[jsheard]

> I'd need to ask the lawyer how close this is to technically being a protection racket, or other no-no.

Wait 'til you find out how many of the DDoS-for-hire services that Cloudflare offers to protect you from are themselves protected by Cloudflare.

[yard2010]

This comment demonstrates what an exceptional business it is - the house always wins.

[ziddoap]

I hear this pretty often. I am curious what do you think Cloudfare should do?

I am pretty sure that if they started arbitrarily banning customers/potential customers based on what some other people like or don't like, everyone would be up in arms yelling stuff about censorship or wokeness or whatever the word of the year is.

As an example, what if I'm not a DDoS-for-hire, but just a website that sells some software capable of launching DDoS attacks? Should I be able to buy Cloudfare protection? Should a site like Metasploit be allowed to purchase protection?

[jsheard]

> As an example, what if I'm not a DDoS-for-hire, but just a website that sells some software capable of launching DDoS attacks? Should I be able to buy Cloudfare protection? Should a site like Metasploit be allowed to purchase protection?

Would you say this nuance is a major issue on the other big cloud providers? Your own grey-area example of Metasploit is hosted on AWS without any objections. Yet the other cloud providers make a decent effort to turn away open DDoS peddlers, whenever I survey the highest ranked DDoS services it's usually around 95% Cloudflare and 5% DDoS-Guard.

[ziddoap]

I'm asking you what you think Cloudfare should do. I'm not sure why you spun it around on me.

[jsheard]

I think Cloudflare should make the bare minimum effort to kick services which are explicitly offering illegal DDoS attacks, given that their current policy of not doing anything unless legally compelled to is demonstrably enabling the overwhelming majority of DDoS providers to stay online, which has terrible optics when they're in the business of mitigating those attacks.

Whatever slippery slope excuses they give, somehow AWS, Azure, GCP, Fastly, Akamai and so on have managed to solve the impossible problem of turning away DDoS providers without imposing Orwellian censorship in the process.