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

Posted by msmash on from the roadblocks dept.

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."

12 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cloudflare can't keep it's story straight by halivar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This isn't about getting into the censorship business. It's about obeying a court order. They do not have the option of demurring.

  2. Not setting a precedent? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    1. Re:Not setting a precedent? by Mal-2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
    2. Re:Not setting a precedent? by lordlod · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      Somebody got out of the wrong side of bed this morning and is walking around in delusion land.

      Of course Cloudfare, like every other substantial company complies with court orders, always has.

      Last year Cloudfare received 153 court orders world wide and complied with the vast majority of them. We know this because they documented it in their biannual transparency report https://www.cloudflare.com/tra...

      What ever your view on the actions around The Daily Stormer it is a completely independent issue to Cloudfare complying with lawfully issued court orders.

    3. Re:Not setting a precedent? by CanHasDIY · · Score: 2

      How exactly is Cloudflare supposed to respond to a court order other than by obeying it?

      Well, if they had a moral objection to it, they could have shuttered their doors a la Lavabit, effectively giving the court a big middle finger.

      That is to say, a moral objection that superseded the board and shareholder's love of money. Apparently, tis not the case.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    4. Re:Not setting a precedent? by BlueStrat · · Score: 2

      Which would still block those sites, as well as half the rest of the internet.

      You say that like it's a bad thing, or that it would last forever. It would certainly put a lot of pressure on the court and judge issuing such an order. Freedom is not free, there are costs and sacrifices that must be made to both win and keep freedom, far beyond the mere monetary in nature..

      Strat

      --
      Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
    5. Re:Not setting a precedent? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Lavabit shutting down denied the government any further access to user's emails and stopped them having to run a known insecure service. Shutting down Cloudflare would do nothing to negatively effect the court of ACS and nothing to prevent Cloudflare having to violate user's privacy.

      The two situations are really quite different.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Wikipedia as DNS by eis2718bob · · Score: 4, Funny

    So now Wikipedia is my backup DNS. (IP addresses at the bottom of the info box).

    1. Re:Wikipedia as DNS by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 3, Funny

      So now Wikipedia is my backup DNS. (IP addresses at the bottom of the info box).

      Be careful! You'll attract the HOSTS file guy.

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
  4. Re:Dangers of storing your stuff in the Cloud .. by Mal-2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
  5. Barbara Streisand (at least for me) by SmilingBoy · · Score: 2

    Well, I for one did not know Sci-Hub. I don't read a lot of paywalled scientific articles (when I do, the costs can be expensed to a client usually) but knowing that this is available could be tempting in the future occasionally... Not because of the money of course, but the convenience of access...

  6. Re:THIS is what Class War looks like by losfromla · · Score: 3, Informative

    Community college used to be cheap. It is still cheap if you have a nice engineering job but not if you have a McJob and are working for minimum wage. Here is California (yeah, The People's Republic of Kalifornia) community college costs $52/unit. Per unit! That means that a full load of classes will run you $600 per semester! Books, parking, bus passes, etc will cost about that again. So now it is $1,000 per semester. That is not cheap. It is fucking insane.
    Apply for scholarships while holding down a job or two and carrying a full load (or more) of classes is a luxury that some don't have time for. Because people want to sleep and eat and even rest at times. Not all humans are diabolical machines like Archangel Michael.

    --
    Only I can judge you.