The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it doesn’t like.
You can’t win with these people, I personally think this is the best outcome and shows our systems work (albeit slowly). Sure it took a while, but now there doesn’t have to be a precedent of Cloudflare acting as the internet police more than it has to.
This is the classic fallacy of assuming that because you see comments of type A and comments of type B on the same forum that means they're the same people. They're usually not.
A more accurate way to phrase this is "you can't win with ... people". Whatever you do will end up ticking off some subset of the population.
There’s a similar problem I encounter from time to time: when I self-identify as “conservative” and express opinion C, many people assume I also hold opinions D, E, and F, because “that’s how all conservatives are”.
There's one great piece of advice: "Keep your identity small" [1].
(If people ask me about my political affiliations, I usually answer something like "Hamilton for president! Of maybe Jefferson."; this kind of statesmanship is hard to find now though.)
They are not many multitudes in the US. Good on you, but my experience is that most people stick with one group and regurgitate the party lines. I think this comes mostly from very polarized TV shows.
Likewise, if you disagree with them, they instantly assume that you are with the other group. It is strange.
The two-party system easily evokes the ancient knee-jerk reflexes. The millennia-old "us against them" tends to eschew any nuance and instill the war mentality. Either you are "one of us", and subscribe to the bulk of "our" views, or you are "one of them", and are assumed to subscribe to the bulk of "their" views.
“These people” is presumably a set of people quick to find fault in anything a corporation does, which could be a superset of those two groups. Not sure what kind of fallacy that’s supposed to be.
Those people are in the noise and nobody cares what they think once they realize they just criticize for the sake of it.
That doesn’t change that people seem to think the top upvoted comments being contradictory from day to day represents some kind of inconsistency in the views of the commenters on this site.
> The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it doesn’t like.
It'd be interesting if you could point to a single example of someone taking both sides. I strongly doubt these are the same people.
If you're asking me to personally identify someone, no I'm not going to do that. However if you want to see some hilarious hypocrisy, go ahead and see who said what when Cloudflare banned 8chan.
Well CloudFlare already does exactly that. It already set the precedent you are referring to. That's why it feels odd that they don't shut down literal criminals too. They have no issues with shutting down stuff, but they are famously very lax when it comes to actual criminal stuff. I'm not trying to say that they were wrong or right for engaging in content policing, what I'm saying is that the precedent isn't new.
There is no contraposition. In both cases, big company simply does something it wants.
This comparison actually highlights that there is no “system”, because some (imaginary) impersonal entity decides that those bad actors are allowed, and those bad actors are not allowed. Some public sensibilities are given as a reason, but no one is actually asking anyone's opinion on anything. Still, there are people who believe that Santa Claus brings presents for free, and that the whole thing is not governed by typical hypocrisy and typical politics behind closed doors. The thing is, you've built a turnpike, you can now bargain with people interested in sharing control over that turnpike.
The internet is a global system that spans ~all jurisdictions, and most internet criminals live in jurisdictions that don't prosecute internet crimes as long as the bad actors leave citizens of their own country alone.
So they're criminals as far as the US and allies are concerned, but de facto not criminals where they live. If they're going to be locked out of the system, it has to be by the infrastructure, because their government has no interest in stopping them.
I see. Perhaps there should be a legal framework to get the government to demand companies like cloudflare stop serving these international criminals, then. That way it wouldn't depend on a private entity making the judgement.
Do you ever think it's weird that we have gone through web 1.0, web 2.0, semantic web, intertubes clogged with spam bots, web 3.0: crypto edition, and the dawn of AI scraping, and we still haven't figured out these issues?
Which government do you mean when you say "the government"? Any national government? Only the US government? Only governments in which the US is friendly and/or has agreements with?
Would you want authoritarian governments to be able to demand Cloudflare stop serving those they consider criminals that are outside their borders?
I again ask: is it desirable for any of those countries to be able to unilaterally force a company to enforce its laws regardless of where the individual in question is?
If the equipment is in country X, it seems reasonable to enforce the rules of country X. Plenty of companies refuse to operate in specific countries, including China, because they don't want to follow rules of that country.
If CloudFlare chooses to do business in China, that's a choice they're making and it comes with consequences.
Maybe they can offer service where customers will only be served from equipment outside of China, maybe that's not something they choose.
Are you American? Because that sounds like such an American idea of how the world works.
To answer your question: most malware actors can be traced back to Russia, what exactly do you think "sending the cops" after them will accomplish and if the answer is "nothing", then does that mean you don't think they can be called criminals?
It doesn't need to be physical cops. What I mean is that if crimes are being committed, the legal system should initiate a process that either puts them in jail (which as you say may not be possible) or ends up with cloudflare banning and other internet companies blacklisting them. That way, the burden of judging criminality isn't on random companies but on the appropriate authorities.
Cloudflare shields criminals from cops. They do so because of "free speech" or whatever. There was recently a story about a swatting victim, who tried to get the forum the swatters use to shut down. Cloud flare refused to give the identity of the criminals, the case even went to court and the victim lost and now apparently has to pay court costs.
Our legal system is unfortunately not perfect, which is why it matters what infrastructure providers do.
Do they enable criminals by shielding them from the police? Or do they have policies in place that prevent abuse of their service?
With Cloudflare, I'm pretty sure they lean towards the former.
Which is a catch-22, because subpoenas / warrants for collection of digital information have to name a specific intended target (a real legal identity under suspicion, not some pseudonym) — and "the real legal identity of the suspect" is exactly the thing that Cloudflare's proxy-shielding prevents you from learning. Courts won't act until they have some specific individual to act toward.
(This is also why, whenever you hear about e.g. police stings on Tor forums, they never mention requesting courts to issue warrants to ISPs for collection of e.g. traffic-analysis-correlation info about locations of servers hosting illegal content. Instead, this de-anonymization step is something they always have to achieve extra-judicially, usually by contracting a private network threat intelligence firm.)
Or you don't hear about the methods they are using for deanonymizing because they would get the cases thrown out of a court. Warrantless wiretapping and the like... And the private firm is just lying for them so law enforcement can do parallel construction.
Is the website illegal? Or maybe the police need to deal with spam calls more sensibly. Presumably they can trace where the calls are coming from in real life
wait, are you mad cloudflare decided not to be an active participant in a doxxing campaign? Swatting is awful but I'm inclined to side with cloudflare here.
I'm mad that they offer anonymity to criminals. If you offer a service that lets people hide their identity, you ought to perform a bit of due diligence.
People who want to live in a just world often get in the way of things. I'm just not sure why you're mad at those who want justice and not those who put profits above all else?
> that Cloudflare hosts these criminals
Oh.. it's not that they host them, it's that they go out of their way to protect them, and the profit streams associated with them.
There are tons of shady websites hiding behind cloudflare's services. Some used .tk domains too but just in general, many shady websites are hiding behind Cloudflare and at least I know from personal experience if you contact cloud flare about it, they pretend not to be home.
"We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying for that website it would be at least offline, never worked.
Cloudflare is a US company. If they provide hosting (or reverse proxying; I don't think there's a material legal difference) services for anything illegal under US law, shouldn't it be possible to compel them to stop doing that through the legal system?
And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
> if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"
It's not reasonable. 99% of scams, frauds and harassment will never be subject of legal action, because there just aren't enough prosecutors out there to charge every fraud attempt.
If you require a court ruling before blocking a fraud, it means you will keep hosting 99% of frauds.
If it's clearly illegal, what prevents it from being handled in any court of law? If it's not actually as clear, preemptive/overzealous compliance can lead to all kinds of undesirable (in a liberal democracy) effects.
I also doubt that Cloudflare lets every single analogous issue bubble up to a full court case every single time, but for new/unclear/borderline scenarios, I'm glad that courts don't get to outsource their duty, i.e. determining the legality of actions, to a for-profit organization without public oversight.
Maybe that commentator lives in a country without common law, so precedent doesn't matter, but in a country like the US a law without precedent is considered "untried" and a lot of the details are worked out when the law is first enforced.
If the legislature doesn't like the court's interpretation, they can then amend the law and the process restarts.
So basically, at least in the US, nothing is clearly illegal until it is handled by a court -- so yes I think you're right
They can. You can also subpoena them for information on an account, there are literally lawyers with blogs talking about how to do this. The people complaining essentially think that they should have the right to take anything they want down with an abuse report.
A while back there was an interview with someone at Cloudflare and they were asked what about these Al Qaeda sites you guys are in front of, dude just answered "no comment". Seems that at the time they didn't ask many questions at all, like you said cause they don't want to go in to content moderation.
You can’t win with these people, I personally think this is the best outcome and shows our systems work (albeit slowly). Sure it took a while, but now there doesn’t have to be a precedent of Cloudflare acting as the internet police more than it has to.