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>no Matthew Prince selectively and benevolently enforcing CF neutrality.

What's the logic behind this? It's still a single point of failure and relying on a corporation. If the daily stormer or 8chan tried to use them, they would probably kicked off as well.




If you are not a political undesirable, it does help, though. I think Wikipedia is fine in this regard, not something to shun of for a big corp.


Wikipedia is blocked in China. It's politically undesirable for 1/8 of the human population...


I think undesirable here describes something like white nationalists. They have a problem getting web hosting.


CloudFlare has strategic business partnership with Baidu [1]. They are very likely to cooperate with the chinese government to implement the great chinese firewall.

Additionally, helping to block Wikipedia because China says so is much easier to excuse than blocking 4chan - they would just be complying with local regulations after all.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2015/cloudflare-an...


Because all of them don't want it?


Unlike a DDoS attack, this is not a technological problem.


There's always something "undesirable" for someone in a big crowdsourced website.


The cloudfare 8chan action was based on a direct link with multiple actual mass-shootings. Moreover, as they took the decision they went to great pains to explain this was an exceptional case.

Going from that to 'undesired political speech will be censored' requires more of a slippery cliff than a slippery slope.


>The cloudfare 8chan action was based on a direct link with multiple actual mass-shootings

What is this "direct link" you speak of? Did the shooters plan/recruit/organize their attacks on 8chan?


> What is this "direct link" you speak of? Did the shooters plan/recruit/organize their attacks on 8chan?

Legally, a "direct link" is irrelevant, you can rarely find a "direct link" between two of anything. What matters legally is whether 8chan was a "proximate cause" in creating the mass shootings. Whether one thing is the "proximate cause" of another is often pretty difficult to discern.

However, as a helpful guide towards determining proximate cause, lawyers ask whether one thing was the "but for" cause of another, i.e., would the mass shootings occur "but for" 8Chan? Put another way, if 8Chan did not exist, would these shootings occur?

Unfortunately, we do not have an alternative reality to play out events without 8Chan, so we cannot know for certain, but we can use evidence (e.g., 8Chan chats, how the shooter interacted with 8Chan and others on the service, etc) to try to simulate that alternative reality. All of this analysis also needs to consider related issues like freedom of speech on public forums and any commercial interests.

I'm not saying 8Chan is guilty or innocent, just that the existence (or lack thereof) of a "direct link" is pretty meaningless.


There are multiple instances of them announcing them and implying they are follow-ups of previous discussions on 8chan.

These include the Christchurch shootings, the Poway synagogue shooting and the El Paso Walmart shootin.

The Christchurch shooter shared his Facebook stream to 8chan before the shooting started, and it was spread from there.

The Poway shooter blamed/thanked 8chan for his views.


So FB's internet peers should depeer Facebook then in their routers, since the original material (the stream) was on FB? Or you prefer your justice selective?


I'm sure you already realize this, but to make it clear: FB has enormous utility for billions of people outside that and that is worth defending.

You are expanding a lot of effort defending 8chan here. Perhaps consider that it might not be worth defending.


8ch had a lot of very interesting and non-violent stuff. Have you been reading it regularly? I did.

I lived in a socialist country and you did not. Perhaps consider that you might not know where these current trends are pointing to.


[flagged]


you're not really engaging with his point. Effectively banning 8chan by removing network protection does not just restrict extremists; it restricts anyone who used that forum.

Ultimately, such matters should be prosecuted by courts. It is inappropriate for organisations like cloudflare to leverage their position within essential network infrastructure to start editorialising what passes through their network.


It is inappropriate for organisations like cloudflare to leverage their position within essential network infrastructure to start editorialising what passes through their network.

No, I think it's entirely appropriate.

"Don't troll" and methods for dealing with trolls has been a thing all sites have done since the internet was invented. I don't see any difference here at all.


the difference is their position in the stack.

Cloudflare blocking people that abuse the network is legitimate (e.g. spam, denial-of-service), just like it is legitimate for forum admins to block people that abuse the forum (trolling, explicit posts).

But cloudflare, or any other network infrastructure provider, shouldn't be determining permissible content for websites because they are not hosts/administrators for that content.

It is like a postal service reading your letters and then saying "we don't like what is being said, so you can't send letters anymore." They can and should stop people sending dangerous materials by post, but they should not be determining permissible content of letters.


See, I think 8-chan itself is a troll, and it is entirely reasonable to deal with it by refusing to provide service.

It is like a postal service reading your letters and then saying "we don't like what is being said, so you can't send letters anymore." They can and should stop people sending dangerous materials by post, but they should not be determining permissible content of letters.

No it's not. It's like FedEx declining to deliver for a company which continues to cause it problems, or refusing to service Amazon[1]. Or like Visa refusing to service businesses which have lots of charge-backs.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/business/fedex-amazon-exp...


Actually, it is illegal to mail obscene materials or crime inciting matter through the postal service.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1461


yes, but these are investigated and prosecuted by police, public prosecution services, and courts; not by couriers discontinuing their services.


if 8chan was cut off because they were subject to extensive network attacks and cloudflare did not see any profit or value in serving them then I am ok with that. I just don't think that's the reason.

I expect that a different site with the same contract and payment terms, subject to the same attacks would have continued to be protected. maybe I'm wrong but it looked like a political decision, not a business decision.


The direct link is that they announced these attacks there.

Beyond that, given the announcement there, it stands to reason they were convinced to do it there.


I think it’s somewhat misleading to refer to those who support genocide and child abuse as simply “political undesirables.”


It's not just supporting. Taking a neutral stance on censoring these things, or not being adequately proactive on hate speech, is now seen as condoning. You either censor your user base, or upstream will censor you. Gone are the days of "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." The new policy is "The net interprets wrongthink as noise and filters it out."


It’s not censorship: they are not suppressing information, they just aren’t allowing their resources to be used to spread it.

It would be “censorship” if they actively antagonized any attempt to spread the information, such as by lawsuit or DMCA notice. They are just refusing to participate.

And given that the “information” is definitively known to be child pornography and violent white supremacy propaganda presented as news, I would personally say refusing to participate is the only responsible action.


> Gone are the days of "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

But it's clear that it matters just what's being censored. Surely you wouldn't say the same trite clever-sounding hackerspeak if we're talking about censorship of threats, assault and child pornography, would you?


They are beyond a certain line; some very-very far past it, some just crossed it. It makes them unsupportable by any corporation that aims to look decent.


Genocide has been and still is a political tool. It is extreme, but ultimately something that people consider and carry out as part of political processes, not a special category of its own. And realpolitik is to continue dealing with countries that practice genocide. Consider Burma or China.

Cloudflare simply has the luxury of choosing which politically disagreeable parties they do not want to associate with because they are insignificant customers.

Pretending that this is not due to differences in politics and moral judgment is semantic smoke and mirrors.

Anyway, the point is that they are not a neutral carrier/providers. Unlike banks or telecoms which are required by regulation to accept any legal business. CF styles itself as neutral infrastructure, until they decide they are not.

The risk of getting deplatformed due to someone's moral judgment is quite real, even for an entity such as Wikipedia. For example they were blocked in the UK because the Virgin Killer album cover landed it on a block list used by major ISP.


I didn’t say it wasn’t political, but it’s not just undesirable for immediate political reasons — it’s undesirable for nearly universally-agreed moral and ethical reasons. So implying it’s only inconvenient for politics is, in my opinion, misleading.


The political tends to encompass or at least subsume the moral and ethical aspects, as I tried to allude to with the realpolitik aspect.

But again, this is just a tangent. The core argument is that it is best not to rely on providers that have the freedom to make political/moral decisions who they deal with because that freedom makes them susceptible to moral denial of service attacks. You are one moral outrage away from being deplatformed.


I can see that mentality, but what I’m saying is that, personally, if I become a Nazi, I think I should be deplatformed.


Then who decides what is a Nazi? Deplatforming someone for their speech makes them one in my book. How far down do we go?




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