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Comment by peanut-walrus | Hacker News Reader

So "big companies only, absolutely no anonymous sign-ups" should be the only ones able to put stuff on the internet without fearing that a random teenager can take your site offline for days just because they're bored?

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No. Nobody said that.

Cloudflare should simply enforce basic rules, like "don't run a cybercrime storefront", rather than letting criminal operations like this proliferate.

How? Their sign-up flow would have to change dramatically. It might even become a process that is internally "expensive". There is likely one or more managers in charge of this decision and they don't want it. Additionally the current universe rewards the current situation (for them)

This is called KYC and is a standard part of operating a financial service. Seems to me like it should be part of internet infrastructure services as well. And, I thought, in some cases already is?

... and financial services companies huge and small still go out of their way to help their clients move money around in a myriad of ways, because it's very lucrative and there are so many loopholes and ways to obscure things. Offloading the responsibilities of law enforcement and regulatory bodies to private companies makes things worse for everybody. Providing non-crime services to criminals should not be a crime any more than selling a candy bar to a criminal is. As long as you aren't actively aiding or covering up for a crime, not reporting criminal activity is not even a crime in many areas, and if KYC can effectively identify criminals, law enforcement should be able to do it themselves.

No fintech within reach of the US government is going to give money to terrorists under sanctions on the SDN without facing severe fines/consequences. That various groups have faced consequences for giving money to terrorists is a sign of the system working, not that it doesn't work. No system is going to be 100% perfect, but the US is pretty serious about having no one they have control over sending money to eg North Korea.

Ok, terrorists and countries we've been at war with for 70 years. What about drug dealers, mafias, hitmen, corrupt politicians, white collar criminals, scammers, etc? Criminals that actually threaten Americans? Nobody cares about whether terrorists or whatever tinpot dictator can get funding through US banks, because the CIA is bringing pallets of cash to them anyway.

KYC is useless as a regular user. I hope it never infects industries outside the financial system.

Why care about them hosting an info page for anyone? Cyber criminals supposedly can host it a billion other ways so why care?

Plausible deniability is all they really need. Asking companies not to make money in very likely to be legal ways will never work. If these people are really doing illegal business in plain sight it should be easy for law enforcement to catch them.

The danger with this is that you're asking cloudflare to know more about you and your website and to be more ready to take websites offline. That's a monkey paw if ive ever seen one.

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