At a company I worked for we had a strong incentive program to submit patent applications for our work, where each listed inventor would receive a monetary payment of ~$2-3k if the patent was deemed worthy and filed by our lawyers, and an additional bonus if it was granted some years later.
The problem is the patent applications would flood in from employees with the hopes that the non-technical lawyers would miss some due diligence like finding prior art. Worst case is you wasted a bit of time on the application, best case is you just made an easy $3k.
Now the company was not a patent troll, so I don't recall hearing about any instances of them actually suing anyone over patents. But it still opened my eyes to how ridiculous the software patent process really is. You don't have to create anything, write any code, or even be the brightest engineer with a unique idea. You just need to get that idea past enough people. The entire industry is a scam for money, no matter which end of it you're on.
We really admire what cloudflare did in dealing with patent trolls… “Patent troll” should not be an acceptable profession in America, or anywhere for that matter!
We will announce more on this soon. Cloudflare’s crowdsourced prior art search was brilliant.
Whatever you think of cloudflare... It's refreshing to see such principled and dedicated action taken against a clear injustice to a degree well beyond what is self serving.
Now it's time to address the root cause of this mess. Make the patent examination system better at vetting claims and looking for prior art. It's too easy to get patents issued. (Said he, who has a few patents to his name.)
I don't suppose it's feasible for the Patent Office to crowdsource the examination process: patent applications aren't public. But they could surely hire some people, or a company or two, to use the 'toobz to look for prior art.
It is a problem on two fronts: 1) The USPTO office is criminally under funded. You have people making $75K being given mere days to sort out a new patent application. 2) Say you even have a PhD in some field. In three years, you may be completely out of your element with new advances. Now think about people who have been there 20 years
I think the solutions are fairly simple for software patents
Software patents are only valid for 3 years
Software patents aren't transferable, they are only licensable and have to be licensed on the same terms to everyone (this means the patent is always owned by the creators)
Software patents have to have a dissertation defense where they have to present to multiple examiners. We need people to push back on things that are "Super common prior art thing but on a PDA"
My understanding is that most software is not patentable, unless it is tied somehow to hardware or to a machine. I've identified a patent that makes broad claims for which prior art exists in the form of a YouTube video detailing the software and its interaction with a machine. Why is it the case that this form of prior-art is not considered for ex-parte reexamination but it is in the case of the patent owner requesting reexamination? It doesn't make sense.
> My understanding is that most software is not patentable, unless it is tied somehow to hardware or to a machine.
That understanding is incorrect. What is explicitly non-patentable are "abstract ideas" like the patents discussed in this blog post. An example off the top of my head of software that is patentable but not tied to hardware would be a video codec.
I think that in the case of the video codec it applies due to the algorithm transforming a signal that represents a physical quantity. So perhaps the requirement is that the software to patent must have a physical effect?
I'd prefer that Cloudflare, or any other highly used web infrastructure, not be used as a speech/thought gatekeeping weapon and just stick to blocking things that are illegal only.
In which case those countries can get a court order and have Cloudflare remove their services from that company. They're not endorsing a forum by providing them the same services they do anyone else, and it sets a very scary precedence for a private company to shut down speech (however deplorable one may find it).
Another way of looking at it - should there be a concerted (and successful!) effort from the Christian Right in America to start taking positions of power in major tech firms, would you be happy for them to stop serving people/companies who held social views at odds with their own?
But not in the United States. Hate speech at least, and harassment is a bit murky these days anyway. Swatting is certainly harassment, but is making fun of someone for being odd?
Imagine for a moment that Cloudflare leans in and starts doing this. Then, let's image a DeSantis Presidency, with a full hard-right Senate, House, and majority SC soon.
Now, imagine what those people feel like is harassing them. 90% of Twitter posts would likely qualify. Half of the post on this very site. Most of Reddit. Then they start passing laws that you can't pick and choose. If you are a piece of infrastructure that is gatekeeping what someone felt was hate-speech or harassement yesterday, well then you have to do it today.
It becomes much less murky after repeated and individually targeted "making fun". If it's made clear that you want them to leave you alone and they choose to persist, it becomes crystal clear.
At most, that's bullying. People can get restraining orders for those cases. Trying to mandate decency won't work. It will only empower people who control the definition of "harmful" to get rid of anything they don't like.
I don't think I buy that. I think we're doing pretty good at identifying, for example, what constitutes sexual harassment in the work place. I'm really not sure what the hesitation is, to be honest. Seems like a given that you don't have the right to just keep fucking with someone who has asked you to stop.
I am extremely grateful that the world is not one big workplace and there's no HR to report everything to. Sexual harassment is actually legal outside the workplace, and it's generally protected speech up until you start violating a restraining order.
Simply talking about other people behind their back isn't harassment, but it's typically unacceptable in a workplace. Outside the workplace, it's just a natural tendency of humans.
>I am extremely grateful that the world is not one big workplace and there's no HR to report everything to.
This is how I imagine living in parts of Europe are and also how I imagine people fantasize about the US becoming.
They just seem to not have the foresight that their current cultural thoughts might not be the dominant one and once the other side takes power they will call it fascism ... regardless of the side!
>If it's made clear that you want them to leave you alone and they choose to persist, it becomes crystal clear.
Let's say I buy your premise (I don't completely) but where does it stop? Does it include Trump? What about non-public figures only, but ones you probably don't like, for example White supremacists or neo-Nazis? Does it count against corporations?
And who gets to decide if you are making fun of someone? Just someone is offended or feeling hurt? If that is the metric then I defy you to write an English sentence that I can't turn into an oppressive, smart-ass remark about someone.
I am being a little hyperbolic here, but surely you see how any move to limit speech outside of literal threats or similar can just be used the opposite way round.
Ah sorry, I didn't mean just speaking "out loud" generally making fun of a group of people, I mean directly addressing someone, calling them a name, and them asking you repeatedly to stop.
Directly harassing someone is already a crime in most places. Here is an example definition:
----
(1)Fear for the person's safety or the safety of the person's immediate family or close personal associates. (2) Suffer substantial emotional distress by placing that person in fear of death, bodily injury, or continued harassment.
----
The second part of that is a little circular, but the point I am trying to get across to you is that in the US, I can call you a "fool" every time I see you and it is mostly perfectly legal even if you don't like it and tell me to stop. It generally has to be very escalated to involve the police.
And this is how it should be, and it should be a police matter. Not the "roadways" of the Internet making those decisions.
Today it might be some asshole calling someone the n-word or misgendering someone that gets their site shut down for all intents and purposes, but if we go down this road, tomorrow it could be because you misspoke about some "Dear Leader" in charge politically and now you can not participate in society in any real respect.
I'm fine with TOS, but TOS isn't the end-all in the US. For example, the electric company can't put in their TOS that I am not allowed to use electricity to view "hate speech" or hold a gathering of neo-Nazis. Neither of which I want to do, but you get the point I am making, if they start making moral judgements about how I use a fundamental part of operating in the modern world, it will be an issue.
What you're describing is a law. Electrical services are a utility and classified as fundamentally different. Is Cloudflare infrastructure that should be governed more-or-less the same way as electrical access? That's an interesting discussion! But it's also neither here nor there, since they're not classified that way, and so it's entirely within their purview to drop customers pretty much whenever and however they want.
Cloudflare dropping kiwifarms as a customer doesn't make kiwifarms go away. It doesn't target you if you were a user of that site either. All it does is say, "we do not wish to do business with them, so they should go solve the problems we solved for them in another way". I think it behooves us as technologists to influence these businesses to be ethical about who they choose to do business with. There is no forcing hand here. There is no government oversight involved (although perhaps there should be if we consider them infrastructure). If "buttflare but for nazis" forms as a business and they decide to take all the websites that everyone decries under their umbrella, offering site protection and all that jazz, we can make a fit about how unethical it is that such a service exists, but at the end of the day we can't do much about it other than do the same: advocate for them to not do what they do.
>What you're describing is a law. Electrical services are a utility and classified as fundamentally different. Is Cloudflare infrastructure that should be governed more-or-less the same way as electrical access?
Yes! At this point.
And just because electrical services are a utility now, doesn't mean they always were, and internet infrastructure should be classified that way as well.
Think about it in a non-web structure: Should someone be able to send a letter about "Killing all the Jews and make all black people slaves" and the New York Times HAS to print it and distribute it to all its subscribers?
Or do you think the NYT (as a private enterprise) can decide what messages they distribute on their platform? (this is a different question than whether or not the NYT has a moral responsibility to not distribute hateful messages)
Should the mail have to take the letter to the NYT without opening it and making sure that the content is culturally appropriate, is the proper question. And I argue yes!
If something in that mail turns out to be a death threat and something that the very end receiver have a problem with they can deal with it.
Cloudflare basically has no limit on the number of sites they can support, a newspaper has limited space. They are just providing CDN services not editorial services like a newspaper does. The average person probably does not even know that a website is using Cloudflare so the association is significantly less than a newspaper
Visa and Mastercard won't processes payments from dispensaries even though they have (effectively) no limit on the number of transactions they can support.
Visa and Mastercard threatened to cut-off OnlyFans unless they dropped "explicit content".
>Visa and Mastercard won't processes payments from dispensaries even though they have (effectively) no limit on the number of transactions they can support.
>Visa and Mastercard threatened to cut-off OnlyFans unless they dropped "explicit content".
I also, think that this should not be allowed, although the first one is a little more murky, due to possibly moving money across state lines where marijuana is illegal.
However, at the end of the day no one is stopping you from using cash, which is an inconvenient, but reasonable alternative. If a few large scale web infrastructure companies team up, you are fucked, there is no reasonable alternative.
>Cloudflare has already made an editorial statement in the past
I know that Cloudflare previously did this. I don't think they should be taking an editorial stance like that.
My point is that it is not typical to have a CDN taking an editorial stance. It is expected that a newspaper will.
>Visa and Mastercard won't processes payments from dispensaries even though they have (effectively) no limit on the number of transactions they can support.
I think weed is still illegal at the federal level? Visa and MasterCard could easily be accused of facilitating a felony. This seems clear cut to me.
Is Visa and MasterCard doing this in countries where weed is completely legal?
>Visa and Mastercard threatened to cut-off OnlyFans unless they dropped "explicit content".
Visa and MasterCard claimed they were doing it because banks require there to be proper validation against child porn. This is not Visa and MasterCard directly.
Regardless, who is to blame in this situation, they are not taking an editorial stance. They are saying that OnlyFans is facilitating child porn which is against the law.
I don't know about OnlyFans, but before getting threatened by Visa, PornHub clearly wasn't doing enough. They appear to have knowingly kept multiple child porn videos up even after being informed multiple times that they were child porn. Perhaps onlyfans is better than pornHub, but I doubt it.
Regardless, you can't really compare on of the most heavily regulated industries with one of the least.
It is not clear to me that KiwiFarms is actually violating the law or not removing illegal content. Do you have any examples of Kiwi Farm facilitating criminal behavior like PornHub and probably OnlyFans were doing?
You run a business that, while pretty unethical, is fairly soundly legal (as evidenced by winning multiple lawsuits and not being taken offline by a court order). An aggrieved person incites a mob that attempts to burn down (DDoS, etc) the business. Thankfully for the business, it has a deal with the local, privatized fire department (CloudFlare) that mitigates most of the ongoing arson attacks. The mob protests outside the fire department's front door for them to drop the business as a customer, with the obvious intent to destroy the business once the protection is removed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms This isn’t a couple of bad takes. It’s coordinated harassment against already vulnerable people where the aim is to get them to kill themselves which they have successfully done on numerous occasions.
Cloudflare doesn’t need to protect them under some vaguely defined free speech argument.
The individuals who committed crimes should be tracked down and prosecuted. However, I still have zero desire for cloudflare and other tech companies to suppress "incorrect" ideas or communities.
I am completely fine with tolerating disgusting people being allowed to communicate, when the alternative is corporations maliciously lording over speech to maximize their profit margins. Even in abscence of that tradeoff, I have no desire to suppress other people's "wrong" opinions, because I acknowledge that "wrong" is completely subjective and variable between groups of people.
Maybe you think this makes me a bad person from your point-of-view, and I respect your right to have and express that viewpoint.
For those who don't know KiwiFarm is a far-right forum that organized harassment campaign against many individual, especially trans developer.
Some of their victims have committed suicide after years of harassment. Most notably Near, famous in the emulation community and Chloe Sagal, an indy game developer.
Just did, the latest featured thread is laughing about a Republicans silly statements. Seems to have no issues criticising both the left and the right..
You said to read the forum, I did. Saw no comments about politics, threads of people laughing at both sides of the political spectrum (with the majority of threads being apolitical). So where's these 'far-right' people hiding?
Nobody here is your personal librarian. Nobody owes you some carefully cited reply. The original point that was made is widely accepted by every neutral party familiar with the topic, it wasn’t some fringe theory. Then the replies started coming in that were at best ignorant and at worst bad faith demanding proof.
It’s like trying to argue with your crazy uncle at Christmas about global warming. I’m not going to play that dumb game with you and not should anyone else feel compelled to. If you had any genuine interest in getting an answer it wouldn’t be difficult but it looks much more like you just want to be some contrarian for the hell of it.
I'm not saying you owe me anything. I'm just saying if you want to convince anybody you shouldn't just say there are people who agree with me but I won't tell you who they are or the examples they point to.
The point I was trying to make is that you’re walking into a conversation that’s multiple years old and not particularly controversial and then demanding that people do the work for you in order to help catch you up.
I think if you were serious about actually wanting to know it wouldn’t be difficult to do which is why it seems like you’re just wanting to be contrarian for the sake of it.
Maybe you could expand upon what you’ve done so far to try and answer the question for yourself?
I was responding to someone who spent a grand total of several seconds on the topic before coming to a conclusion that they felt so strongly about that they thought they would come and argue with randoms on the internet about and as far as I can tell they put more effort in than you have so far.
It apparently is controversial. There are multiple people asking for proof that KiwiFarm is far right in this thread. If it was so obvious maybe there wouldn't be so many people asking.
If you don't care enough to do anything other than make statements without providing proof why should I care enough to find sources to confirm what you are saying? If you want others to put in effort maybe put in a modicum of effort yourself?
I have done some research into KiwiFarms. A few months ago, there was some drama in a certain section of the far right. I was interested in what it was about and ended up coming across a streamer on the far right involved with the drama. He was accusing members of KiwiFarms of coordinating harassment against him. I read through the posts and there was some harassment and doxing against him. (The posts are now removed). I was interested if this was common on the forum and didn't find any other doxing or harassment. I didn't deliberately google things against KiwiFarms, but did read through threads. If you go on /pol/ on 4chan you will easily find harassment in multiple threads. When you do the same on KiwiFarms you don't. Maybe there is all sorts of far right propaganda on the site, but it is not in plain site.
I am quite willing to believe they are far right, but I haven't seen any evidence. The only harassment I saw was against the far right.
I assume you are trying to say they are Nazis? The Nazis used the phrase Final Solution (The Final Solution to the Jewish Question) with no s at the end. I don't think you can draw the conclusion that they are Nazis when the name isn't even the same phrase the Nazis used. If this company was trying to copy the Nazis why didn't they name it properly?
Also, there are multiple companies called Final Solutions LLC in the US, do you think they are all Nazis or do you think it could literally just be a name?
Your username starts with an 'm'. Hitler's book Mein Kampf starts with an m as well. Does that mean you were trying to copy the Nazis?
You are moving the goal posts. You were claiming they were far right. Now you are just saying right wing. Unless you think everybody on the right is far right?
Do you remember a whole one comment ago where we were talking about final solutions LLC and you tried to make that ridiculous argument that nobody could possibly ever know for sure that they are far right because it had an ‘s’ in there and that Nazis will never attempt to speak in anything other than plain language.
Nobody moved any goal posts here, you just seem to be hell bent on trying to provide cover for some of the shittest people on the internet and trying to pretend you are some “neutral third party”.
I just don't like to accuse people of being Nazis with only circumstantial evidence. Maybe you don't mind, but I do. If you think that is providing cover then this conversation is a waste.
The burden of proof is on the claimant (That is YOU) to give that evidence not the other way round. Telling some one to look for that evidence is not 'proof' and it is YOU that needs to provide the evidence.
If it was so easy to prove, you would have already done so in less than an hour. 20 hours is plenty of time to show this proof by now, yet there is none.
There is no shame to admit that you have no evidence and you made a baseless claim.
So there's some reason to say that it's inaccurate to classify the site as far-right. It did not start out as a far-right organization or anything. It's always been a troll farm whose purpose is to organize people who can take others down, but wasn't established as an alternative to stormfront or something.
However, their victims are nearly all under the "left wing" umbrella. And if you go and read the posts on the maniacally long threads discussing their victims (especially the ones they've successfully goaded into suicide), it's riddled with far-right hate speech. So if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a duck?
>It's always been a troll farm whose purpose is to organize people who can take others down
What? It was originally a forum for users of a wiki about Chris Chan. It's purpose is more about documenting what exists and discussing it. It's never been about trolling others or harassing people.
'Documenting' the existence of a socially maludjusted grown man so they can laugh at him and coordinate gaslight efforts definitely counts as harassment.
Laughing at someone isn't harassment. Organizing gaslighting efforts happens off platform and is discouraged by the community. There is no way to control what happens off platform. Josh isn't able to mind control everyone to not do it.
It's a slippery slope to so many other issues. An issue that is black and white today can become grey tomorrow. Sanctioning a corporation to take moral decisions is giving them too much power. I would rather corporations not have such power and we use the legal route to control societal conduct.
What issues, exactly? Companies are free to operate their own TOS and decide what activities they allow on their platform. There's literally nothing about dropping kiwifarms as a customer that puts Cloudflare in a weird position. And there's nothing stopping kiwifarms from operating on their own (and thus being directly responsible for the speech on the site).
Corporations already do this and always have. Movies/TV/Music place limits on whether nudity/violence/profanity/etc is allowed or not. Newspapers decide what articles they print and distribute. Shows/Networks/Platforms limit what ads they will show to users (e.g. Fox News isn't going to show ads that are anti-gun and NPR isn't going to run ads that are pro-gun)
In general, this is how it works. Public pressure causes public change and eventually that leads to codification in law, not the other way around.
In this case though, the current "cyber mob", as you might call it, is agitating for a famously editorially neutral company (that simply provides a service to other websites) to become strictly partial based on what is essentially politics under the guise of an anti-harassment campaign. This is a hair's breadth away from demanding that the electric, water, and gas utilities suspend service from problematic but law-abiding individuals and companies. The claim is that private companies should be able to freely choose whether to "publish" another person's views, but the underlying intent is blatantly to bully all the right "dependency" companies such that it is absolutely impossible to operate a law abiding website unless it enforces the correct politics.
In other words:
- "Just make your own subreddit/group chat/etc"
- "Just find another website to speak your views on"
- "Just make your own website if you want free speech"
- "Just run your own hosting company"
- "Just run your own DNS registrar"
- "Just build your own datacentre"
- "Just run your own worldwide DDoS protection" (<-- You are here)
- "Just run your own Internet backbone if you want infrastructure companies to peer with you"
Why stop at Cloudflare? We need to tell PG&E to cut off their electricity and McDonalds to stop providing the calories that's enabling their harassment campaigns. /s
It should be noted that the stated aim of KF is a forum to document and discuss the escapades of people that naturally produce their own drama and spectacle, and actually interacting with the "lolcows", on- or off-site, is explicitly against the site rules. Obviously whether you believe that sentiment to be genuine is your prerogative.
>Most notably Near, famous in the emulation community
While I'm sure others have mentioned that there isn't any direct evidence to indicate that Near actually did commit suicide (I truly hope he is still alive, both on a human level, and because I followed his excellent emulation development), the uncomfortable detail that is always left unstated is that he was not a person driven from a previously well mental state to suicide. The truth is that, prior to his suicide note, Near attracted very little attention on the site, with just a small, HN-sized thread before he made an account to directly talk to people in the thread. In his communication with the KF administrator (which ironically I can't find since the site is being DDoSed right now) he said that his mental state caused him to hyper-fixate on the relatively small amount of negative attention from the community, and he admitted that he didn't know the precise reason that it bothered him so much. Before the administrator finished the email negotiations about what action to take about the thread, Near had sent a follow-up message saying that it was, essentially, too late and that he was going to take his own life immediately.
All this isn't to say that this was Near's fault, and I think it's obvious that the ethical thing to do would have been to remove the thread. But ultimately if the question is whether a website's existence should be made de facto impossible, it's an important detail to mention, and a very similar story to other 2 or so people on the supposed "kill list". To put it crudely, the site exists to document the things that "crazy people" do online. Without ruling out that the site had a hand in people's suicide, it's pertinent to consider that there is a very strong selection bias at play if a person featured on the forum sadly takes their own life.
>CloudFlare continue to host them despite all.
I believe Cloudflare doesn't host the website per se, but proxies traffic for mitigation against attacks. The organiser of this current movement has been pretty overt about getting Cloudflare protection removed so that the site is at the mercy of DDoS attacks and other highly illegal means of disruption.
It's not a far right forum and site members are recommend not to contact the people being discussed there. There aren't harassment campaigns being organized there.
I'm not spreading misinformation. I've been involved in neighboring communities and I am sharing what the site is. What I'm sharing are my legitimate beliefs and I'm trying to paint an accurate picture. I am not trying to misinform anyone, but rather inform them as I happen to be more familiar with the community than some other people here. You can say that I'm biased in favor of it as I live in the corner of the internet that is close to it and I would say that would be a fair assessment.
Not a joke, i honestly dont know why people have been referencing NZ farm land....
> an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs"). The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling, harassment, and stalking, including real-life harassment by users.
You know, funnily enough, not exactly in my regular browsing habits so im extremely sorry for not knowing.
Some people have claimed that their reddit accounts were banned after linking to the site or referencing it directly, hence the use of various nicknames and euphemisms.
It's not a joke - it's a way to talk about things without being searchable or appearing on Google alerts. I see it all the time on various twitter threads discussing 'bad people'. Saying their name let's them find out you're saying it so they find a nickname or moniker to use instead.
And this is why i was unable to locate any information about it or its context.
Its pretty normal to change the name of something slightly on reddit to avoid the attention of banning bots while still conveying the original meaning.
For others feeling out of the loop: apparently one of Cloudfront's customers is "Kiwi Farms", which is apparently a discussion forum for trolls, some of whom have apparently conducted swatting ("murder") attempts against trans activists.
It's pretty much the forum equivalent of LibsOfTiktok, people post clips / screenshots of people acting silly and people laugh at them. The site is constantly being DDoSed by the people/groups laughed at and Keffals (the latest big personality being silly) is now leading a crusade against Cloudflare to drop their DDoS protection so the attacks can be more effective.
Worth noting is that the admins of that forum removes anything illegal and they make fun of everyone acting silly regardless of politics / ideology.
I'd link to the thread, but the farms are presently under ongoing DDoS attack at the behest of one 'Keffals', noted Twitterninja and the Fastest Ratio-er in the Wild Wide Web.
They have been having some trouble with n00bs trolling. What do you expect when the media and, frankly, most of you spend 7 years telling everybody it's a 'trolling and harassing forum', i.e. lying through your blueteeth, just because you want to see the site gone. The thread I was going to link is the sole site admin literally begging the n00bs (people who've joined relatively recently and think trolling is cool) to stop trolling the subjects. There are a lot of joke threads and the Kiwis are ironic in the extreme, but that thread is not a joke thread. It's been Josh's stance forever: look and laugh, don't mess with them. If you're an asshole and you want to make dumb trolling plans, do it elsewhere. It isn't just the admin and the mods, either. Pretty much all of the OG users have always tried to quash trolling talk as much as they can. What the hell else can they do? They can't control what a few of their thousands of users do off-site.
Ask yourself if you want a global pseudo-public internet where any one of its critical private infrastructure companies can de facto censor the planet-wide web at the request of aggrieved Twitter mobs. Ugh. I don't think I have the energy for this today.
Their intent is all well and good but, from your description, it seems they are not capable of preventing this tool they've built for their own "fun" from being used from causing harassment and real life consequences for real people.
It sucks for the people using it in the way it was intended but I would hope that they would agree their "fun" stops being fun when it's actively harming people.
Legally, there's no requirement that you moderate a forum so that its contents can't facilitate the commission of a crime (outside of a few things like DMCA anti-circumvention). If this were the case, everyone would have to be extremely careful when discussing anything dangerous, and most people would be hesitant to participate in the discussion at all for fear of being exposed to liability.
In fact, even the person posting something like medical misinformation can't normally be sued.
Guys, this is just a big misunderstanding! We're not swatting or doxxing anyone over on kiwifarms, we're just having a laugh! We're just big ol silly guys being silly!
> It's pretty much the forum equivalent of LibsOfTiktok, people post clips / screenshots of people acting silly and people laugh at them.
This is a tremendous misunderstanding of LibsOfTiktok, for starters. The vast majority of content posted by LOTT is no longer social media content to be mocked. The majority is:
1. Event announcements, particularly for queer events, accompanied by a call to shut them down; naturally, their followers do so via a combination of attack threats and actual attacks on the events
2. news articles, some real and some hoax, framing the targets of (1) as acceptable targets
"The account, run by Brooklyn real estate agent Chaya Raichik, tweeted on August 11 that “Boston Children's Hospital is now offering ‘gender-affirming hysterectomies’ for young girls.” The claim has been widely debunked by fact-checking groups—but as is typical in anti-trans rhetoric, facts rarely matter, and the claims were shared widely on right-wing social media accounts."
What fun, silly stuff they have going on over at LibsOfTikTok. no one should have to be tolerant of intolerance.
In addition, their targeted harassment caused the developer of the world's most impressive and accurate SNES emulator to commit sucide, as was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652814
Neither is anyone since May 2021 (even though the data had an average rate of right 1/month before that). I guess the US expats in Japan have figured out immortality and aren't sharing. Or, maybe the data source is absolutely useless and incomplete?
If there's anyone I'd trust on stats it's the IRS and related agencies. Also, no Americans dying in a country that's been strict on lockdowns for the past year seems plausible, especially if the average when people could freely come and go was < 12 a year.
Literally every individual claim in your message is trivially wrong.
1. The IRS is not involved, it's the department of state collecting these statistics.
2. Japan has been in and out of lockdowns since 2020 like most countries in the world, and nothing particularly changed in May 2021. If anything travel rules are laxer since then with most business travel and family visits being authorized again.
3. Your statistical claim that 15 months of no deaths (previous data: average 26 days between deaths, max 81 days) is plausible is beyond absurd. Please show your maths, I'm not going to spend time on my phone doing probability distributions for you at this point because you must be trolling.
I'm appalled that you're spending your time trying to convince strangers on the internet that my friend faked their death. Do you really have nothing better to do with your life than to shit on those who lost theirs?
Why would CloudFlare have any responsibility for the use of their services in this way?
Do you expect the power company to cut off power to that forum? The water company? How about the power and water companies cutting power to known members of the forum, to "fight against targeted harassment and murder"?
Cloudflare is not a regulated provider of essential services / utilities. Right from their tos: "We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all." (and they have done so before)
So? Are you arguing that it is good for a company to have and wield this kind of power to attack other organizations that it believes are engaging in conduct they don't like?
Or has Kiwi Farms been shown in a court of law to have engaged in the behavior you describe?
Yes. At some point you've got to ask yourself if you're making the world a worse place with your decisions, even if everything is technically legal. And then decide if you want to change it or not.
You're basically arguing that it isn't just the right of large organizations to deplatform content to make the world a better place (which has no consistent definition). You're implying that they have the obligation to do this. This stance is very dangerous even to those who might benefit from it in the short term.
To a vanishing degree, most people agree that hosting a site that encourages vulnerable people to kill themselves (and each other) makes the world worse. That's the context here, not a site debating the merits of different dog breeds.
It is a broader consideration. It is easy to decide to stop servicing murderers, nazis, and other widely derided groups, especially on a one-off basis whenever objections are raised. It is another thing to actively investigate your customer base and police them. There are industries where this absolutely should happen. And there are others where we probably are better off with a laissez-faire approach (my local grocery is not a regulated utility, but I think they should still roughly operate that way - serve anyone who comes in the door). Cloudflare needs to have a clear TOS, and remove this site for violating it.
But we should still be cautious about how broad a TOS it might be, what evidence is required, what due-process and appeals are available. Every other day there is some post on HN saying "Big Service provider shut down my site overnight without warning!" but that is consequence anti-abuse systems policing customer activity and badly implemented systems are going to have negative consequences. The obvious cases make it seems easier than it actually is to build fair systems.
We learned this the hard way during the Civil Rights Movement: there needs to be some public participation in the restrictions that private businesses can place on their customer base.
Of course they don't. Look at all the objections to removing a forum explicitly created to encourage stalking and harassment of marginalized people, which has lead to multiple suicides by its targets.
Sometimes you have to move forward without 100% agreement and stop listening to trolls making slippery-slope arguments.
This is the flip side of https://xkcd.com/1357/ that so many people have been citing here. You want them to cancel the service of the person who says things you don't like, just because they're not legally prohibited from doing so.
Sure, but that is a technical legal issue. If the GP wishes to disrupt the business of some other organization that has not been proven in a court of law to break any laws, they should be logically consistent and ask for this cessation of business not just from CloudFlare, but from every company; that the utilities are legally barred from cutting service in this way is secondary.
That's a strange definition of logical consistency: asking for something you know to be possible is conditional on also asking for something that you know to be impossible.
One of those murder attempts that allegedly! was done by members of Kiwi Farms was against Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the worst anti Trans right politicians in existence. With a message that says "This is swatting. btw. I'm a moderator from Kiwi Farms" This just looks so obviously like a false flag that I'm actually not sure wtf's going on.
So, this was 100% a false flag, there's not even a question. The caller did give the user name of a current moderator. That mod didn't even know what happened until people told them like hours later. Nobody on KF thinks it was them, and it makes zero sense. Despite what most people seem to believe, SWATing is insta-bannable on Kiwi Farms, where almost nothing is considered ban-worthy. A current moderator doing something he bans people for, and for which the admin would ban them for in 2 seconds? Unlikely.
Secondly, I forget where but somewhere in the site rules or in Josh's Plea it explicitly states "DO NOT UPSET THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IN ANY WAY". So again. A current moderator SWATing MTG - WHILE the site is under intense and very possibly existential scrutiny already? Come on.
Cloudflare didn't respond to their tweets demanding removal of DDoS protection, police informed them that sharing public content and laughing at you is not illegal. Of-course the next step would be trying to frame them for political extremism against protected groups (reason Cloudflare dropped Stormfront) and SWATing (illegal), both at the same time.
Targeting a politician they don't like in-case it actually worked breaks the narrative and makes the red-flag more obvious though..
One of cloudflare's customers is a forum known for repeatedly organising swatting, which in practice is a murder attempt (in the US anyway) and other nastiness. Cloudflare seems ok with that, but recently there's more pressure on them. So far only radio silence from the management like Prince and JGrahamC. Check out https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1485731083534667779 for a longer story for example.
It's been an ongoing issue for quite a while but in the last few days there seems to be some effort to make them not ignore it and spread the knowledge.
It would be outrageous for CloudFlare to cut off service to this company/organization or its members over simple allegations, or anything short of a court order, wouldn't it? Surely you can understand this?
When cloudflare accept provinding service to a customer they are linking their brand to whatever their customer do.. Should they not have the right to stop serving this customer if they are doing indirect damage to cloudflare business??
If someone get murdered because someone did something in a site hosted by cloudflare, sure cloudflare is not direct responsible for causing that murder but they do share the moral repercutions of it.. it sure get people asking, would that person not have being murded if cloudflare did not provide this site with the plataform they used to achieve this murder??
Having their brand linked to a site like this can be damaging to their brand\business\moral stance and they would be totally within their right to stop proving service for that..
as for the site/company/organization, cloudflare is not the only player around, if cloudflare stop providing service they can move somewhere else, they can even buy their own servers and host it themselves if no third-party hosting is willing to provide then services..
>Having their brand linked to a site like this can be damaging to their brand\business\moral stance and they would be totally within their right to stop proving service for that..
Sure Cloudflare could drop them but the reason people want Kiwi Farms to loose Cloudflare is because they are DDoSing them. What is a DDoS protection worth if all it takes to circumvent it are a few people screeching on social media?
It is not as simple as just a few people screenching in social media..
The people screenching need to convince the company leadership that keeping this customer will do more damage to their business then dropping then..
It is not like cloudflare could this this left and right all the time..
If cloudflare started dropping any customer for even the smallest issues it would cause massive damage to their brand and no one would use then anymore.. So they need to weigh in the pros and con every time they make this decision..
>They are doing it already [0]
Then if the problem is DDOS they could go to someone else to get their DDOS protection from, cloudflare is not the only solution around..
As last resort they even are free to buy the necessary link withstand a DDOS attack if no one is willing to offer their DDOS protection service..
Or they could distribute their servers around the world so a single ddos is unlikely to take then out..
I guess you haven't read the article because the whole article is about why it's not that easy as you portray it. I don't want to to recite everything but for instance "NTT refuses to peer with any company that peers with my subnet" He can't use anything that peers with NTT (a Tier 1 transit provider).
Sure, it is hard as hell and expensive as hell.. so what??
But why should they be entitled to ddos protection??
If they want to keep a site that many people find nasty in the air and that other companies refuse to have their brand linked to they have to deal with the technical hurdles of it..
Same way you can’t get to a newspaper and demand they publish you, same as you can’t force tv channel to give you air time..
While you can still publish your own newspaper and have your own tv channel, it is still hard and expensive as hell..
Internet access sure should be neutral like a utility, hosting other people content should not..
So sure, they have the right to have access to the internet and keep their site in it.. this does not means they should be able to force other help then against their will to keep it online when they are unable to do so, like in the case of a ddos..
You have te right to say what you want, but this does not give you the right to force other to provide you with a platform..
Correct. If customers can be "DDoSed" off of Cloudflare by Twitter mobs spamming them constantly, then what good is their product? Cloudflare needs to institute a policy of blocking people who make demands that they drop a customer and direct them to the abuse form instead.
I for one would stop using Cloudflare if they caved to the pressure and starting dropping clients based on some people being offended by their content.
If you don't like a website, don't use it. Don't try to prevent others from using it.
It's been documented by very angry, frustrated people who feel personally attacked. I don't trust people with all of their own skin in the game to tell the truth. I expect them to say whatever they have to. People have been going after Kiwi Farms for at least 8 years now, relentlessly. Why can't any of these mobs turn all of this documentation into a court order? Kiwi Farms has been sued repeatedly, close to ten times I think. They're being sued right now. Every case but one has been thrown out immediately. That other one took 3 days to also be thrown out.
The problem is, similar with 4chan, 8chan and others, that being an asshole and literally bullying people to suicide is not illegal under US laws. The only thing that will lead to consequences on the Internet even in the US is anything relating to CSAM, drug and weapons trafficking, terrorism and evading US trade sanctions and financial regulations. Everything else, no matter how morally reprehensible or how illegal it is in every other civilized nation, is a free-for-all.
The problem is, trolls always escalate their behavior if left unchecked - the best example is actually 4chan. Eventually the most notorious user base moved over to 8chan/8kun, and then Christchurch happened. Or they hound people so aggressively that they see no other option to escape than killing themselves, because the police can't help when hundreds of peopple call in pizzas, delivery services or the police themselves. Hell even moving away doesn't help, some stalkers doxxed Keffals from the linen pattern of her hotel bed, others have doxxed people based off on reflections in their window.
Ok. I don't think I disagree with anything you wrote. But you seem to just assume that "Kiwi Farms does/did such an such to so and so" is a fitting description of events that, just for example, a court of law would reach. And that hasn't been demonstrated. I'm well aware that your insinuations are considered documented facts among those on that side of the issue. But in the big picture, they're accusations, narratives, interpretations, assumptions, etc. Don't bother trying to persuade me it's fact - I've spent seven years and hundreds of hours closely and critically following many a Kiwi saga. I'm acquainted with volumes of details about how they operate over a long period of time. And I'm also well aware that my interpretation of why they do what they do will never be acceptable to at least 90% of the types of people who visit here, and the rest wouldn't get into that can of worms publicly, not even me. And just for the record, that's not me being crypto-anything. I am 100% NOT on board with the persecution of any half-decent person absolutely regardless of their identity, in the current colloquial use of "identity". But you lot would not accept my definition of "persecuted" either so there we are.
What the hell was I trying to say... Oh. Yeah I really didn't want to get into the moral side, but I had to say a bit. What I really wanted to say here is simply that you will never hear one single word of protest from me if law enforcement ever investigates Lolcow LLC, charges, and convicts. Or any individual user for that matter. The admin himself has made it as clear as anyone can to his users that if they commit crimes he won't hesitate to hand over evidence if he has it. And as I said elsewhere, do not make the mistake of thinking that's some wink, wink, nudge joke to him. The guy is already tied up in litigation constantly and he doesn't enjoy it. I'm just sick and fucking tired of mob justice on the internet and in the media, and I am neither a pragmatist nor a consequentialist so to me the ends don't justify the means unless my own blood family are in the crosshairs. Sort it the fuck out legally, preferably without trashing the US Constitution.
> The guy is already tied up in litigation constantly and he doesn't enjoy it.
Well, no one forces him to run a forum for the world's most vile scumbags. Maybe, just maybe, being embroiled in lawsuits for years is society's moderate way of telling him "hey, what you're doing is widely seen as unacceptable". If it's worth the stress and money for him, okay, but he's not in any position to whine around. He can sleep in a pig sty all he wants, but ffs don't complain when other people say he stinks like a pig.
> so to me the ends don't justify the means unless my own blood family are in the crosshairs. Sort it the fuck out legally, preferably without trashing the US Constitution.
Well, there we have the classic dispute between people from the US and partially the UK on the free-speech absolutist side and the Continental European viewpoint that some sorts of speech and actions need to be banned for a healthy society, given the learnings of the NS dictatorship and the Soviet gulags on just how depraved humans can act upon each other.
Personally, as a German I see way too many parallels between the current USA and the pre-1933 Germany for my liking, in particular the regular bloodshedding and the attempt of the far right to deny marginalized people (especially Jews and LGBT, it's disturbing how history repeats itself) their right to a peaceful existence. And platforms like the xChans, Kiwifarms, but also due to their inaction on moderation Facebook, Twitter and Youtube play a massive role in this.
> Personally, as a German I see way too many parallels between the current USA and the pre-1933 Germany for my liking
I don't have much else to say that's worth arguing about. I just wanted to say that I acknowledge that you have a perspective on it that I can't have, and if I were in your shoes I'm pretty sure I would not ignore my intuition on this. As far as what I would do about it.... That's going to take some number of sleeps to think on.
Oh and Josh doesn't whine. He's kind of the dutiful servant. I think if you read his writing you'd see he actually speaks with a consciousness of the other side's point of view that almost nobody ever does when they're embroiled in this type of war where nobody will cede an inch. But that isn't enough for people. They won't accept anything short of him changing his mind.
So if enough people believe OJ killed his ex-wife, we should shun him from society because it's no longer in "he said they said" territory?
The rule of law and due process are important factors. While you are personally free to refuse your own business to anyone based on any criteria you like, demanding and expecting others to do so based on what is ultimately hearsay is pure entitlement.
It is not too much to expect of a dozens-of-billions-of-dollars worth multinational corporation to conduct an investigation based on that "hearsay" and to react on that investigation.
Operating a global business does not absolve the business from the need to prevent harm caused by it, in fact some form of abuse management has been expected from any good Internet citizen since its inception, e.g. in Usenet [0] or e-mail in general [1].
Or for a real-life equivalent: if I were to stand outside of the home of a person and blaring into a megaphone that she deserve to die... I'd at least get the cops called on me for a noise violation or a harassment charge, and if I were to incite others or coordinate their behavior, I would get a conspiracy charge. Why should Internet trolls enjoy legal protection for the same behavior?
> It is not too much to expect of a dozens-of-billions-of-dollars worth multinational corporation to conduct an investigation based on that "hearsay" and to react on that investigation.
Who is to say that they haven't done this already? It's been almost an entire week - not taking action could be very well be the reaction. Albeit not the one you are hoping to see. They don't owe you or anyone an explanation and anything they state could just be turned around against them by the next angry Twitter mob next week.
> Or for a real-life equivalent: if I were to stand outside of the home of a person and blaring into a megaphone
No. That is not equivalent to what is happening here. It's more like a bunch of people making fun of someone in a backyard, with the subject frequently walking by, taking offense, and then calling for the offender's landlord to break their lease with the occupant for allowing mean things to be said. If someone in real life called the police over this they'd be laughed at and told to walk down a different street next time.
> Why should Internet trolls enjoy legal protection for the same behavior?
They don't. If an internet troll commits a crime then they have no special protection from prosecution. And on the civil side if an internet troll is posting untrue defamatory content then there is also recourse for the victim.
In fact as far as the legal system is concerned, the call by "Keffals" to attempt to intentionally damage the business relationship that kiwifarms has with Cloudflare falls dangerously close to tortious interference [0] in the US and something similar in Canada. The owner of kiwifarms may even have a civil case against them.
> Or for a real-life equivalent: if I were to stand outside of the home of a person and blaring into a megaphone that she deserve to die... I'd at least get the cops called on me for a noise violation or a harassment charge, and if I were to incite others or coordinate their behavior, I would get a conspiracy charge. Why should Internet trolls enjoy legal protection for the same behavior?
They shouldn't, but why would a coffee-shop down the street be held responsible for not serving them? This is the equivalent of what some people are asking of Cloudflare.
I fully support people suing, or demanding the police or whoever is responsible investigate, KF. By most accounts, they are a horrible organization that are attacking and causing harm in the world. But we call the police when someone harasses us, we don't ask strangers to stop doing business with our harasser.
Sure, they just dox specific people and the same people coincidentally get swatted by completely unrelated individuals. Also, I've got a bridge to sell you...
So Cloudflare provides CDN services for a forum that has content that (in some opinions) should be illegal (but probably isn’t) and, on that basis, Cloudflare should refuse them service?
I’d hope to live a world where Cloudflare would host speech that I like and agree with and speech that I disagree with on equal terms. (If it’s legal, the bits flow.) I literally do not want opinions different from my own to be silenced.
Actually I’m pretty sure you should be allowed to make fun of any subject at any time, even if in very poor taste. That’s not your call or the government’s.
"making fun" is putting it lightly. They will dig through your accounts, archive everything you say, interpret it the worst way possible. And if that doesn't work, they'll also sometimes outright make shit up (also known as defamation). Usually, for trans people, some groomer narrative is established.
It's essentially high grade stochastic terrorism. They hand you a gun and tell you where to aim, but then get upset when someone implies they encourage pulling the trigger.
Those affected also don't often talk about it, because it encourages even more harassment.
Your false equivalence doesn't interest me. This "but the others are just as bad, therefore it's okay" mentality that has almost become an ideological reflex really needs to be added to the things HN considers bad contributions. I could feed an ebooks bot HN comments and get these exact words out.
If people make things up, they're doing so against the written rules. I'd link to it, but the site is under a DDoS attack being very proudly and loudly organized by an individual they believe fits said narrative. The gist is: "[Stick to what you can document, that's more than funny enough.] Misinformation is not welcome here." The un-bracketed part is verbatim if memory serves.
Narrative is a tricky thing. Neither side of the controversy would exist without their narratives.
How are so many people on this forum of all places advocating for unaccountable opaque private entities to almost cut off access to the internet for organizations that have not been convicted of any crime?
Lol. I know, right? But there aren't many of us old-school "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" types left anymore. And sometimes it feels like we're getting run outta town. We always knew this day would come, and Kiwi Farms is kind of a perfect litmus test for whether legal controversial speech can actually persist on the Internet. It's almost the only one left. 8chan is pretty dead. 4chan sold out years ago.
It's honestly pretty scary to me. Feels like a corporate <-> academic <-> government synthesis around an ideology that's extremely unpopular to purge any dissent. That's a big deal, even if you despise (like I do) the 8chan crowd.
I know. I see it. And I don't know anymore how to tell people the emperor has no clothes. On odd numbered days I think the culture is going in a dangerous direction that will lead to unintended consequences. On even numbered days I think I'm just an old man yelling about the cloud, and if Gen Z really thinks all this is good and normal then fuck it. It's your world.
The old programmers had a left leaning liberterian trend, but today's programmers are a product of institutions that teach and support censorship for their cause etc and will happily support that sort of thing against their political enemies.
It shouldn't surprise you. The companies involved aren't doing censorship from the top down, it's censorship being demanded by their employees.
It's partially what turned me off of getting into certain industries which heavily involve programming.
My own willingness to learn the skills was a large part, don't get me wrong lol - but I'm happier making little scripts and tools/toys for me and a few others to use to make their day to day lives easier.
I would never want to work for a larger company like a FAANG outlet, nor any other media-based tech company like game developers. Too many politics have been injected into the identity of a typical programmer, when it should just be about the code.
While I’ll agree that things have gotten too political for my tastes, don’t you want a say in how your company operates, what products it builds, and how the products you build are used? For me it’s definitely not just about the code.
I would advise you to join and continue to be apathetic toward political issues. The vast majority of us don’t care. We just want a massive paycheck. Don’t let political activists prevent you from pursuing your career goals.
It's easy to support the creation of a monster when you're absolutely sure the monster will love you and tear your enemies to bits. But monsters aren't known for their loyalty.
Targeted harassment of minorities sounds like a crime to me. Shouldn't the police be investigating and prosecuting this crime instead of some random internet CDN company?
Yeah, they really should! And the fact that they are not and never do implies that perhaps we should be looking into alternative solutions to the problem!
I agree. If harassment laws haven’t been updated to better reflect the digital age, then folks should be demanding their lawmakers to do their job and change the law. And, you know, enforce it. That is the purpose of the Executive branch of government (in the US, at least).
The current flavor of exerting social pressure on companies to, in effect, enforce their version of what the law should be, won’t end well for anyone.
What’s righteous today will become the evil of tomorrow. Political winds shift all the time.
We shouldn’t box ourselves into a corner where corporations enforce the rule of the people. There’s a threshold that once reached will be very hard to undo. I certainly don’t want to live in that version of the future.
We should all be working to fix the broken system we’ve got, not throw it away and start from scratch.
Oh, the harassment laws are perfectly up to date. The problem is that we then have to rely on...
1. that being the case literally everywhere; otherwise, it's just a matter of moving the harassment sources to a friendly jurisdiction
2. the police to enforce them, although the police are known to often be complicit in similar conduct (harassment of minorities)
3. this enforcement to actually cause positive changes in people's behavior, which, given the current state of the US "criminal justice" system, won't happen
The legal system is ill-equipped to handle this not because of a lack of laws, but because the legal system is full of humans who often don't treat the safety of vulnerable people as a priority.
Blasphemy is a crime in many countries. Let's burn all of the books and block all of the websites that are guilty of it (without going through courts because that is too slow) so that the people, who we do not trust to make judgements for themselves, are not exposed to it!
If you own a store somewhere that shoplifting doesn't get prosecuted, should you look into alternative solutions like kidnapping the shoplifters and locking them in your basement?
Kiwifarms members are literally terrorists. They use fear and violence to push an agenda. They have literally killed people. I don't even just mean by pushing people to suicide (which I do believe is violence as well)- the terrorist who killed worshippers at the mosques in New Zealand posted on Kiwi Farms before the attacks.
This isn't hyperbole. Cloudflare is working hard to keep a website linked with actual real terrorists online.
> the terrorist who killed worshippers at the mosques in New Zealand posted on Kiwi Farms before the attacks.
I think you misread the Wikipedia page. Kiwifarms got in the news for refusing to remove the video as it was not breaking any laws. Not for supporting / encouraging him.
>the terrorist who killed worshippers at the mosques in New Zealand posted on Kiwi Farms before the attacks.
That's not hyperbole, it's simply not true. The shooter posted on 8chan, not Kiwi Farms. You're thinking of a completely different (defunct) website.
Even if true, to take just one of very many examples, if I remember correctly the terrorist that mowed down a parade in Waukesha had a long history of posting violent black-supremacist content to facebook. Are all facebook users "literally terrorists"?
Completely unrelated but as HN works as an unofficial support channel.
This page https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/ seems to be missing a range of IPs which are in the 172.66.x.x range, our site appears under it but can't see it on the page
If what kiwifarms is doing is illegal, then law enforcement should stop them.
If it's not illegal, then CloudFlare should continue providing service to them, regardless of how much CloudFlare may dislike what it believes they may be doing.
It should ideally be illegal for CloudFlare (given how large and important they have become) to refuse business to anyone unless under an explicit court order to do so. Law enforcement should never be up to unaccountable private entities.
Isn't it pretty normal to have an opinion on what companies or people do? I think Google should and should not do certain things, but my opinion is not enforceable in any way.
I don't think that's "ugly", and I don't think people are trying to supplant the role of actual courts?
> If it's not illegal, then CloudFlare should continue providing service to them
> It should ideally be illegal for ClourFlare . . . to refuse business to anyone
Yes, we should abstain from acting on _any_ moral interpretation unless it has been codified into law. /s
Fun hyperbolic thought experiment, consider a site which posted 2-3 pictures a day of 12-13 year old girls, with faces blurred out, and no context other than the text representing their age (e.g. a caption with "12 year old"). There's no nudity involved, but the girls are always in some sort of skirt.
Now imagine this was hosted through CloudFlare and they decided to close the site because they were uncomfortable with the content. Would you find it reasonable for a law to force them to continue hosting this content?
> Would you find it reasonable for a law to force them to continue hosting this content?
Yes, at least in principle. Generally, I don't think companies should have any business deciding what their customers can say.
Now, if this site was sending threatening emails to Cloudflare employees, that would be a different discussion - I do believe that a company may have a right to protect its own employees from attacks. Though even here, requiring Cloudflare to go through some legal process where the senders have a chance to defend themselves before a neutral 3rd party would be a good thing.
In general, the principle I'm following is that companies should have minimal rights, and definitely minimal to 0 obligations, to police their customers' behavior, outside very specific niches (e.g. AML and KYC for banks are probably important enough).
Your experiment is the first interesting argument I've found in this whole accursed thread. As someone who gets triggered by child abuse, thinking about it forced my mind past the Cloudflare issue to what is my real issue, and the whole reason I take any interest in the KF situation in the first place. Because I can't bring myself to say Cloudflare should host your thought experiment, in spite of them not wanting to host it.
But as much as I hate it, and I do hate it, your example should be allowed to be on the capital-I Internet. Because the only reason this is an issue is that WE ourselves have long since lost our innocence / ignorance of pedophilia and fetishes, and we're imagining how they would see it, and it's nauseating. But like we always used to say, if you see something dirty it's because you have a dirty mind. And as much as it's sickening, what goes on in other people's minds and how they view the world, as long as it stays in the mind, is none of anyone's god damn business except their therapist and maybe their spouse, if they're interested.
If anybody thinks the girls are being abused, the site should be investigated by the FBI or equivalent. I have no idea but I hope to God there's a law somewhere that says the site owners can be convicted for their intended purpose, for example if there is no evidence that there's a legitimate explanation like pageantry (ugh) or fashion. Or if they're using a known porn payment processor, or if they require payment in BTC or something. But ultimately the law is the (changeable) law. Samantha Fox's mother put her in real softcore porn when she was 16 and it was shot, bought, and sold in the open, legally. Yup. Her mom.
But my issue that I'm trying to get to is this. The real problem is that it turns out that the Internet, from an architectural / engineering standpoint, ain't quite so amazing as we thought it was back in the 90's. It turns out the Internet can't route around shit, because way too much of its infrastructure is privately owned, and there may not be sufficient or well-written-enough legislation and regulation to prevent these private pieces of the network from acting unilaterally when they should not.
Here's an article another HNer posted the other day. It's called Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet, it's written by the admin and owner of Kiwi Farms, and it explains the problem way better. It also explains exactly why Josh won't back down for anything.
My interest in this, in addition to just as a concerned netizen, stems from my own attempt to solve a much harder version of Kiwi Farms' problem. I failed. Josh hasn't failed yet. I wouldn't stop rooting for him no matter WHAT was on his site, legally. All these people on a forum centered on internet tech, who can't see past doxing and swatting and think they're better people than those monsternaziterrorists, and meanwhile I have more respect for this Josh kid right now (I was online and coding before his parents met, probably) than anyone in this industry right now. I don't care about the content. I care about the censorship at the scope of the whole planetary Internet, as well as free speech in the U.S.
Because it's their business, and they have the right to to choose what it is permitted to be used for.
> If what kiwifarms is doing is illegal, then law enforcement should stop them.
Law enforcement deals with crime, not everything illegal is also criminal.
> If it's not illegal, then CloudFlare should continue providing service to them, regardless of how much CloudFlare may dislike what it believes they may be doing.
Cloudflare is not a common carrier or public utility, not is it the kind of natural monopoly that would typically justify it being made such, and has the freedom to decide who to do business with, and what to allow their facilities to be used for, and is not obligated to only refuse unlawful business.
> Because it's their business, and they have the right to to choose what it is permitted to be used for.
> Cloudflare is not a common carrier or public utility, not is it the kind of natural monopoly that would typically justify it being made such, and has the freedom to decide who to do business with, and what to allow their facilities to be used for, and is not obligated to only refuse unlawful business.
They also have the right to choose to keep doing business. We're not discussing what they must do, we are discussing what they should do.
They are well within their rights to both allow or deny service to KF or any other person or organization (at least barring some kind of court order). The GP demanded that they cut their business relationship with KF. I am arguing that they shouldn't do that.
Do anything like what? Address controversy? It’s common for companies to issue public statements when they’re in hot water.
Or did you mean doing something about bad actors? It certainly is their prerogative to do nothing. But they’re just as capable of doing something. That’s why I’m asking their CTO whether they’ve issued any statements yet. So far I’m not aware of any external communication about this, and I’m keen to hear what they have to say.
> That Cloudflare does or does not do has no bearing on the website continuing to have an origin so it isn't even really censorship in the lightest.
This has to be one of the most narrow definitions of censorship I've seen. Suppression of information is censorship, full stop. Suppression does not need to be committed by government for it to be censorship.
These kinds of arguments are torturous. It's not "censorship" when your local coffee store tells you to leave the premises after the third time you've threatened to kill the waitstaff.
No, just being verbally threatening is not assault on its own; there needs to be an imminent threat of physical harm for it to be a crime. But this isn't the standard your coffee shop is interested in, because they don't want waitstaff to have to wait for a crime to happen to them before removing someone who's harming their business and upsetting the other customers.
Verbally threatening someone is not a crime in most US jurisdictions in its own right -- there needs to be an additional reason to believe that you'll immediately suffer physical harm.
You can call the police, and they will arrive and probably remove the person. But they won't be removing them because of the threat; they'll be removed because they don't have a right to be a nuisance in someone's store. This is precisely the position Cloudflare is in: they are entirely within both their rights and the realm of acceptable social behavior to remove nuisances from their premises.
> This is precisely the position Cloudflare is in: they are entirely within both their rights and the realm of acceptable social behavior to remove nuisances from their premises.
No, Cloudlfare is more in the position of a random person coming to the counter to ask that one of their customers be thrown off the premises because they have posted on a forum that someone should be murdered.
While Cloudflare does have the right to ask anyone to leave their premises, they also have the right, and are well in the realm of acceptable social behavior, to not investigate what their customers are saying, and to ignore people coming off the street to demand they throw customers out.
You've repeatedly misdirected or minimized key elements of the case throughout this thread: these aren't "random people," but the targets of explicitly violent and cruel harassment. Ironically, KiwiFarms' culture ensures this: anybody who criticizes them too loudly becomes a target of harassment, leaving no disinterested bystanders to complain.
They are perfectly within their right to ignore harassment coming from their customers. But it's absolutely not within the realm of socially acceptable behavior; nobody (successfully) runs a coffee shop where 2% of customers actively seek out victims within the other 98%.
Are you claiming that viraptor or yoshuaw are victims of KF? Because they were the ones demanding Cloudflare answer for not stopping business with KF in this thread, and I have not seen any claims that they were doing so in their own name.
How many coffee shops have asked you for your facebook name to check whether you are engaging in online harassment of their other customers before serving you coffee? If the customer in line in front of you claimed you harassed them, and even showed the barista some proof, would you think it's normal for the barista to throw you out of the shop?
I have no idea if they are, and it doesn't matter -- KF's tendency to harass people who want them removed from private service providers is exceptionally well evidenced. They're proud of how much evidence there is!
The rest is another indirection: if I'm known to the establishment for harassment, then it makes perfect sense that they'd not want me around. There's no investigative aspect to this situation: KF's history of harassment is a matter of public record.
To be blunt: this is a ridiculous hill to die on. Boycotts are about as old as capitalism; the only thing that really distinguishes calls to boycott Cloudflare from any other boycott in history is how ridiculously trivial it would be for them to do the right thing.
People boycott companies for something that company did. Please, go ahead and boycott KiwiFarms all you want: you are well within your right to do so, both legally and morally.
But extending this to other random people or companies who choose to do business with the thing you are personally boycotting is often going too far.
Where's the "random"? Cloudflare is a services provider: they are a first-degree participant in the affair. You presumably wouldn't object to a boycott of Hugo Boss in 1941, despite not running the camps themselves.
Their own TOS makes this clear, and provides justification for a boycott rather than just general ire: it would be one thing if they merely declined to intervene at all, but they're decided to do so selectively.
Boycotts (or threatening one) do not remotely qualify as tortious interference, nor does publicly advocating for a publicly traded customer to drop a client.
And what exactly is being suppressed by cloudflare?? Cloudflare would just be refusing to help spread it and are totally within their right to do so..
If cloudflare stop provinding service they can move their hosting anywhere else or even self host in their own servers if no one want to host then.. They have literally dozens of hosting options other then cloudflare..
It is not like cloudflare is the only place around and they are required to use it..
In fact, requiring Cloudflare to perform an act like forcing them to host a website is suppression of Cloudflare's own speech.
If it's not illegal, Cloudflare should be able to make their own determination on what they choose to host and facilitate. Others can have an opinion on whether they wish cloudflare did that or not, and they might choose to do business (or not) depending on that. I think this is all completely normal and none of this is censorship.
Note that we are not discussing a demand for Cloudlfare to reinstate KF's service, we are discussing a demand for Cloudflare to stop doing business with KF.
This thread is not about defending KF, it is about defending Cloudflare from demands that they stop doing business with some organization that some have decided is undesirable.
I don't see what the problem is. Cloudflare should be able to make it's own judgement on who it does business with.
If I'm running a business, I may wish to make a moral judgement and not do business with an energy company because I don't think they're climate-friendly, or avoid doing business with Facebook because of their stance/impact to privacy, or not/stop buying peaches from 9/11 truthers www.palisadeproduce.com. I think these are all completely reasonable and normal ways for me to run a business.
In the same vein, other people are welcome to a view on the above, who i do business with, and try and change my mind, and might withhold their business from me because of it. I think that is also completely fair and normal.
No one is forcing anyone to do anything. Everyone's just having an opinion and operating by it.
Personally, I don't think Cloudflare should stop providing service for these website. I think they have a leg to stand on with saying they're a neutral dumb pipe who will just follow the law. But I also don't think it's abhorrent for people to think different, and try and persuade Cloudflare to cut their relationship with kiwifarms
It isn't suppression of information, its not taking part in re-broadcasting (emphasis on re) it. If this was AWS banning Parler where AWS was the origin, then you might have a point.
> It isn't suppression of information, its not taking part in re-broadcasting (emphasis on re) it.
So, it sounds like you're in agreement that Cloudflare's role here is fairly impartial; they're not editorializing or supplementing the KiwiFarms data with any of their own opinions or biases. They take no part in the creation of this material, just the preservation of it. So, where do we draw this line? Should we remove Terry A. Davis' videos off the Internet Archive for intolerable racism and encouraging hateful behavior? Or maybe we should delete all the GNU projects because the public opinion on Stallman has changed of late? I simply don't follow this line of logic; there is nothing to gain from de-platforming this content. They'd only be giving them a reason to reincarnate as a Matrix server or Onion domain, and good luck getting your self-conscious service providers to take out the trash when that happens.
I despise Cloudflare from the bottom of my blackened heart, but seeing people think a Twitter campaign is going to stop a forum from existing is silly. We're begging for an "Epik" situation, where a replacement pops up with the sole purpose of catering to extremist politics. Congratulations, now nobody wins.
I don't think the internet can funciton as a public platform, which it both is and should continue to be, without allowing infrastucture providers to provide services without being selective in who they provide them to.
Also the details of America's legal implementation of the principle of free speach don't resolve the moral debate over what constitutes censorship, especially in regards to a global platform like the internet.
As long as actual ISPs remain neutral the Internet is an open platform, if you have a controversial position you may just have to do your own hosting as you are not entitled to demand others do so for you.
They already aren't neutral. For example, if you mirror or seed a Kali ISO, you're in violation of Comcast's TOS (even if you have business-class service), which says you may not "distribute tools or devices designed or used for compromising security or whose use is otherwise unauthorized, such as password guessing programs, decoders, password gatherers, keystroke loggers, analyzers, cracking tools, packet sniffers, encryption circumvention devices, or Trojan Horse programs."
I have never once mentioned the word "censorship", and that is not my only concern. I would be saying the same thing if someone were asking a coffee company why they continue to sell coffee to this evil organization - even though no one would claim that the coffee company is "censoring" someone if they refuse service for this reason.
My point is more related to this idea of a private company punishing an individual or organization for behavior it doesn't like. I believe this is a dangerous notion, and we should be demanding it stops, not encouraging it to happen more.
For highly competitive markets I fully agree, but when the service providers form a monopoly or oligopoly it becomes a different story. These companies become de-facto gatekeepers for certain infrastructure. Cloudflare as a CDN isn't quite in that position yet, but it's close, close enough that it deserves to be scrutinized.
That XKCD gets brought up every time someone mentions free speech and all it does is make a bad argument and refute its own bad argument.
First, who's the "asshole?" In ANY situation, people point at each other.
But more importantly, free speech is how we democratically resolve conflicts.
Rather than fighting about things, we discuss and vote. As a conflict resolution mechanism, democracy which rests on freedom of speech, has been extraordinarily successful.
And yet it's always under threat by people who when they are in power feel the temptation to ban the people they don't like from taking part. Even though the people we disagree with are exactly the people with whom we have to resolve conflicts.
For thousands of years, when someone got into power, they would use force to keep others from gaining that same power, meaning the only way to get power was by force. That puts the most brutal in power. Welcome to the dark ages.
Talking about things is much better, even if it means hearing things you don't like. Sometimes you are right, and sometimes you are wrong.
"It's not literally illegal to say" is the argument for Cloudflare keeping Stormfront. Except they already compromised on that position so their free-speech extremist credentials already aren't that great.
There's actually an easier argument against KF than XKCD 1357. The forum is specifically a platform for discussing and distributing the personal information of notorious public figures[0] in the interest of generating drama and lulz. They actively brag about having a kill count[1]. My personal opinion is that KF is actually engaging in illegal conduct and the only reason why they get away with it is because the US legal system has many blind spots.
[0] Originally just one particularly weird Sonic fan comic author, but now a mish-mash of transgender streamers and alt-right nutters
[1] Except when it comes to emulator developers, when they instead go full Alex Jones trying to claim Near didn't commit suicide
Yes, I believe Cloudflare shouldn't have interrupted their contract with Stormfront, or anyone else, for the reasons that they don't like what these others are publishing.
That KF is a horrible place for horrible people should simply not be Cloudflare's concern. A company that is offering web hosting or DDOS protection services is too far removed from this idea of "publishing" for this to make any sense.
I am not even necessarily against things like YouTube removing Alex Jones' videos - but this type of content validation needs to stop early. If you believe Cloudflare shouldn't do business with these people, neither should their ISP, nor should Github or Nginx or wherever they get their code from, and soon you'll say that they cleaning services company and their accountant should similarly stop providing service to such an evil organization (without any legal recourse, of course).
And to be clear, I don't in any way sympathize with what KF is doing (assuming what you are saying is true, which I do believe but have not checked myself). But suing them or at least seeking to alert the authorities is what you should do, not complaining to Cloudflare about it.
Won? Come on Cloudflare, you have not won the fight until the opponent is fully defeated: the Trolls' company is still operating, as far as I know the corrupt lawyers still are cashflow positive on their operation.
Call us back when these guys are bankrupt and disbarred.
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