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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.
The block is by order of the High Court. The ISPs have no choice. It's this troublesome thing called "the law". Outside the inane and naive minds of certain slashdotters it's commonly thought to be quite a useful thing. You could look it up on Wikipedia.
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.
Oh, I'd certainly be up for sueing my ISP over this.
Unfortunately, I'm with Andrew&Arnolds, one of the only ISPs in the UK that outright refuse to filter content (not even the IWFs filter is applied). They give you all the tools you need to apply your own filters at your end but ultimately it's up to you.
Anyway, I'm with you in spirit as I continue to simply enjoy my uncensored internet connection.
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.
Thing to add to your list to learn: SNI - Server Name Indication
Yea, right mate, because laws are all genuinely for the good of the people, right?
No need to challenge, ask, rebuke, or seek to have it overturned.
It's the law.
Try not to speed on the way home, will you?
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?