[nabla9]

Cloudflare has pushed against public sentiment and mildly against the government to restrict censorship. They would want nothing more than be just "delivery infrastructure" part of the internet.

All the points about transparency, monopolies, and privacy concerns and implicit trust in general level are true, of course. They should be addressed. If you want to resist attacks and deliver content efficiently you need CDN and bigger the network is more efficient it is (Network effect is strongest in networks, no surprise there).

[Incipient]

Take it to the extreme. If cf has a site hosting child exploitation content, that absolutely has to go - at the very least cf could potentially be liable for it. Taking it as a given that this is acceptable to block, then a line must be drawn somewhere at what does and does not get thrown off their network. So far cases of cf taking action have been very few and far between (in the grand scheme of things).

[convery]

> Cloudflare has pushed against public sentiment [..] to restrict censorship.

Except when they booted sites off their network because Twitter users were upset..

[maldev]

I personally don't trust any of my businesses to run on it after this, and have been advising business partners and people I advise to steer clear of it. I know it's not much, but it's been mid to high 6 figures in revenue i've had shifted elsewhere. Having a business possibly be crippled won't pass any sort of risk management, and clearly shows they don't rank highly on any sort of organizational maturity scale.

[deanCommie]

Maybe you should instead advise your business partners not to host content that threatens the lives of specific individuals based solely on their identity group? Including coordinate doxxing, harassment, swatting, and threats of violence?

It's nice that you have the option to take such a professional attitude that can advise companies in the abstract based on free speech absolutionism, but the details really matter.

I know too many Americans genuinely believe that free speech absolutionism is the only way to prevent a descent into 1984 authoritarianism, but Canada and Europe seems to have found a way to restrict nazis and threats of violence against races and LGBTQ people and ending the "slippery slope" there.

[phpisthebest]

Many Americans would disagree that they "ended the "slippery slope" there" or have anything close to free expression. Look at the Trucker protests during Covid, arresting people for harmless jokes on Twitter, or because a dog raised it paw.....

Come On now. Neither Canada, nor Europe have free speech, while they may not be to 1984 authoritarianism yet, they are well well down that path.

[deanCommie]

> Trucker protests during Covid,

Watch a video of the protest in Ottawa and come back to me and tell what you would have done if this was happening inside your city.

> arresting people for harmless jokes on Twitter

I'll give you that one - https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/7/22912054/uk-grossly-offens...

The law is a mess. But ironically it's not because of a degradation of free speech, but rather because of legacy laws that haven't been caught up with the times.

> because a dog raised it paw

While I personally wouldn't have made a stink out of that one either, let's not pretend that's all it was.

The man trained his dog to raise a paw in response to the command "Do you want to gas the Jews?" and then put it online.

I realize it may be difficult for Americans to understand why the rest of the world takes such a zero-tolerance policy with fascism considering they are only 6 years removed from having elected a fascist president, but there are good reasons why the rest of the world takes a zero tolerance policy with Nazi speech.

[laughinghan]

If learning that Cloudflare took action against literal, self-identified Nazis—who praise Hitler, deny the Holocaust, and drove a car into a crowd and killed a woman—made you worried that Cloudflare might take action against you, you're really telling on yourself.

[maldev]

I don't condone that stuff at all. The big risk comes from 5 or 6 digit member enterprises where you can't properly vet your partners, employees, or contractors. What if a situation like Yandex happens and you find out your code has obscene comments on the backend? What if you have a sponsor that wasn't properly vetted. What if you wind up in a catastrophic PR situation, say BP oil spill. Or, what if someone goes onto a public comment form and posts that obscene stuff and you don't realize it?

Enterprises are massive machines that move EXTREMELY slow. And the risk of not being able to catch something in time is there, and since Cloudflare has now done it once, that means they could be pressured into it in the future. And would the media or Twitter be defending a poor Oil and Gas company if their source code had obscene things in it from a malicious developer, or would they push for Cloudflare to remove them?

Even if the odds of this are so low. I would be doing a disservice to my clients and enterprises if I didn't advise them of this possible risk that could cripple a company. Anything that can be easily stopped by using another vendor, so essentially free, when compared to a risk of something that could result in a company losing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars is an easy choice to make.

Corporations are risk averse, and this plays into both sides. Activists abuse this to pull advertisers of people they don't like. But they also have to understand that services which can cause risk are avoided like the plague.

[deanCommie]

Upset over serious, credible, actionable, threats of violence against other people hosted on those sites.

[phpisthebest]

Was it... I think you may want to research those events more

[Rimintil]

This type of response has no value and should not be posted, here.

If you wanted to _provide_ links to said information and be helpful or provide a factual counter-argument, that would be wonderful. It not only benefits the person you're replying to, but also the rest of the HN community.

Otherwise, this type of response simply raises red flags of evasion and lack of knowledge.

[phpisthebest]

I did in another comment in this thread. Also this topic is already on the line so putting in too much content and information would run a foul of the political leanings and bias of a large part of rest of the HN community resulting in mass flagging of my postings...

[byyll]

I did, in another thread about Cloudflare and my comment got flagged so take that as you will.

[rose_ann_]

And I think you don't have the slightest idea what the commenter you're pretending to reply to, is actually talking about.

[phpisthebest]

pretty sure I am fully informed...

[deanCommie]

https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/

> "the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before."

> "Revolting content alone does not create an emergency situation that necessitates the action we are taking today."

> "While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action."