>The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy.
>have our cake and eat it too.
I don't get this corporate reverse speak.
They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday and then plainly say "But this violation of that policy doesn't reflect on our policies overall."
I get that Kiwifarms is hated, that doesn't make black turn to white and up turn to down.
Cloudflare reneged on everything they said Wednesday, there isn't two ways about it.
They are self-stated as 'internet infrastructure', and this is definitely a censorship tactic.
It looks like it's time for a government to step in with over-sight, since they want to be an infrastructure player.
As I remember the policy they posted had exceptions for sites that were dangerous/etc. I think what they did today is completely consistent.
What I DON’T get is why they didn’t think the site was dangerous last week. When I read their policy it seems to clearly state they wouldn’t work with a group like kiwifarms, and yet they posted a whole post explaining why they were.
I agree it’s a flip-flop, I guess I see it from the other side.
> As I remember the policy they posted had exceptions for sites that were dangerous/etc. I think what they did today is completely consistent.
It's a fig leaf and an obvious moving of the goalposts. Any time they really hate a site, they'll just decide that it's now "dangerous" and use that excuse to ban it.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Cloudflare. Their core product is security done the wrong way. They have the potential to do evil things at an enormous scale with little to no recourse.
On the other hand, KiwiFarms was ACTUALLY DOING something evil at an enormous scale with no recourse. Lives have been threatened in the past, and another life was in jepoardy in this instance. The site is dedicated to activities that are at best harmful to society, and at worst illegal and life-threatening.
What reason does Cloudflare have to eliminate a customer, other than a situation like this? They have no reason to care about your site's content. They just want your money so they can protect you from DDOS attacks and slurp up metadata. The only reason this happened is because human lives were in question.
I haven't seen any evidence that they are significantly more dangerous than Facebook or Twitter. The "human lives in danger" is transparent bullshit. They are actually doing this due to a pressure campaign being carried out by a small number of activists looking to drive any speech they don't like out of existence. Thankfully it hasn't completely worked yet and they are still able to respond in their own defense, so we have something other than the unchallenged claims of Cloudfare etc to determine whether they've actually done something wrong.
I think Cloudflare did think it was a dangerous site, but they would really prefer not having the responsibility of being the arbiter of what can and cannot be hosted, as well as all of the negative publicity that comes with being so. At the same time, I believe they believe that current legal process surrounding how things like this are handles are so woefully underdeveloped that turning a blind eye is not being neutral, it's being irresponsible.
Taking downs sites like this hurts the view of infrastructure neutrality, so I'm sure it's not done lightly, even when someone goes against their policy.
Most customers do not have means of being harmful to the utility by their actions of using the utility itself. If for example your use of the power network caused damage to the network and effected other customers than you can believe you would get an immediate cut off order until the situation was remediated.
Sites behind cloudflare, in theory (lots of debate here) could be considered harmful to cloudflare's network by their behavior, hence presenting a risk to the network and its customers.
> Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold.
If CF is going to police the internet then they had better do it fairly and justly. I do not believe CF is equip to do that, and neither does Prince. That is the issue here as evidenced by the parent and GP being unclear on the rules. It’s very hard not to see this decision to terminate KF as a corporate knee jerk.
A person, claiming to be a moderator on Kiwifarms, swatted Marjorie Taylor Greene (but unfortunately misspelled it as "Kiwifarm" in the note claiming responsibility). I have no doubt that this person did it with the express intent of getting Cloudfare to withdraw their services. Up until then Marjorie Taylor Greene had been quite popular on Kiwifarms.
Correction: someone who claimed to be associated with KF swatted a member of Congress. The username mentioned (which I will not quote here) denied all responsibility on the site. Surely we're not taking artificially voiced 911 calls from VoIP numbers at face value here are we?
Cloudfare really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here. Their Wednesday post was fantastic, and for once I had an ounce of hope they’d do the right thing.
Of course they took less than a week to completely cave, falling back on their spineless nature. This kind of institutional rot starts at the top, they desperately need a new CEO.
Utility “companies” don’t get to pick and choose, if you pick and choose you are just a regular company which opens up the whole monopoly trust-busting side of things.
I don’t think companies just get to decide to be a utility company anyway. It is clearly a play to disregard responsibility. If governments started treating them like a utility and started requiring things like free services to people who don’t make a certain amount of money or price caps you bet your ass they would fight it tooth and nail.
> They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday
How so?
On Wednesday they said they will block content "that ... incites ... violence against people".
Then now they're saying "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".
>have our cake and eat it too.
I don't get this corporate reverse speak.
They literally went against the policies stated on Wednesday and then plainly say "But this violation of that policy doesn't reflect on our policies overall."
I get that Kiwifarms is hated, that doesn't make black turn to white and up turn to down.
Cloudflare reneged on everything they said Wednesday, there isn't two ways about it.
They are self-stated as 'internet infrastructure', and this is definitely a censorship tactic.
It looks like it's time for a government to step in with over-sight, since they want to be an infrastructure player.