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Pirate Bay Blockade Censors CloudFlare Customers
An anonymous reader writes: The blockade of the Pirate Bay by UK ISPs is causing trouble for CloudFlare customers. Several websites have been inadvertently blocked by Sky because a Pirate Bay proxy is hosted behind the same IP-addresses. In a response, CloudFlare threatened to disconnect the proxy site from its network. Like any form of censorship web blockades can sometime lead to overblocking, targeting perfectly legitimate websites by mistake. This is also happening in the UK where Sky's blocking technology is inadvertently blocking sites that have nothing to do with piracy.
Would it not be rather ironic if Sky were to use the CloudFare CDN for some of their content, and therefore blocked themselves?
Blocking all of the sites served by a legitimate CDN is going a little far.
The UK ISPs are paid by their customers connect to the Internet.
The UK ISPs are blocking connections.
There are no "pirates".
There is no "piracy".
There is only UK ISPs not allowing their Internet customers who have paid for to reach all Internet sites to not reach all Internet sites.
Shame on UK ISPs.
There is nobody else to blame.
UK ISP customers. Sue your provider.
E
If you really want to stop the theft of art and music, why not start with the megacorporate audio/video recording combines who profit from the monetisation of culture and the destruction of the public domain?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
As a current CloudFlare customer, the fact that they're so quickly and easily kowtowing to enemies of freedom disturbs me greatly. If I publish a book that makes some random government cranky and gets my site on a ban list, are they going to threaten to throw me off, too? What if somebody posts a link to an illegal torrent on my blog and I don't notice it quickly enough? Where do you draw the line? At what point does the threat of government censorship become too great a burden for the Internet to bear, stifling creativity by causing site owners to be afraid of their own shadows, and destroying the most basic freedoms upon which the 'net as we know it was founded?
In my opinion, CDNs should send a clear, unwavering message by declaring in one voice that government censorship of the Internet is unacceptable in a free society, and simply cannot be tolerated. That's what I look for in a CDN. If the CDN providers have any cojones at all, they should deliberately ensure that torrent mirrors and other potentially objectionable content share IPs with some of the most high-value targets that they host, so that blocking one of those sites would cause as much collateral damage as possible, and then refuse to do anything about it. Let the sites that are blocked complain to Cloudflare, let Cloudflare redirect their complaints to the ISPs who are doing the blocking, and let the ISPs scream at their MPs to demand that the laws be changed.
Basically, the CDNs need to parade the naked emperor down the street. Only by maximizing the extent to which these ill-conceived laws destroy citizens' access to the Internet can we force the clowns in power to actually take the time to understand how the Internet works, and understand why these laws can only cause harm, and can never actually be successful in any meaningful way. The only way those laws will ever get fixed is if a million people wake up tomorrow and call their MPs screaming because their IP violator block lists are preventing them from using Amazon.co.uk or Pinterest or Facebook.
So for the next "Ask Slashdot", does anybody know of a CDN that actually has a spine?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I'm a content creator too, with significant copyrighted works. I've even used copyright threats to ensure I've been adequately paid. I also think Copyright is utterly absurd as it is. 5-10 years ought to be the max. The establishment has shown severe disrespect to the public by locking down culture indefinitely behind a paywall. It might be "stealing" in your eyes, or the law's... Ethically, it's sharing, with the same good intentions of every public library. I hope one day copyright catches up to morality. Our culture is owned by all of us.
The thing is, you could say the same thing about any other form of speech that happens to be illegal in a particular country. For example, a site hosting Nazi propaganda would be illegal in Germany. A site hosting pornography would be illegal in most of the Middle East. A site hosting news coverage or historical documentaries about the events of June 4, 1989 would be illegal in mainland China. And so on.
Where do you draw the line? Which countries' laws do you require all your sites to comply with? And what is lost by doing so?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I totally agree, but comments like this always get downvoted because on \. everything needs to be free. So don't even bother posting things like this.
Any reputable cloud provider would disconnect any of their customers deemed to be hosting illegal content.
Even if it's not illegal in their home country? Cloud providers wouldn't have many customers left if they disconnected anyone hosting content that was illegal in another country.
Do you really believe that if North Korea passes a law prohibiting web sites that mock their leader, CloudFlare wouldn't be a reputable company unless they disconnected any customer who had a site that mocked their leader?
Cloudfare blocks Tor exit nodes heavily; you have to fill out a captcha almost every other page refresh. It makes it almost impossible to navigate a website.
That seems incompatible with your distaste for "kowtowing to the enemies of freedom" and trying to allow customers access to your books even if a government doesn't want them to have access.
Please help metamoderate.
no legit company uses CloudFlare
These companies use CloudFlare services. Names I recognize include Reddit, eHarmony, Bain Capital, League of Legends developer Riot Games, Cisco Systems, Quicksilver, Y Combinator, NASDAQ Stock Market, Eurovision Song Contest, Massachsetts Institute of Technology, and Metallica. I've also seen CloudFlare services in use on Stack Exchange (the Stack Overflow company). If you can explain what you mean by "legit" and show how all of these companies fail tests for being "legit", I'll believe you.
CloudFlare blocks any IP address that sends an insane number of page hits in a short period of time
Then it blocks search engines and reduces the SEO of its customers' sites on search engines that aren't big enough to get whitelisted the way Google and Bing are.
CloudFlare was treating Amazon's web crawler bot's IP range as a potential spammer and showing it a captcha page for every result
If any other CloudFlare customer sees behavior like this, try whitelisting each smaller search engine on which you want your site to appear.
[CloudFlare's CAPTCHA] is trivial for end users to get around and thus is not a true block
Even for blind users?