CloudFlare and Free Speech
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
I was once on the operating side of a site that was controversial to several traditional/entrenched industries, but we were just a small little flea to them and they ignored us (for those that even noticed). Until a lovely blogger happened upon our site and decided to write a story about how innovative we were. All of a sudden we started getting C&D letters from very large firms that had tenuous (but expensive to litigate) claims against us. Turned out the bloody blogger had gone around asking loaded questions to them all about how we were undermining the industries' business model and what they planned to do about it. Once it was put to them in that way, we were no longer an annoying flea but a blood-sucking tick that needed burned. We had to shutdown because of that. :(
I can forgive uninformed people inadvertently asking loaded questions, because it takes practice and effort to be unbiased. However, it is inexcusable for the media to do so (even if it is par for the course).
Not the sort of magazine that anyone here would read or support, I would hazard. Let these hacks run themselves into the ground — for the second time, apparently.
Surely CloudFlare just like any other company should take a stand against possibly pretentious bloggers, but the whole america-land-of-the-free is tiring, more so given the recent spying disclosures brought to light by Snowden and others.
Don't be a fan of me; I'm just a guy doing stuff some of it total crap.
How come you don't step away from being associated from distasteful content here?
It's a faulty analogy IMO. Cloudflare chooses to let this company pay CloudFare for services provided. It is 100% CF's choice as to whether they accept this person/company as a paying customer. Google isn't asking for money for their index. There's a massive difference there. In one case, the paying customer agrees to follow CF's TOS. In the other case, Google agrees to follow the site's robots.txt and meta tags (which operate almost as a proxy for a TOS).
No, nor would it be right for us to monitor the content that flows through our network and make determinations on what is and what is not politically appropriate. Frankly, that would be creepy.
This reads as, "We don't have any filters whatsoever - anyone can be a paying customer and, as long as they pay their bill, we'll let them use our services no matter what." That's just disingenuous - no company operates that way. Take, for example, a case where Group A uses a CF-hosted site to attack Group B. Group B complains to CF - does CF take the same stance? I doubt their lawyers would approve. I suppose CF could now backtrack and say, "See that line where we say 'politically appropriate' - we're really talking about censoring people, not about copyright/attacks/etc." If that's the case, they need to take this post down and have a re-write in which they make it clear what they mean.
Or what about DMCA takedown notices? Is CF's stance just to thumb their nose at them and say, "Nope - we aren't even going to investigate."?
What about pirate sites - is CF saying, "We don't want to know. We're just closing our eyes and ears and just letting whatever happens happen." Bull#%*^&
Perplexing.
> A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.
Replace website with song and provider with record label, and you'll have a very familiar conversation from nearly 30 years ago:
Frank Zappa on Crossfire, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISil7IHzxc
The comparison is loose, but it's eerily reminiscent.
Your labeling of analytics as "creepy", though, is entirely unreasonable - every hosting company and ISP on the planet that I've ever dealt with, regardless of their politics or privacy position, has always had hyper detailed analytics regarding my sites / racks bandwidth utilization - typically down to 5 minute increments. Furthermore, if I engage them as a provider of Transit and or CDN services, they always have very deep knowledge of who/where I'm sending data to. That's the entire point of why I acquires those services from them - so they can manage them for me.
I don't think they watch your site in the way you mean it: they are content-agnostic.
What's next, I can't stand outside and record how many people walk by with t-shirts versus long-sleeve shirts? That's how I see anonymous analytics. Now if you want to argue that the analytics are not anonymous and they can be linked to real people, like that one AOL search-data leak a few years back, then that's a discussion. But you can't say websites/app collecting anonymous analytics is bad anymore than you can say me standing outside in the city collecting visual info on the people walking by is somehow an invasion of privacy. That's just paranoia. You might as well just not use the internet at all if you're that worried because I'm sure whatever ISP you have collects some kind of analytics too. In fact, I'm sure just about every successful business ever has some kind of stats on its users/costumers. You'll just have to exit modern-society if you don't want anyone collecting anonymous analytics from you.
And there isn't such a thing as anonymous data in 2013: it's just data that hasn't been identified yet. Surely a small portion of "anonymous" analytic data can be used to match a user's two identities.
One of the primary reasons to be on Cloudflare is to make use of their security features such as DDOS protection. How are they supposed to tell if you're under attack if they can't monitor the rate of traffic going to your site, or the IP addresses associated with said traffic?