Cloudflare Terminates Service To Sci-Hub Domain Names (torrentfreak.com)

While Sci-Hub is praised by thousands of researchers and academics around the world, copyright holders are doing everything in their power to wipe the site from the web. From a report: Last weekend another problem appeared for Sci-Hub. This time American Chemical Society (ACS) went after CDN provider Cloudflare, which informed the site that a court order requires the company to disconnect several domain names. "Cloudflare has received the attached court order, Case 1:17-cv-OO726-LMB-JFA," the company writes. "Cloudflare will terminate your service for the following domains sci-hub.la, sci-hub.tv, and sci-hub.tw by disabling our authoritative DNS in 24 hours." According to Sci-Hub's operator, losing access to Cloudflare is not "critical," but it may "cause a short pause in website operation."

Comments

Not setting a precedent?

[Hal_Porter]

Back when Cloufare nuked The Daily Stormer the CEO said it was important it didn't set a precedent

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

And in an internal company e-mail obtained by Gizmodo, Prince acknowledged that the decision was exactly as arbitrary as it seemed.

"My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I'd had enough," Prince wrote. "Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision."

Prince wrote that he "woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. It was a decision I could make because I'm the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company."

In the same e-mail, Prince argued that it is "dangerous" for that kind of power to be concentrated in any one person's hands.

"It's important that what we did today not set a precedent," Prince added. "The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral."

In a company blog post that appeared later on Wednesday, Prince argued that the Internet needed a better system for determining which content should be taken down-one that gives publishers a right to due process and doesn't put power over those decisions in the hands of a few CEOs like Prince.

But, of course, the decision is likely to set a precedent even if Prince hopes it's a one-time occurrence. Cloudflare has helped to establish an industry-wide norm that some content is too offensive to be hosted by any mainstream technology company. In the future, the public will suspect that if an infrastructure provides service to a site, it's because they don't actually find it objectionable. This may not be a genie Cloudflare can stuff back into the bottle.

And now Cloudfare have let the genie out of the bottle it seems like any site can be nuked, either because the CEO wakes up deciding to do it or due to a court order.

So much for the Internet 'interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it'.

Andrew Anglin is an asshole but he's also a kind of canary in the coalmine because assholes are the first ones to see their sites disappear when censorship starts. Unfortunately they're unlikely to be the last.

Re:Not setting a precedent?

[Mal-2]

How exactly is Cloudflare supposed to respond to a court order other than by obeying it? Precedent is irrelevant, this is PMITA prison time we're talking about if they don't comply. Expecting them to do otherwise would be exceptionally foolish.

Re:Dangers of storing your stuff in the Cloud ..

[Mal-2]

And if you don't store it on someone else's hardware, then instead you're vulnerable to having your facilities seized, or your upstream provider pressured into cutting you off. The only hope is to do both, which apparently SciHub was.