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0 pointseru4y ago0 comments

They might take that stance, to avoid liability and complication.

At the moment, they have a very clear rule. If they stop providing services to obvious spammers, they will create lots of grey areas, and they will also implicitly make a judgement that the client they still serve are _good_ in some way, and an enterprising lawyer or muckraker might exploit that.

0 comments

LudwigNagasena4y ago

Cloudflare dropped the Daily Stormer. The ship of pretense of no judgement has sailed.

Litost4y ago

To anyone else who's curious links for the above:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer

sneak4y ago

This may have had something to do with the fact that the daily stormer was claiming prior to that that their lack of suspension was an implicit endorsement by CloudFlare of their site and content.

Misuse of trademarks is a thing.

I agree, however, that CF's policies are applied arbitrarily.

iratewizard4y ago

And 8chan, the 4chan alternative where anyone can make and moderate their own board.

hnbad4y ago

Better known for being linked to the Christchurch and El Paso shootings, being the origin of the QAnon movement and having a history of hosting child pornography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan

2 more replies

avian4y ago

How is that different from a hosting provider that has to address legal complaints regarding spam, copyright infringement, etc. on their servers? Just like a hosting provider, they specifically have a relationship with the website owner to provide the reverse proxy service. It's not like they can say "we don't know who or how our service is being used".

It seems to me that if they want to be in this business they have to deal with these liabilities and complications, not hide behind some vague "our hands are tied" language.

studentrob4y ago

Presumably if illegal content is not taken down by the customer then the host cancels the service, right? Otherwise the host risks liability. That's different from revealing the IP of a customer which requires a court order.

eruOP4y ago

You have a point, but I assume those businesses' lawyers understand this better than our armchair speculation here.

lelanthran4y ago

> How is that different from a hosting provider

If their argument is "we only retransmit what we get, with caching" then they are in the same place liability-wise as the phone providers ("We only retransmit what we et, with caching").

In other words, a common carrier.

Hosting is different. For exmaple, Youtube is not liable for what their users upload. They comply with takedown notices because they host the content, not the user.

breakingcups4y ago

But in a way, they actively host the content. The fact that their server periodically retrieves new content from a different backend makes no difference. The page sits on their hard drives and is server by their servers when I visit that domain. It's always been a very, very thin argument and it has gotten even thinner with the likes of Cloudflare Pages and Workers.

Cloudflare is just a huge company actively ignoring abuse complaints and somehow they are getting away with it. It even helps their PR to a certain market segment.

They even still host kiwifarms, a board that is primarily known for its vicous harassment of people and is known to have driven multiple innocent people to suicide.

I consider CloudFlare a bad actor at this point and I wish the other big names around them would too. They are subsidizing crime with VC money.

IfOnlyYouKnew4y ago

This logic doesn’t make sense. Nobody is under the illusion that CF is somehow incapable of denying service to individual customers.

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