Twitter/X migrated to Cloudflare, bypassing Brazilian block | Hacker News Reader

Twitter/X migrated to Cloudflare, bypassing Brazilian block

54 pointsfabioyy79 comments

twitter/X migrated to Cloudflare, rendering the block imposed by the Brazilian judiciary ineffective.

will Cloudflare block twitter on brazil?

Looks like Cloudflare has already agreed to block Twitter in Brazil.

https://noticias.uol.com.br/colunas/andreza-matais/2024/09/1...

When the block became effective, I asked how much it would cost to migrate to Cloudflare. It appears that it wasn’t that expensive, haha.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41406367

The real question is whether is whether it is right for the judges of a country to block access to a service that the countries depend on.

For instance in the UK the government can stop local media from publishing news that is considered libellous or defamatory, or may unjustly influence court cases, but they can't stop citizens from accessing that information if it is published in a news outlet outside the country.

No one is questioning why the Brazilian judiciary should have that power. It seems rather excessive and an infringement of Brazilians rights, though that is not surprising when we live in a era when governments have taking upon themselves to decide what their citizens rights are, when human rights are supposed to be intrinsic, ie those that all fauna on the planet do.

It's the Supreme Court, not some random small claims court. That needs to be taken into account.

It's still illegal.

No, it's not.

Yes, it is. There's nothing in our laws that backs the judge ruling. And in Brazil, judges can ONLY DO what the law says, not what they think it's fair or what they want.

It is ilegal to be a criminal and those senators you are talking about? They will go to jail :) together with Bolsonaro. Fighting the legal system is the last strategy of convicted criminals

Did you said the same when the same justice system did the same to Lula back in 2016? :)

It makes no difference. If the people posting those tweets are Brazilian denizens why not sanction them under Brazilian laws?

Shutting down Twitter to stop them implies the Brazilian judiciary doesn't have the ability to sanction them under Brazilian law.

AFAIK, Twitter/X was shut down in Brazil for refusing to declare a legal representative in the country which is a basic requirement for any company operating in Brazil.

On a side note, the contents an international corporation publishes can violate the law of a country even when they are not posted by citizens of that country. When they do so, and don't take down the content, they will be shut down. It works like that in every country, including the US. It pains me having to point that out since it's so obvious.

And have they been shut down? Blocking access to a service through the regular channels doesn't shut it down.

For instance before the internet a Saudi dissident based in the UK used to send faxes to phones in Saudi Arabia that were critical of the Govt. I don't think the Saudi govt blocked access to phone calls from the UK on account of that.

If Brazilian enterprises are not allowed by law to trade with Twitter that does not amount to shutting it down. All you've done is block the usage of a service by most law abiding citizens which many of them probably rely on for all or a part of their living.

Twitter is operating under US law and Brazilian law only applies to their Brazilian subsidiary. If their Brazilian subsidiary has been has closed down because their parent company is not complying with Brazilian law then Brazilians are free to deal directly with the parent company under US law and jurisdiction.

> Twitter/X was shut down in Brazil for refusing to declare a legal representative in the country which is a basic requirement for any company operating in Brazil.

Which is a pretty stretch from an older law, that was made to companies operating "phisically", opening offices, having workers and etc.

Twitter closed their offices in Brazil, so they don't need to do it anymore.

If we take the interpretation this judge is using with Twitter to everything, 99% of the internet will need to be blocked in Brazil.

> No one is questioning why the Brazilian judiciary should have that power.

Actually, millions of people are, and senators are seeking this judge's impeachment.

The Western media is not mentioning that.

> No one is questioning why the Brazilian judiciary should have that power. It

That's the point, they don't. There's nothing in the law for him to back his decisions. But we just hope for our senate to take action.

We hope he continue, Moraes has at least 50% of support :)

Yeah, he has the support of the same people that used to hate the judges when Brazilian justice system persecuted Lula when went into jail ilegally.

In the end of the day, people just care if their political agenda is being met, it doesn't matter if it throws the country into a dictatorship.

In tomorrow’s news, Cloudflare blocked by Brazil.

I'd say it's more likely that Cloudflare will receive a legal order to block X in Brazil.

Then Twitter can migrate to AWS CloudFront.

I doubt that any of those services would be willing to risk being fined or blocked in Brazil just to continue hosting X.com.

X is the first and only company willing to prioritize values over revenue in this case.

It seems like it is already done

Why Elon didn't use the same strategy with China?

"as many positions as the kamasutra" sounds like a good motto for Xwitter.

Because it does not work..

Sure, it makes technically harder to block.. But governments don't rely only technical solutions for problems..

China, like Brazil is doing, would order Cloudflare to block Twitter and they would have to choose either comply and help China block it, like they are doing in Brazil, or challenge and not comply and face the consequences and likely a full block..

Having Cloudflare fully blocked in both countries would be terrible for business as they have many other customers so it is economically best to comply and potentially loose one customer then challenge the order and loose the entire market..

Because he's not questioning a law, he's questioning the judge not following the law.

Looks like they only use it in Brazil, everywhere else seems to resolve to regular Twitter IPs

Then our Supreme Court will have to issue a legal order to Cloudflare, which has representatives in Brazil, to block X nation-wide.

Blocking Cloudflare itself wouldn't make any sense as our country systems themselves would get hurt and I don't think Cloudflare will deny such order.

It's hard to see why Cloudflare would put themselves in this position if they're planning to back down when the order inevitably comes in. (Perhaps Twitter somehow did this without Cloudflare's cooperation - I wouldn't put that past them trying but I'd be surprised if it were possible.)

Don't see why they would join this fight agains't Brazil.

The money X Corp is paying them cannot be THAT great to justify losing all brazilian costumers and Cloudflare doesn't seem like a very ideology-driven company.

I think it would be about the matter of principle and demonstrating that they will defend their customer's interests.

They will defend their customer interests by staying able to do business in Brazil..

Lets remember that Twitter is not their only customer..

So if twitter has problem with some country justice it is their problem to solve, not a problem to be shared with every other Cloudflare customer..

Also, i doubt that they are making more money from Twitter then every other customer in Brazil added together..

by complying with the block it sets a precedent that is bad for their other customers in the long term, not the short term.

They already do content blocking all over the world..

The precedent is already set, this is nothing new..

are there technical details on exactly what x.com did?

cloudflare offers a lot of self-service tools, which can and do allow customers that cloudflare doesn't want to service to use it until someone finds out (my favorite example is that, briefly, the foreign ministry of Iran briefly managed to register and activate properties on the service)

registering while only directing brazilian clients to cloudflare would be difficult using the standard method (setting your domain's nameservers to the cloudflare servers), but cloudflare's CNAME setup option only requires a TXT record. it's possible x.com did that by just paying for a business plan and never interacting with cloudflare staff

doing so for the _root_ record is a bit dicier, but as x.com operates its own nameservers they're probably able to handle the not-quite compliant fuckery necessary to CNAME the root: https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/zone-setups/partial-se...

I know, but I want Cloudflare to go down in a burst of flames, it makes web scraping such a pain, please do it Baldy.

Migrated...what.. to Cloudflare?

Twitter, currently known as X.

no I mean what part of twitter, the main application? We're saying it's running off of CF pages and workers now?

Elsewhere I've seen only the t.co domain link shortening/forwarding... which could be a small worker app running there, not the main app.

From what I can see some locations in Brazil route to CF, but not all. And only from x.com, not twitter.com

I dunno, still down to me.

DNS propagation can take a while. Some people couldn't access earlier and they can now.

Good luck fighting countries, if Brazil is serious about this, it will be blocked again.

It's really interesting that CloudFlare accepted X (Twitter) as a client knowing the fights Musk gets into.

They probably gave a high quote that got paid anyway.

Hopefully in cold hard cash upfront.

Cloudflare was happy to host Kiwi Farms for a long time. I doubt they care what Musk does.

Hosting Kiwi Farms wasn't likely to get Cloudflares ASN null-routed by the 7th most populous state on Earth though. There's the potential for serious collateral damage to Cloudflares business here if Brazil calls their bluff.

Null-routing Cloudflare is also going to do a fair bit of collateral damage to the people of the 7th most populous state on Earth though.

Considering the initial order of the Brazilian judiciary regarding VPN, this is almost certainly what Twitter hopes to achieve here.

i doubt it will require null-routing Cloudflare..

they will probably get notified to block twitter in Brazil and will likely comply.

Well, yes it's always possible that Cloudflare will comply with a demand to block Twitter. GP specifically raised the possibility of null-routing and I'm just pointing out it's probably not a good idea.

Like project golden shield damaged the chinese internet and handicapped lical grown buisnesses?

Roskomnadzor's 2018 escapade with Telegram under a rather similar situation - their attempts to block it ended up taking out vast sections of the internet (for Russians) that didn't have anything to do with Telegram.

Tying your service to vital internet infrastructure can work. It doesn't even have to be a particularly ironclad solution. In 2018, the powers that be in Russia decided it's cheaper to flood Telegram with their own propaganda, rather than block it.

> Null-routing Cloudflare is also going to do a fair bit of collateral damage to the people of the 7th most populous state on Earth though.

I wish... That sort of massive economic damage is exactly what this country deserves. It's gotten to the point I'm hoping Trump wins and sanctions this place for stealing millions from american companies via arbitrary fines.

MANY piracy websites and even 4chan use Cloudflare. That’s nothing compared to X/Twitter.

We really need to avoid a future where censorship is regarded as a virtue and monopolized transit providers are "cancelled" or shamed into being the judge/jury/executioner.

The far better solution is just to ignore stuff you don't agree with, go outside, and move on with life.

lol, no we don't. Hosting providers have always had terms of service, and private enterprise does not need to adhere to government-level definitions of free speech.

Elon algorithmically censors me on twitter and makes everybody reads his xeets, this is the opposite of free speech, it is censorship and propaganda.

Google Ads took Twitter on, too. Google now delivers ads directly into Twitter that /sort of/ look like tweets, but just off enough to tell they’re ads. The “Why this ad” sends you off to Google.

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