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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

>We already live a world where your service is terminated for illegal activity. Of course we want it, how is this even a question?

you are misunderstanding me, but im not sure if you are doing it on purpose.

if they receive a lawful order of course they should oblige. and without a lawful order they should not make content-based decisions on what to host.

>The mental loops people in these comments are using to support criminals is truly mind blowing.

this is a complete mischaracterization of what i am saying. and implying that i am... astroturfing for ddos? plain offensive.

i just dont want cloudflare ai-scanning my blog, seeing the word "DDoS" because i am in networking, and proactively removing my site from the internet.

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Your account can get terminated for any other random nonsense though. Happens all the time, with cloudflare, google, github, everywhere. Everyone just pretends that "this can't happen to me". You want cyberspace free from any "evil" state jurisdiction, nor "coddling" so this is what you get.

was this meant as a reply to someone else?

no it was reply to "i just dont want cloudflare ai-scanning my blog, seeing the word "DDoS" because i am in networking, and proactively removing my site from the internet."

> if they receive a lawful order of course they should oblige. and without a lawful order they should not make content-based decisions on what to host.

You are ignorant of the law. You cannot host user content without being required to police it for at a minimum things like child porn.

But this is also not a remotely ambiguous case. Any normal service would instantly terminate a client account if the client is blatantly and openly advertising their service to disrupt the business. This is not some "slippery slope grey area" where maybe they are breaking the law but who knows. They have a website that says "Here is our service to disrupt cloudflare." It's as black and white as you can get and any normal service would instantly terminate them as soon as they became aware.

>You cannot host user content without being required to police it for at a minimum things like child porn.

yes, child sexual abuse material is covered by law, i.e. they already have a lawful obligation for that thus do not require a separate lawful order.

the issue is around arbitrary content-policing, where the decision is made by cloudflare rather than the legal apparatus.

having a website that says you do ddos for hire is not illegal. (doing the ddos is the illegal part. but that was not done with cloudflare infrastructure = cloudflare should not be involved unless they receive a lawful order).

i am going to choose to ignore your additional mischaracterizations and insults. it would super cool of you to stop calling me ignorant, an astroturfer for ddos, etc. over a simple disagreement.

Yeah, there's a huge big hole you're ignoring:

That 18 USC 2 and 371 apply to the CFAA, too. What are those? Accomplice liability, which has been considered to include aiding and abetting. Hosting (and protecting, by virtue of your product) computer crime organizations could quite plausibly be rolled into accomplice liability.

cloudflare has no knowledge that <random site> is linked to <random attack on a completely different company, originating from random places on the internet> and they have no way of gaining that knowledge unless presented with a lawful order stating such.

if what you were saying was at all a plausible legal interpretation, it would have been brought to light over the last 16 years of lawsuits cloudflare has been involved in. or it would have been brought up by their literal room full of (actual) on-staff lawyers.

aiding and abetting requires knowledge of the crime and intent to facilitate it. cloudflare has neither.

You don't have to police content. You only have to take content reports and read them. (Assuming you don't live in a dictatorship)

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