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Comment by jonluca | Hacker News Reader

Wow the people in this thread are a huge bummer. This is much cooler and I doubt this is a real safety issue. You can already sign up for a free cloudflare account and deploy it for free, on your own, on a free workers.dev domain. The friction removal here isn't going to meaningfully change the security / amount of malicious content.

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Well according to the people in this thread it was previously impossible for bad actors to host a website, and CloudFlare has now given them this unique ability.

I really hope/imagine this project specifically has a LLM of some kind doing real-time analysis on the uploaded files for malware from the get-go. How good that is could be is anyone's guess (and chances are there would be blind spots / evasion techniques).

Why would Cloudflare do that? They shouldn't help bad actors.

Who, exactly, should help people host a website?

Best case: themselves. Since we are not there yet, reliable services.

Same folks who are very concerned AI will give malicious actors the ability to produce text containing falsehoods.

When you see a group of people being critical, you can either see it as a “bummer”, or you can see it as people critically thinking about a thing.

Is it really more useful to have everyone expressing how much they like something instead of identifying problems?

Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

> Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

Probably (I'm just assuming) because that person observes negative/cautious/"I don't like this because X and Y and also Z"/etc sentiment too much and feels like people are only quick to notice issues while forgetting about good sides.

It's only an assumption, though.

I think the HN rule for "curmudgeonly" applies.

> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think HN should be a place where I am excited to see what others have to add. When I see a post I am excited to see what takes and spins others have on it. I do want real criticism and a lively debate about important things, but there has to be a balance.

I want to see other comments that seem like they genuinely want to help steer something or build people up. Sometimes I get the impression that's not happening on HN.

There needs to be another rule against being a techno-sycophant.

To the curmudgeon, its techno-sycophancy to say the wheel is a pretty good thing.

It’s just another take on shill / sheeple / etc. it gets old.

And to the sycophant, pointing out real and obvious drawbacks is being a curmudgeon.

In such situations, the golden mean is a useful lens.

Mortal combat is the only way to resolve this.

The golden mean is only a useful lens if all sides are equally prepared to take up extremist positions. If some people are taking up considerate or even reasonable positions but others take up the absolute, the golden mean will always skew towards the unreasonable.

I think I might agree, but just so we're clear: what exactly is a "techno-sycophant"?

Discussing the privacy implications of a big box that says "drag files to me!" is thoughtful criticism.

I would get the point if this was someone's personal Show HN project but this is Cloudflare. They can withstand a little critique.

The problem is that everything is negative, all the time. Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged. Everything someone or some company does must not be acknowledged to have any redeeming value- it’s all just negative

Which is sad, because so much amazing stuff is happening on the world right now, and seems to be only accelerating. For everybody.

Maybe AI slop has something to do with it?

> Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged.

What makes you say this?

Amazing stuff? You mean technical stuff right? Because politically, demographically and climate wise we're headed for disaster or at least dystopia.

I wished I could find all the science and technology as uplifting as my friends do.

I don't know, I find it very hard to stay positive about our general direction in the last couple of years, and know few people in real life who don't share this opinion, in or outside of tech. And I'm also not entirely sure I understand why others are excited, it perplexes me. I would appreciate any insight into this.

It may not be critical thinking though, but simply being contrarian, which is one of the easiest ways to sound smart without necessarily providing much of value or substance. And strangely, seeing as it’s relatively rare IRL, seemingly the default on the internet. Blindly praising isn’t worth much either, but I doubt that’s what jonluca is encouraging. It’s possible to “yes, and” without resorting to either sycophancy or relentless negatively.

This is what the influencer propaganda machine on social media has done to people's view of critical thinking.

You're encountering the "contrarian dynamic" which dang described in this post (which also explains why your own anti-contrarian comment reached the top) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601

Thanks for linking that comment! I wasn't familiar with the term, but it perfectly describes the pattern that manifests in every single HN thread about certain topics. The Grok announcement thread that is on the main page today is another perfect example.

Agreed I think this is pretty solid especially since you get all the Cloudflare benefits like CDN from the get-go.

But why need they so much license rights?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48841559

Oh poor you, bummed by people WHO ACTUALLY care about the web.

After my hoster started asking me for 700€ for a year of hosting a static website of like 100Mb i moved to CF worker and github. I would selfhost but thats not allowed without license

I think they are all bots or threatened to see their little hobby now being accessible, classic gatekeeping.

Corporations acting as if naive is a bit of problem in reality. For one thing, CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

Same here: CF is basically giving malicious actors an ability to ship contents/data publicly while laundering the legal responsibility of those actors.

Now tell me what is cool

> Now tell me what is cool

Not immediately being a copyright bootlicker.

The fact that you went straight to "BuT pIrAtEs" already shows who you actually care: Corpos, not people.

A dirty secret is that piracy is being abused by criminal organizations[1]. When people unknowingly access such sites to see contents for free, it generate ad revenue for those organizations, which can fund other crimes.

[1]: https://www.interpol.int/en/Crimes/Illicit-goods/Projects/Pr...

Broadly speaking any organisation facilitating piracy is implicitly a criminal one. Piracy is a pretty large field though and the economics of say a streaming site are going to be very different from running a torrent tracker. The fact you can use a torrent tracker without even visiting the site (Radarr/Sonarr etc) tells me that running a tracker site, probably isn't very lucrative.

Are you talking about:

> The suspects subscribed to 40 Korean cable TV service accounts, re-broadcasting content to Indonesia and offering video-on-demand (VOD) services through customized TV boxes, applications, and web browsers.

Sure, that is a case, but I mainly wanted to quote INTERPOL (the international police):

> Criminals behind pirate sites can be part of organized crime groups. They can use the proceeds to fund other illegal activities, such as illegal online gambling, online sexual exploitation, drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering.

Another notable example would be Operation KRATOS 2 by EUROPOL[1]. The case was roughly the same — crime organization pirating video content. IPTV piracy is certainly a lucrative business, because videos are relatively more difficult to handle for normal people.

[1]: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/29-a...

> For one thing, CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

That's awesome, glad to hear it

>Now tell me what is cool

Piracy is cool. Information wants to be free.

I hate the corporate bootlicking that is so prevalent here.

What about centralizing the internet like Cloudfare is doing? Once corporate greed starts creeping we will find ourselves on the verge of pay per visit a website

You mean centralizing the web? Doesn't bother me. Most of the web is a dumpster fire of AI slop anyway.

There's more to the Internet than the world wide web, though. NNTP and IRC communities remain vibrant, if diminished in size

Are you aware of any projects to replace the current web implementation?

I've noticed the current version is largely accessed by Chrome which appears to be a trojan.

Other than gopher/Gemini, not really, no

> CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

I'm already on board, you don't need to sell it to me!

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