On Rackspace Cloud you can't link to offensive content | Hacker News Reader

On Rackspace Cloud you can't link to offensive content

rackspace.com

38 pointsdchest29 comments

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"relates in any manner to non-consensual sex acts" Better not make a bad joke involving dropping the soap.

"is defamatory" Better not insult anyone.

"exposes trade secrets" Why?

"promotes illegal drugs" Better tell the white house petition site it's too offensive for rackspace.

This is a pretty overboard CYA script.

may result in retaliation against the Rackspace Cloud by offended viewers.

This seems excessively broad. E.g., recursively: I am offended by this passage. Other viewers who are similarly offended may retaliate, ergo Rackspace cannot publish, transmit or store on or via the Rackspace Cloud’s network and equipment any content or links to its own Cloud Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).

The most regrettable bit is really the euphemism. It's not like there's a huge and diverse population of viewers that, if offended, will engage in retaliation.

Of course, as a private company Rackspace is free to deny service to those that may bring harm to their employees. Though, it's still sad that refusing to take a stand for that most simple and basic freedom (speech) is so uncontroversial.

Fortunately hosting is a commodity and you can get what rackspace sells from any number of providers. Don't like the terms? Don't do business with Rackspace. Vote with your feet and your dollars and make sure you tell them you're leaving because you don't like their terms of service. If enough of their customers do that they'll get the message eventually.

And if they don't get that particular message they'll have to move on some other metric (perhaps price) to get people to continue to host with them in spite of their terms of service.

Personally I wouldn't have a problem hosting with them under these terms, I'd simply ignore the terms and factor in the risk of being kicked out by spreading whatever I was hosting there across multiple providers. That's a good strategy anyway, even when you think you're in compliance with the terms of service where ever you host your stuff.

If your content is such that Rackspace closes your account, reliable hosting probably isn't nearly as much a commodity as you describe. All hosts have clauses in their TOS to let them close your account if you become an inconvenience.

Yes, but hosts typically respond to outside pressure and it could very well be that someone else's stuff gets taken down with your stuff being collateral damage.

In that case it pays off handily if you have your content spread. Of course, if you're going to do something that is illegal then it doesn't really matter where you host, then you are basically just counting down until you get booted.

You can often approach hosting providers out of band and arrange deals for sites that are normally against their TOS. I've seen it happen on multiple occasions.

If you could let me know any specific hosts that do this (in private if necessary) I would much appreciate it.

Looks fine to me. I would hope they would issue takedown requests rather than e.g just pullin the plug.

Tellingly, that part is left unspecified.

Looks fine to me.

</sarcasm>

Rackspace Takes Koran-Burning Church Site Offline[1] : "Dove World refused, and Rackspace gave the church several hours to migrate the content." (emphasis mine)

I guess that's better than just pulling the plug, but not much.

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368948,00.asp

I don't get the Excessive Use section. Don't you pay for what you use. If your VM has 7g ram, are you not allowed to use all of it all the time?

I believe they are mostly talking about maxxing out your CPU usage since I am sure they oversell their CPU availability. This could really be fixed with affinity settings, but that may also interfere in peak moments. Im sure they have that in there so that they can kick you if you start holding you CPU at 100% load 24/7

If they advertise with certain features then you should be able to use those features.

They'd have some form of scheduling that would just restrict your CPU usage there they aren't going to shutdown your box just because it's under load. This would be for when you are making millions of unnecessary api calls or have a virus spamming the local network.

They provide for "bursting" of shared resources as needed. If you are under your resource cap, you're fine. But if you're constantly needing bursts out of the shared resources, you need to move up to a higher-resource tier with more dedicated resources.

On a related note, Hetzner's terms of service say "material not deemed in good taste is not permitted" http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb/

For about $2500/month you can put a rack of machines into a colo connected to the peering net. Depending on how clever you are that's like 1/2 PB of disk space and plenty of CPU to host what ever you want.

You can do it for less than that if you're willing to rent an 'office' near a tie point. Just takes a bit more work, and of course you are always going to be threatened with the government coming in and taking all your servers if they don't like you but, that's kinda the way it is.

I'm going to venture a guess that hosting controversial clients is more trouble (in cease and desists) than its worth. I don't think Rackspace is hurting itself by not servicing the controversial/illegal content market.

It looks pretty reasonable to me... They don't want child porn and rape videos on their servers.

I honestly don't see the problem here.

Citing the whole thing and highlighting the problem in italic:

===

You may not publish, transmit or store on or via the Rackspace Cloud’s network and equipment any content or links to any content that the Rackspace Cloud reasonably believes:

- Constitutes, depicts, fosters, promotes or relates in any manner to child pornography, bestiality, or non-consensual sex acts;

- is excessively violent, incites violence, threatens violence or contains harassing content or hate speech;

- is unfair or deceptive under the consumer protection laws of any jurisdiction, including chain letters and pyramid schemes;

- is defamatory or violates a person’s privacy;

- creates a risk to a person’s safety or health, creates a risk to public safety or health, compromises national security or interferes with a investigation by law enforcement;

- improperly exposes trade secrets or other confidential or proprietary information of another person;

- is intended to assist others in defeating technical copyright protections;

- infringes on another person’s copyright, trade or service mark, patent or other property right;

- promotes illegal drugs, violates export control laws, relates to illegal gambling or illegal arms trafficking;

- is otherwise illegal or solicits conduct that is illegal under laws applicable to you or to the Rackspace Cloud; or

- is otherwise malicious, fraudulent or may result in retaliation against the Rackspace Cloud by offended viewers.

===

For example, publishing this comment would be a violation of these terms, because it links to exposed trade secret (http://web.archive.org/web/20080404222417/http://cypherpunks...), to content that infringes trademark (http://www.apple.com/iphone), violates export control laws (https://github.com/sqlcipher/sqlcipher/network), and content that is intended to assist others in defeating technical copyright protections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime).

That's not the only part. They have complete discretion by their use of the following words:

    excessively
    risk
    interferes
    improperly
    intended
    promotes
    malicious
    may result

Both of those are directly illegal. You don't, as a business, need to explicitly state that your service can't be used for illegal purposes.

This AUP amounts to "If we (or someone else with power to be sufficiently annoying to us) don't like it, it's going offline. kthxbye". Of course they can't state it in that many words, because people prefer to do business with providers that at least pretend to be on their side.

How does this compare to Amazon? Does Amazon permit unauthorized scraping, etc? I'm guessing that they do.

http://aws.amazon.com/aup/

The wording is "You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services or AWS Site for any illegal, harmful or offensive use, or to transmit, store, display, distribute or otherwise make available content that is illegal, harmful, or offensive. Prohibited activities or content include...".

No "linking" mentioned here, although, "otherwise make available" is a broad definition.

That means that a XSS attach, or just a comment, and you can shutdown any company hosted at Rackspace?

Sure, if Rackspace completely ignores the context of the infraction. It's save to assume they don't.

>It's save to assume they don't.

Never assume anything with regards to your entire companies infrastructure being in the hands of a third-party.

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