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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...
"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.
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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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.”
Otherwise known as forwarding the complaint. They aren't policing content. Calling this "doxxing" is like complaining that Amazon gave your address to UPS.
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.
Actually, there *is* quite useful way to define extremism that doesn't rely on on subjective value judgments about the admissiability someone's particular ideology.
To the degree that a person tends to perceive the world as polarized into two camps with no overlap or middle ground, that person is an extremist. It doesn't mean he's wrong on any particular issue.
So, socialists who think anyone who isn't a socialist is a fascist are extremist socialists. Likewise capitalists who see any departure from laisez-faire as tantamount to communism are extremist capitalists. Their comrades with similar views about issues but somewhat more flexible views about people are not extremists.
Extremists view the world as populated by the moral equivalent of angels and devils; consequently they have a severe difficulty with compromising or horse-trading, which is tantamount to a deal with the devil. This is why extremist movements are notorious for schism.
This also explains the resurgence of extremism in the age of social media. It's never been easier to surround yourself with like-minded people, no matter how outré your particular mania is.
Now "hate speech" is an entirely different matter. It's poorly named because "hate" is not the defining characteristic. The defining characteristic of hate speech is intimidation. Suppose you burn a cross on a black family's lawn, not because you have anything personal against blacks, but because you know that it's better for your property's value if the neighborhood is entirely white. That's still hate speech, even though you don't feel any hate. On the other hand if you politely inform your black neighbor so you'd prefer it if the two of you stayed out of each other's way because you hate blacks, that's not hate speech.
Hate speech is a crime against liberty: it's an attempt to force people not to live here or put their genitals there, when it's none of your damn business.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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?
This is just a guess, but probably because we're not talking about a court case, where your reference to "justice system" would be relevant.
Have you ever had the police show up at your door because a neighbor complained that your loud party was disturbing them at 2:30 in the morning? No? They don't say, "John Smith, whose phone number is 555-1212, accused you of disturbing the peace." They say something like, "Your party is too loud. Keep it down, or you'll be cited for disturbing the peace."
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 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).
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!
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.