Slashdot Mirror
Cloudflare Helps Serve Up Hate Online: Report (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If you've been wondering how hate has proliferated online, especially since the 2016 election, ProPublica has some answers. According to ProPublica, Cloudflare -- a major San Francisco-based internet company -- enables extremist web sites to stay in business by providing them with internet data delivery services. Cloudflare reportedly also keeps to a policy of turning over contact information of anyone who complains to operators of the offending sites, thus exposing the complainants to personal harassment.
I experienced this first hand. I was working for a client who was attacked by having hundreds of thousands of links pointed to their website with anchor text like "child porn" in attempt to ruin their brand. The spammers were effective and they had to change company names. I was able to track down a site that was owned by the spammer after the spammer also created a duplicate copy of the website with a porn related domain name. Cloudflare was able to reveal to us the IP behind them, but by the time we received this information, the spammer had taken to the web and posted hundreds of thousands of new comments with my first and last name accusing me of all sorts of stuff (although not CP). Ultimately we were able to scare the spammers off their game, but the issue was quite clear. Services like Cloudflare (which I think are great) do create an additional veil of anonymity for unscrupulous individuals and their abuse policies pass the names of the complainant on to the unscrupulous individuals, allowing retaliation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For some reason the link was to the CNET article. The actual propublica article is here: https://www.propublica.org/art...
Quote:
"Cloudflare also has an added appeal to sites such as The Daily Stormer [the neo-Nazi web site]. It turns over to the hate sites the personal information of people who criticize their content. For instance, when a reader figures out that Cloudflare is the internet company serving sites like The Daily Stormer, they sometimes write to the company to protest. Cloudflare, per its policy, then relays the name and email address of the person complaining to the hate site, often to the surprise and regret of those complaining....
“I wasn’t aware that my information would be sent on. I suppose I, naively, had an expectation of privacy,” said Jennifer Dalton, who had complained that The Daily Stormer was asking its readers to harass Twitter users after the election.
Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content. “We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” Anglin wrote in one online post. “We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”
The reason they're after CloudFlare is in the summary, because it's "a major San Francisco-based internet company."
The activists want to isolate them and push for policies that create private policemen for what you can and cannot say online by taking ideological control of the privately-held infrastructure. You know, to push us back to the pre-web days when only a few voices were allowed to speak pre-filtered messages to the people.
What we really need is to expand the ideals behind common carriers and public accommodations to ensure that everyone has equal access to the web. Even the people I don't like.
Our alternative is that the loudest idiots police what you can and cannot say.
Is that anti-fascism?
Common misunderstanding - they're ante-fascists, as in proto-fascists. When one side is marching in black uniforms, initiating political violence, using violence to shut down speech they disagree with, and generally trying to reenact Weimar Germany, that side has made is clear they're the fascists (or at least wannabes).
We're sure not perfect, but we strive to change for the better. That's progressive.
Funny, I heard "We're sure not perfect, but we strive to change for the better. That's Christianity." a great many times growing up. Plus ca change.
I'm sure many progressives have their heart in the right place, but then so did many right-wing religious whackos. The worst tyrants are those who think they're doing it for your own good, after all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's quite mind-boggling why a third party won't pop up and have 90% votes immediately (ie, anyone with a shred of brain left).
The US electoral system mathematically dictates that the US have a two-party system. This explains why much better than I could.
We desperately need to overall this system.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that progressives don't encourage actual anarchists. Most of us are older than 15.
Likewise, I'm not really accusing conservatives of being defined by the immigrant hating, pro-violence, alt-right movement. Both parties will have wing-nuts and extremists which take ideals too far. I mean, if you want a flavor of reddit right-wing hate-mongering, here you go.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say I haven't really cozzied up to that lot.
Good for you! If you haven't paid attention to the Battle at Berkeley, you're a bit out of touch, but that's probably for the best, mental health wise.
The best bit was the protest that was shut down cold before it began in Alabama, where there's a (strongly enforced) law against public activities in masks or hoods, for good historical reasons. I doubt it sunk home with the antifa crowd that their behavior was overlapping so much with old-school KKK.
The religious right is rooted in conservatism, as in conserving the old ways and or going back to the old ways.
I didn't say they changed as a culture, but the whole religion is based on changing as individuals, striving to be more Christ-like and whatnot, for whatever that's worth. Still, their rhetoric was the same. And, to be fair to Christianity, it has changed a lot over a larger time scale - they've had a Reformation, various wars that changed the mainstream culture, the entire emergence of Protestants (protest-ants - sound familiar?), and so on. Things desperately needed by another medieval religion I could name.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.