at the mouth lynch mob much more interested in power-tripping and revenge than truth and justice.
The strategy is straight out of Sun Tzu on how to deal with a stronger army, and I haven't really seen any examples of anyone handling it well.
Taylor's uncle is Roger MacDonald, founder of TV News archive:
https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive
https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz
And of course you've already begun downvoting.
I guess the old addage has never been truer: "History is Written by Victors"
Kiwi-farms seems fairly mundane based on everything I've read about it so far (not that I can even look at the site for myself now). Why is there a double standard here? How the hell did these random twitter users manage to gain the power to pick and choose who gets to be on the internet now?
This is the part that really worries me. Random Twitter users trying to dictate what _I_ am allowed to read. And Cloudflare and the Internet Archive bends to their will! Highly embarrassing, these people should be taken at anything but face value.
Cloudflare folding is nothing new, but I really expected better of the Internet Archive.
Openly, to any outrage-politicking militant Twitter deathsquad member: you will never stop me from reading what I want to read. I wasn't aware of Kiwi Farms before your ridiculous antics but now you can bank on me reading EVERYTHING I can possibly get my hands on.
I will form my own opinions and you will have no say at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect -- good luck. You can't stop the signal.
The subjects of "To Catch A Predator" also comprise a few suicides.
For a site supposedly created for the purpose of bullying people into suicide, 3 is pretty underwhelming.
Looking at the Wikipedia article you linked, I don't see any definitive, authoritative sources of information that directly links KiwiFarms and these horrible events other than random tweets posted by people on the internet.
After looking through 5-6 different sources cited in the bottom of the article, I don't even see any references or screenshots of the actual website used in reporting, just journalists taking what other people are saying as fact.
The site owner posted this rebuttal to assignment of blame for these suicides, which I find compelling. For instance, the widow of one victim decried Vice News (one source referenced in the article) for using her death to attack Kiwi Farms:
This isn't even witch-hunt style "newspaper will embellish the story", this was published on the forums by the ones harrassing people. The goal of the forums was to provide a space for doxxers to share info on people they didn't like (that they called "lolcows"), and elicit a reaction out of them for i guess entertainment?
KF was a site for snuff movies, except instead of a guy torturing and killing another, it was psychological abuse of the highest degree.
I am trying really hard to not run afoul of HN posting guidelines here, but this is RICH given the accusations against the main instigator of the deplatform efforts
Ηic Rhodus hic salta. Show how any of those claims are verifiable.
They might claim that its mere existence psychologically harms marginalized people, but it seems that their real goal is more about power. You get a ton of clout by both appearing as a marginalized person under attack as well as winning victories over enemies. Right now, Keffals and another person are fighting over who gets to take credit for this.
The more long-term goal is to establish a precedent that sites that are "harmful" are simply not allowed to be on the internet. This will serve as an example to any ISP that might consider hosting them or anyone like them in the future. All it will take is someone finding the site, reporting it to Keffals and gang, and the mob flooding their CDNs, data centers, upstreams, and business partners with demands to either deplatform or be deplatformed themselves.
There's currently no defense against the "Layer 8 DDoS".
It turns out that when you mess with people's lives, those people fight back. Stop doxxing people and harassing them if you want business partners to host your forums.
You smother their 'community'. It's a last ditch effort that should be used rarely, but this isn't the first time something like this happened, and it won't be the last.
shit's scary
Have we seen this happen for any other site? Even Wikileaks itself couldn't be brought down, despite the main man still languishing in prison, and being targeted by government agencies.
1. Archive.org probably has just disallowed access. Not outright purged.
2. Shit drops off the internet literally every day
3. It’s a site full of edgelord incels who have a history of being complete pieces of shit
4. This isn’t a precursor to some horrible dystopian future of corporate control of thoughts!!111 that happened long ago ;)
Seriously though. All the panty twisting “oh noooo” wreaks of disingenuous bullshit under the guise of “but freedoms!”
You don’t have to leave the entirety of the content up to gauge it.
I mean, do you want TWBM to archive and leave up all childporn sites it accidentally crawls or similar? So individuals can gauge if it’s /actually/ bad or if it’s just a handful of twitter users squawking?
C’mon.
You're right that it isn't a precursor to some horrible dystopian future of corporate control.. because it is actually that already! The internet is now broken. Another level of infrastructure (now basic network infrastructure) is open to tantrumers, PR etc veto!
People protesting a company is not "harassment". (Disclaimer: I'm an investor in Cloudflare)
> a faux appeal to danger
Law enforcement has been involved.
> a completely legal site
Yeah, no, at best it's in the black part of a very grey area until the slow US legal system catches up with the case.
> via illegal DDoS attack
Their various hosts dropped them. One of those hosts happened to also do DDoS protection, but that part is irrelevant if they have nowhere to host their website.
My advice to you: Stop browsing this type of forum. The brain rot via propaganda and misinformation is real. KF is not a victim. A bully is not a "victim" when their targets defend themselves.
If you rob me and I get you arrested after reporting you to the police, you're not the victim of a society ostracizing you, you're the perpetrator of crimes society doesn't tolerate. Quit hanging out with perpetrators.
https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/columbia-man-jailed-u...
They've extensively documented actual alt-right figures such as neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who they consider one of their "lolcows." They also followed and recorded the activity of accused rapist Christine (formerly Christopher) Weston Chandler, the original "lolcow", though several users interacted with Chris over the years in ways that may have contributed to his/her decline:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/sonichu-creator-has-been-arres...
They also discovered and documented Isabella Janke, allegedly the person most responsible for convincing Christine to abuse her mother, among other allegations:
This truth of these allegations will likely come out at at Christine's upcoming trial, assuming enough evidence was preserved. Incidentally, Isabella's father Mike Janke has a professional relationship with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince:
"The guberment will handle it" - they're not, and haven't for years. The only justice to be had here is if people themselves push for it. Alphabet orgs could care less, if not already members of it.
You're being both intellectually dishonest, hyperbolic, and strawmanning at the same time. Content that is illigal is taken down as it is reported. Not all content is illigal, no one has claimed KF for things outside of organized harassment.
You're ignoring (what was that about "intellectual dishonesty"?) the part where this is likely still archived by them, just not publicly accessible. You're also forgetting the countless screenshots and other documentation that exists of KF from prior controversial incidents.
Screenshots are not a trustworthy medium. Many of the articles published about Kiwi Farms contain significant factual errors and rarely cite sources for the claims they do make.
For example, the CBC recently published an article claiming that the Christchurch shooter "revealed his intentions (on Kiwi Farms) hours before carrying out the attack".
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/kiwi-farms-online-forum-1.6565...
If you read articles from 2019 it was claimed that the gunman posted on 8chan shortly before the massacre. The claim that he posted on Kiwi Farms hours before is completely new and unsubstantiated.
Sure. That's why it's likely that - again, I don't know how this still bears repeating in this comment chain - IA still has the site archived, just not publicly accessible.
Because if it isn't publicly accessible it functionally doesn't exist, and what remains is a number of publications of questionable veracity.
Perhaps law enforcement will eventually be able to comb through the data, but there is no guarantee the general public ever will be able to.
It becomes a very questionable "trust us, they were bad" from sources that are demonstrably flawed.
(I am not saying they aren't bad, but from researching common claims like the owner is a pedophile and the Christchurch shooter posted on Kiwi Farms myself, it's clear that quite a few are exaggerated or not true.)
I was under the impression "kiwi farms" was a dark place. The byuu story and reaction of the webmaster made me no fan. But this really changes things. Suddenly it's presumably "not just only" a twitter mob with some internet skills and resources committing vigilante justice.
This is becoming a precedent and the webmaster a martyr for the cause of internet freedom, and against Cancel Culture.
Suddenly I'm rooting for the supposed bad guy. I'm confused.
[0] https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_p...
Even with that aside, this is a lot of data, which, as an example, can be used in research about psychology. I'm never a fan of throwing data away, it's not like we have too much of it.
There are people within the internet archive whose politics is so strong that I have said in private since 2016 that I have concerns they are a risk to the neutrality of the project. I am not going to mention their name to avoid a flamewar but that name will be mentioned more by others if they decide to remove more content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Apt would be, should publishers have the right not to publish material like Mein Kampf, if they so choose, or does "free speech" now mean that all publishers must be forced to publish everything, however objectionable, if legal?
The remove part was done already. They are not on the internet anymore. It was removed from Internet Archive because it contains some inconvenient information about DIY HRT to minors and other accusations.
second: if it's true they have to notify it; and explain how researchers can access to this material.
I found a blog post and several reddit posts talking about it, but I still have no idea what it is. Is it literally made in a bathtub?
"Although it is theoretically possible to make a 'low-cost' production (using only a 5mL syringe, a spinning top filter, a kitchen scale and a pressure cooker), the reproducibility and the quality will not be desired."
A. Complain online
B. Strike a blow for free speech and host the data yourself.
I thought this was about the "danger" and "threats"
Controversial opinion, but I think the internet archive shouldn't exist, and that the right to be forgotten trumps the right to outsource and automate the business of remembering. Maybe there is content worth saving, and maybe it ought to be manually scraped and preserved by a suitably interested individual.
HN Libertarians when the free market acts: No, not like that!
What's the rationale in accepting Twitter stay online but not this website? Plenty of harassment goes on there as well.
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Long version:
Kiwifarms is a site dedicated to discussing the affairs of famous people. Often, this goes as far as public records searches and weird internet sleuthing to find addresses and other such information that is usually considered private. The odd thing about kiwifarms is that it is organized so that individuals have a single thread, which is essentially a record of all the past information and rumors on that person in one convenient place.
There are disputed reports about Kiwifarms being instrumental in the harassment of 3 individuals to the point of them committing suicide, and people on kiwifarms have taken pictures outside of people's houses, etc. Lots of creepy behavior. Threats of violence have also appeared on the site, but are against its ToS and the owner of kiwifarms claims that they get moderated pretty quickly - whether they do is up for debate. It's mostly a center for sharing creepy levels of information and bitching about famous people, particularly when those people do weird things. Critics of kiwifarms believe that they are a center of information gathering (and thus coordination) for harassers.
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One notable individual, who uses the online handle "Keffals," did not like the content of their KF thread. Keffals is a transformation who has engaged in some behavior that is at best borderline, including sending hormones to kids without their parents knowing and running a discord server ("the catboy ranch") that involved prurient contact with minors. Keffals has also done several embarrassing things online, such as producing pornography and participating in internet drama.
Keffals was served with a search warrant recently, presumably regarding the former activities. At least one armed officer came to their house, but no guns were drawn, and Keffals' devices were seized. After the search warrant was served, Keffals erroneously claimed that someone from Kiwifarms had swatted them (and later walked back the claim), and then said that they were being threatened to the point of running from Canada (weirdly to countries with no extradition treaty), and started a campaign to get the site taken down. A gofundme was put up, also.
In response, people on Kiwifarms stepped up the creepiness, finding the hotel that Keffals was staying at in Ireland based on one picture of the bedsheets, ordering pizzas to the hotel, taking pictures outside the hotel, etc. Keffals later went to some other location, and I believe is not posting pictures any more.
During this time, several bomb threats and threats of violence against Keffals and the people who support Keffals also appeared on their kiwifarms thread. Also, people from kiwifarms tried to get the gofundme taken down.
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IMO the whole situation looks really bad for everyone involved. Two groups of internet trolls went to war. One side had a lot of institutional/media backing.
this recent action seems to be related to their long-running beef with a particularly well-connected transgender, over being the primary location for documentation on questionable activities like shipping hormone replacement drugs to minors