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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.
TCP/IP enables extremist web sites to stay in business by providing them with internet data delivery services
So Cloudfare sells their services to everyone who's willing to pay for it.
The ultimate in diversity and that's now "bad"?
Are there calls to stop providing services to Stephen Colbert's show and CBS now then?
No?
Huh...
an *extreminst* website is anything I think is extreme. like Windows fanboy websites.
"Hate" is anything I hate. If it's speech that I hate, the person is making "hate speech"
------------------
What a bunch of hothouse plants the current generation is, can't survive in the real human world
This is the first question. and the answer is the individual.
so what should we do about it? just because you find something hateful doesnt mean I do, and im sure things I find hateful might not bother others. in the end the answer is simple. If you dont want to see/read/watch something... dont go to that site!!!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Anti-Free Speech that Matters
"hate" is a subjective term. people can get offended by anything they choose.
so unless there is a call for actual and specific illegal activity(say by calling for murder of a specific individual or group) such speech should not be censored based on such a vaguely defined term.
that is my opinion.
of course private companies have a right to do what they want with their property, either to censor or not. others(myself included) have a right to criticize that too, either way.
What sort of stupid hit piece is this?
I'm not even going to bother picking this apart because (1) other slashdotters will and (2) no one on here is stupid enough on here for this spin.
I scrolled back up expecting to see another infamous BeauHD submission, but its msmash. C'mon, don't lower your standards.
Good, they're doing the right thing.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
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.
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"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."
So, they dox anybody who complains about a hate site. Charming.
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Gosh, you must really hate hate.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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.”
I think we have a winner here.
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.
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.
Isn't a basic tenet of any justice system the right to face one's accuser? Why should accusers be able to hide behind a mask of anonymity?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Correct. This is not news. it is political propaganda.
These stories, like the "extremism on Youtube" stories, are designed to put pressure on companies to abandon their free speech principals and submit to the will of the media and the political class.
Let us be frank: The article mentions the "Daily Stormer", but the actual websites which will be banned are almost certain to resemble the Prop or Not list of alleged "Russian Propaganda" sites. A list promoted heavily be the Washington Post and other MSM sites which ultimately included many independent bloggers and even left-wing progressive sites like nakedcapitalism.com.
The Propornot list was a list of doubters. Sites which would not tow the propaganda line, on war, on the banks, on the economy, on the election. These are the sites which the political class has been scheming to proscribe since the election. I would hope that people can put aside their political preferences in that election long enough to acknowledge that it was a shocking defeat for the Media and the increasingly corrupt political establishment. Regardless of your opinions on him, someone the political class did not want got in, and they are making moves and exerting political pressure -- usually through their lapdogs in the media-- to prevent ANY such repeat occurrence.
Regardless of whether you'd prefer vote for Trump or Sanders or any other disruptive candidate come 2020, if this censorship drive continues, the MSM will dominate the internet as well, and you'll be stuck with the political equivalents of Hillary and Jeb Bush.
Absolutely not. Free speech is free speech, even if it's not necessarily something that you, personally, might agree with, and (when it works) it's a two way street - you can't get them to STFU, but they can't get you to STFU either.
That's completely apart from the doxing of people who complain directly to those that are being complained about though; something that CloudFlare has a considerable track record of doing, often quite openly on the grounds of "so many people use us, so we're too big to block". CloudFlare might be standing up for free speech, and should be applauded for that, but the way that they are doing it has some serious moral issues and has caused people to get into some incredibly ugly situations IRL because of their approach to dealing with often legitimate complaints about their seedier clients. One thing that CloudBleed made perfectly clear was that CloudFlare provides CDN services for a lot of sites with "issues" that go far beyond free speech and into borderline or outright criminality. If they're doing the right thing on free speech, it's almost certainly more by accident than design - this is definitely not a company with a working moral compass.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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Well, tough it out, snowflake. Just because you've been triggered is no reason to squelch free speech.
I presume you're addressing Donald Trump here, considering he's again been pushing the idea of suing the press.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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How is it a "doxx" to forward complaints about a site to the site owner after telling people that you will forward complains to the site owner? Just look at the CloudFlare abuse report form -
(emphasis added)
They're not looking up your information, they're forwarding your feedback about the site to the people who actually control the site. It's your fault if you don't even read the damned page and send your contact info to some site telling the people who run it just how much you hate them.
I'll take threats of "suing" over the BlackBloc riots actually stopping free speeches. But yeah, you totally have your priorities spot on.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I thought due process in Cloudflare's home country included the right for someone accused of a crime to confront his accuser (U.S. Const., Amendment VI).
The minute you start differentiating your customers based on philosophy and writings (differentiated from inciting violence), you enable the powers that be to re-define "hate" and "extremism" as "speech we don't like" so that dissenters can be silenced. Freedoms come at costs. The cost of free speech is acknowledging that ALL speech is free so long as it doesn't directly lead to the harming of another person. Keep the Black Lives Matters websites. Keep the Nazi websites. Keep them all. But, you must also sufficiently educate your populace to the logical and ethical issues inherent in hate so that people are LESS LIKELY to HATE. Attacking a website does nothing but further embolden those that hate.
Depends on the nature of the complaint, but under no circumstances should they pass on details of the complainer to the website owner - it's always going to be totally irrelevant to the complaint and, in many documented cases, has put the complainer in the crosshairs of some decidedly unpleasant people who are more than prepared to act on it. TFA contains a few examples of this, but the list is exceedingly long and hate speech groups are only the start of it; many of CloudFlare's customers are absolutely running criminal endeavors, as a quick perusal of their leaked partial customer list will confirm. People have suffered real harm because of CloudFlare's approach to abuse reporting, and it's probably just a matter of time before someone actually gets killed when they dox someone who was unaware of what their policy is. (I'm ignoring the actions of various people who have frequented things like the many $group supremacist sites hosted on CloudFlare and then gone on to commit hate crimes, etc. as that's not really on CloudFlare so much as the hosted sites and their viewers).
For the pure free speech issues, CloudFlare could notify the complainer of their policy and leave it at that, or perhaps notify their customer that a complaint had been received, although I suspect many of the site operators would probably just see that as a positive sign they were having an effect on the target(s) of their "message". For the outright criminal sites, that's going to depend on the situation; one of CloudFlare's services is basically a giant reverse proxy - they don't actually host the site itself - so termination of service wouldn't take the content offline, just take out its front-end domain, but it's better than nothing. Once they have been made aware of possible criminality, verifying that and advising local enforcement is probably a good idea too - kind of hard to keep common carrier style protections in place if you don't - but because they often don't host the content directly their approach is basically "don't get involved", so many "DDoS for hire", dubious pharmancies, and other such services reverse proxy their sites via CloudFlare for precisely that reason.
Formalised best practices for this kind of abuse (web hosting) is sketchy - it's far less developed than the RFCs, BCPs and reporting formats that exist for for email service operation and abuse handling - but many of the same principles still apply, and CloudFlare ignores pretty much all of them. It's basically down to that lack of a moral compass again; as long as their customers keep paying and law enforcement isn't banging on the door, CloudFlare will send on any details of complaints and then look the other way, every single time.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
services. The hydro companies sell power to haters allowing them to use buy Internet services from ISP's to access CloudFare services....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Which is it, Pro Publica?
FTA:
Cloudflare lawyer Doug Kramer told Propublica that the company turned over the names of complainants because it is "base constitutional law that people can face their accusers."
We have reached out to Cloudflare for comment and will update this post when we have one.
A comment from their lawyer counts as a response to an inquiry to Cloudflare. I don't mean to be picking nits, but please be clear, and don't contradict yourself from sentence to the next.
I think the problem is that often Cloudflare does not behave in a responsible manner when complaints arise. At one point my mail server was getting pounded by spam bounce backs and the web sites being advertised were hidden behind Cloudflare. The response I got from Cloudflare was basically sorry, it's not our fault, oh, and we'll do nothing so the spammer can continue to use those sites (selling viagra, pump and dump, etc.).
A responsible company would look at this and kick those sites off of their network. There's a reason criminals love to hide behind Cloudflare (or as others have aptly named it, Crimeflare).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
There's a huge difference here. Cloudflare is directly enabling this and when notified of what is going on through the use of their network by their client they do nothing about it. PG&E is a public utility that provides services to everyone as long as they can pay and are not abusing those services. In this case Cloudflare is NOT a public utility and the clients often using those services specifically for their actions and Cloudflare knows it. I've had to deal with criminals hiding behind Cloudflare and Cloudflare could care less.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
1: Ignore them. They're simply a service provider.
OR if you're too constitutionally frail for that option like an adult should be
2: Rake together a metric shitload of money and buy the company.
Then you can have your way with your company. Which will immediately begin shedding customers because you're not a trustworthy provider any longer.
And, in the end, you can go broke knowing you shut down that EEEEVIL bastion of wrong-think support!
Because hey, you can always live fat on the public teat...unless you're white or heterosexual or a guy (or all of the above).
Freedom of speech is UNIVERSAL.
It does not mean YOU get to say whatever you want and make anyone who disagrees with you shut up.
Even if what they're saying is stupid, and evil and offensive.
You want to beat these people?
BEAT THEM WITH BETTER *IDEAS*!
Until more people realize this, they're no better than the people they hate on.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well, tough it out, snowflake. Just because you've been triggered is no reason to squelch free speech.
I presume you're addressing Donald Trump here, considering he's again been pushing the idea of suing the press.
Suing the press is freedom of speech, ya moron.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
You do understand there's a difference between the right to confront your accuser in court when you've been brought up on charges, and harassing and threatening someone who's complained to your ISP, right?
An accusation of hate speech, which one might define as incitement toward bias-motivated crime, is a fairly strong indicator of intending to have the accused "brought up on charges."
Cloudflare has said it is not in the business of censoring websites and will not deny its services to even the most offensive purveyors of hate.
If this is really what Cloudflare does, then: "thank you Cloudflare". I hate censorship. The Internet is choice based. You are not forced to go to websites, or be friends with people who pass content you don't like on Facebook, etc.
I feel when you muzzle people, the only means left to express themselves is through their fists. I would rather let someone post their message, then beat it into me. You have a choice to ignore and avoid what I do not like online.
I want to know what people think. Even if it is offensive to me. I want to know what it is people dislike about me or my culture. I want to know why people take violent actions. I want to know what is the true mindset of people in the world. I want freedom to decide what is acceptable reading for my own consumption. And I don't want to "think about the children" because that is the responsibility and prerogative of their own parents.