You can’t win with these people, I personally think this is the best outcome and shows our systems work (albeit slowly). Sure it took a while, but now there doesn’t have to be a precedent of Cloudflare acting as the internet police more than it has to.
This is the classic fallacy of assuming that because you see comments of type A and comments of type B on the same forum that means they're the same people. They're usually not.
A more accurate way to phrase this is "you can't win with ... people". Whatever you do will end up ticking off some subset of the population.
There are multitudes in every group.
(If people ask me about my political affiliations, I usually answer something like "Hamilton for president! Of maybe Jefferson."; this kind of statesmanship is hard to find now though.)
[1]: https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html (It's short, read it now.)
Likewise, if you disagree with them, they instantly assume that you are with the other group. It is strange.
Pretty sad :(
That doesn’t change that people seem to think the top upvoted comments being contradictory from day to day represents some kind of inconsistency in the views of the commenters on this site.
It'd be interesting if you could point to a single example of someone taking both sides. I strongly doubt these are the same people.
This comparison actually highlights that there is no “system”, because some (imaginary) impersonal entity decides that those bad actors are allowed, and those bad actors are not allowed. Some public sensibilities are given as a reason, but no one is actually asking anyone's opinion on anything. Still, there are people who believe that Santa Claus brings presents for free, and that the whole thing is not governed by typical hypocrisy and typical politics behind closed doors. The thing is, you've built a turnpike, you can now bargain with people interested in sharing control over that turnpike.
How do you end up in this limbo where you need critical infrastructure to play judge?
So they're criminals as far as the US and allies are concerned, but de facto not criminals where they live. If they're going to be locked out of the system, it has to be by the infrastructure, because their government has no interest in stopping them.
Do you ever think it's weird that we have gone through web 1.0, web 2.0, semantic web, intertubes clogged with spam bots, web 3.0: crypto edition, and the dawn of AI scraping, and we still haven't figured out these issues?
Would you want authoritarian governments to be able to demand Cloudflare stop serving those they consider criminals that are outside their borders?
International law is messy.
There is a procedure to get a foreign case recognized in the US, too, but it has to be serious, and it's not an easy process.
I again ask: is it desirable for any of those countries to be able to unilaterally force a company to enforce its laws regardless of where the individual in question is?
If CloudFlare chooses to do business in China, that's a choice they're making and it comes with consequences.
Maybe they can offer service where customers will only be served from equipment outside of China, maybe that's not something they choose.
They can easily order it to reveal the origin server of a website, or the sign-up IP address of the account, or to stop providing services to one.
To answer your question: most malware actors can be traced back to Russia, what exactly do you think "sending the cops" after them will accomplish and if the answer is "nothing", then does that mean you don't think they can be called criminals?
I know, because I bought RX stuff from India and it did not get labelled as medication
Our legal system is unfortunately not perfect, which is why it matters what infrastructure providers do.
Do they enable criminals by shielding them from the police? Or do they have policies in place that prevent abuse of their service?
With Cloudflare, I'm pretty sure they lean towards the former.
(This is also why, whenever you hear about e.g. police stings on Tor forums, they never mention requesting courts to issue warrants to ISPs for collection of e.g. traffic-analysis-correlation info about locations of servers hosting illegal content. Instead, this de-anonymization step is something they always have to achieve extra-judicially, usually by contracting a private network threat intelligence firm.)
Is the website illegal? Or maybe the police need to deal with spam calls more sensibly. Presumably they can trace where the calls are coming from in real life
People who want to live in a just world often get in the way of things. I'm just not sure why you're mad at those who want justice and not those who put profits above all else?
> that Cloudflare hosts these criminals
Oh.. it's not that they host them, it's that they go out of their way to protect them, and the profit streams associated with them.
"We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying for that website it would be at least offline, never worked.
And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"
"Hardline"? To me it seems like quite reasonable approach as opposed to "we will just take down anything someone on Twitter didn't like".
If you require a court ruling before blocking a fraud, it means you will keep hosting 99% of frauds.
I also doubt that Cloudflare lets every single analogous issue bubble up to a full court case every single time, but for new/unclear/borderline scenarios, I'm glad that courts don't get to outsource their duty, i.e. determining the legality of actions, to a for-profit organization without public oversight.
Isn't that somewhat of an oxymoron? What are some examples of something that is against the law but not handled by the courts of law?
If the legislature doesn't like the court's interpretation, they can then amend the law and the process restarts.
So basically, at least in the US, nothing is clearly illegal until it is handled by a court -- so yes I think you're right
So it sounds like the system works as intended, as far as I understand.