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Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

Most interesting is the assertion by the german court (see the linked tarnkappe notice, in german though) that Cloudflare is anonymizing the users of their CDN/Proxying Service which makes prosecution harder.

I'm suprised by that because Cloudflare must know the real IPs to forward traffic to for their services to work and I have not read anything that implies that Cloudflare might not have produced that data following a court order of any kind.

I have however seen private trackers and other pirate site use cloudflares services. I am kinda suprised by that since I must assume that pirate site operates would be aware that cloudflare is not actually providing any court proof anonymization or is promising anything like a non-logging/zero knowledge/Anonymization layer like tor or ipfs.

Can anyone enlighten me on that matter?

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You can use something called cloudflared to establish one or more tunnels into Cloudflare; Cloudflare will access the origin servers via these tunnels.

I've never used cloudflared and don't know whether you could 0wn a few DSL users and run cloudflared on their hardware, avoid having an origin server on your own IP address.

Hosting the sites on Pwned Hardware and IPs seems like a reasonable precaution (though doubtful that is what is actually done these days since at least sites like 1337x.to or thepiratebay.org seem to have uptimes and speeds that would make such a setup at least unlikely to be practical for their usecases. I suspect they are using servers in non-compliant states and use cloudflare as a global CDN where possible.

Still doesn't quite make sense to me but the court being completely retarded in that regard wouldn't suprise me when it comes to german courts and internet law. Though it seems that this cologne court has at least understood the issue, especially compared to the clowshow thats the OLG Hamburg.

FYI: The Pirate Bay is fully legal in Sweden, where it is hosted. Although it's frequently had to change internet providers and physical locations at the discretion of those providers, and its creators went to jail for 1 year due to a corrupt justice system (e.g. judges having links to copyright companies), it was never proven that any crime was actually committed by them.

Germany takes the exact opposite extremist view.

It would be easy for law enforcement to subpoena Cloudflare to get the IP addresses of origin servers. This sounds like law enforcement is just lazy.

Its probably a GDPR thing. They know the IP in transit but are not allowed to store them without user approval because IPs are PII.

That does not work for the pirate site operator though. In order for Cloudflare to cache and proxy any request the endpoint must be known beforehand and must be at least constant enough for any new request to be forwarded to that endpoint in some capacity. It might be true for users that they chose not to log that information but it cannot be true for any site they provide CDN/Proxy services to.

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