You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?
Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:
- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.
- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image
- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action
- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.
I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.
Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue. The real reason why KF was kicked off of Cloudflare is because a lot of people told Cloudflare to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
In a word, yes.
In several words, if the CEO wants to go on about due process, then he should provide it. Establish that there's an "unprecedented threat", either publicly or to Moon in private correspondence.
Also I really dislike that perception of KF required to be so negative that people are severely discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack, especially given the obvious incentives of activists to do this sort of stuff. If KF started producing material indicating that TRAs were plotting to murder Joshua Moon, would anyone take it seriously?
The post directly addressed this matter.
Don't be an apologist for these guys
What they tried at first, which is very "90s internet", is to become a bit of a troll yourself:
"We are deeply committed to the principles of free speech and will never deny a customer service to our critical infrastructure based on the content of their messages. You are banned. Now, go away, lolcow."
Reddit did something similar -- not with the /r/thefappening, but later on with /r/the_donald. Recall when /u/spez randomly edited comments left by contributors there, sending a clear message "we have no rules, and we will break you if we feel like it". The public apology ( https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/ ) conveys the subtext that it will happen again, there are no firm rules, and you are not welcome here.
I dunno quite what the plan is here going forward. weev and null are kind of an amazing force for chaos and if you can get them defensive and off kilter, that's certainly interesting.
Overall though I have found kiwifarms a helpful resource for understanding online harassment. I appreciate that members do their coordination in the open; by reading forum activity you can understanding roughly where the next massacre will happen. The community targets lulz as weakness and many of their most persistent attackers have gotten sucked in and doxxed themselves, notably in the Chris-Chan maelstrom.
The community has successfully killed people and the fact that they have a centralized repository with documentation will be helpful for the next Michelle Carter style prosecution.
Ironically, it's SomethingAwful that is credited* with rousing the press attention required for Reddit to rescind its free speech ideal (making SA chaotically the progenitor of both 4chan and r/ShitRedditSays). There too was suspicion of raiding with questionable activity from those who wanted the ban.
*I'm not sure; take anything about this internet drama with ample salt. Some primary sources are the graph of pages reachable from the references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
About this, however:
> We understand that this might make some of you worried about the slippery slope from banning one specific type of content to banning other types of content. We're concerned about that too, and do not make this policy change lightly or without careful deliberation. We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. (from Reddit's statement, https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/pmj7f/a_necessary_cha...)
yea...
As for generalization, a 2012 writeup on Reddit's situation cites LiveJournal's incident in 2007 and further LambdaMOO's, from 1992: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3585997
What? Citation needed. Has there been a single massacre committed by any of its members?
What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.
Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.
If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.
To run something like Cloudflare you probably have to have the rule that you will not block services for anyone under any circumstances unless ordered to by a court, or they advocate for a blocking campaign against you, or host content that does. In this case they would have let kf of, but block Twitter.
I am not on 8chan. I can never be harassed by anyone in /b/ or whatever the bad that forums are.
If I am aan active part of a community, I should not claim peer pressure and influence or should I not?
Fair enough. But this CEO was blowing clouds in our face that they took this action because our legal system is not up to the task!
It's so sad that Mr. Prince apparently can't afford having a competent legal team to explain to him the concepts of "Rule of Law", "Due Process", "Courts", "Judges", "Juries", "Evidence", and all that other [quaint!] aspects of our (broken!) "traditional legal system".
This is a modern-day equivalent of lynch mobs that has nothing to do with reason, good intentions or due process.
On the other hand, they clearly don't want their company to be used to kill anyone. Even if they are wrong that there is an "emergency", it seems likely they believe that there is one. Isn't a more plausible explanation that they truly believe free speech is important, but that it's not the only deciding factor?
Easy: for-profit organizations do not have conscience, in principle.
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...
Come on. Shouting “fire!” In a crowded room is not free speech and no company in their right mind should support that
Actually, shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater IS explicitly free speech in America, and in fact, the idea that it's not is a layman's mistake (or a wives tale if you prefer) that is corrected in basically freshman legal classes.
In modern legal discussion, the idea of "fire in a theater!" is basically an immediate identifier that you are not educated in this part of the law at all and your opinion is low quality.
Not trying to insult you here, I too have used this very analogy on the internet in the past, just laying out what exactly others see when they see what you wrote.
stop using this dumb analogy. it was invented to justify prosecuting people for speaking out against the draft, and it was later denounced by the very person who coined it.
in this case it's more like: a random person who never went to the theatre before shouted fire in the theatre, the person was summarily booted from the premises and banned by the theatre staff. then later on the police come by and shut down the theatre because they hosted fire-shouters.
You can read a hint of self-awareness between the lines here.
'yes, we have plenty of long-standing accounts who frequently use the hard n-word and ableist slurs just for the sake of it, have hooked crosses and/or hitler in their profile picture and one of our administrators uses an antisemitic one with a stereotypical jew and money, but we are sadly lacking ressources to prevent those users from casually partaking in and moderating our site for years'
User-generated content is a really hard problem, and we need to set reasonable best practices and guidelines. A small volunteer-run forum won't have 24/7 staff looking for illegal content or handling reports. KiwiFarms isn't a very sympathetic test case, but this example will be considered the precedent going forward for what Cloudflare should remove. If major tech companies can't meet this bar, how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage?
By moderating early and often.
KF created an atmosphere where doxxing and harassment were tolerated, accepted, and lauded. The easiest way to survive as a hobbyist is "Don't do that." Set up clear policies that discourage harassment early and enforce them.
Note that if you simply don’t want to moderate content (ie free speech absolutist), that’s a much different argument than you can’t do it effectively. If you want to and can’t do it, then don’t.
Are you suggesting that Cloudflare should drop sites that don't censor the word "retard"? How about "moron" or "stupid"?
There's a huge difference between insults and active shooters and it's strange to see them juxtaposed.
If a site is host to the culture that is normalizing genuine hate (and that does seem to be the case!) I say CF should absolutely drop them.
The livestream (which by the way was shared by the Kiwifarms owner) was spread on Facebook by many users.
Facebook deployed a fingerprinting solution to identify this video being reposted. Not just taking it down once, but taking down all submissions.
Noone expects that from Kiwifarms because they don't need it anyways. No matter what they tell you, they don't have that big of a comment stream. It takes less than 30 seconds to find an account with some Nazist symbolism in username or profile picture and they persist for years. Tell me how that adds up please.
Facebook has billions of users. Kiwi farms, presumably, has several orders of magnitude less.
None of this is illegal. None of this warrants censorship. Twitter is not real. You can block traffic you don‘t like or log out. None of the above actively influences your life until you make the choice to let it.
Could you not also say this of Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and more?
No. Because whilst those companies are slower to respond (due to the volume of content their users generate) they are quite active at removing hateful and harassing content.
Guilty until proven innocent. And naturally we’ll take away your freedom of speech since your guilty, and also generally disregard anything you have to say to defend yourself, we don’t listen to someone guilty of a crime.
Swatting is not organized on KF. It's illegal, any planning of such an attack would be deleted and the users banned, and if necessary their details would be shared US law enforcement. It's not only against the rules, it's against the site culture. You're not meant to go out and do stupid offsite or IRL shit (gayops). People who do (or suggest it) are mocked and shunned. KF is a site for documenting weird people and laughing at them, not proactively harassing them.
Someone swatted a congresswoman; in the call he claimed to be from KF and said his username. But there is no evidence of any planning on the site itself, and anyone who did so would be incredibly stupid given the admin has repeatedly warned that doing so would result in contacting law enforcement with the details of the perpetrator. Given that a great many people want the site gone, it seems likely this was a low-effort frame job.
Like ... swatting is easy. Saying you're someone you're not is easy. Blaming it on someone you don't like is easy. You just have to call 911 and say a bunch of unhinged bullshit. Anyone, anywhere, can do it.
Other claims like "KF bullies people to suicide": there is a point-by-point rebuttal to this at the top of the Keffals thread. I'd link to it, but the site is yet again down ...
EDIT: here it is:
>1. Near / Byuu
>Byuu had a 13 page inactive thread on the forum at the time he e-mailed Null offering him money in exchange for deleting his thread. He told Null if he does not accept this offer he would commit suicide, this is extortion. Null told him he can not accept money in exchange for deleting threads and he will not be extorted. The next day a twitter user claiming to be Byuu's co-worker says that Byuu went through with the suicide. His only proof was that he claimed to have called the Japanese police and they confirmed it to him, something that the police would never do since he is not a relative of Byuu. He also posted a picture of an urn that supposedly had Byuus ashes in them as "evidence" of his death. The US government puts out a report every 6 months that includes all American citizen that have died abroad. Byuu's death was never on this list. No American citizens have died overseas within the time-frame that Byuu's death supposedly happened. The japanese government is meticulous when it comes to bureaucracy so this is unlikely to be an oversight. Byuu being dead is extremely unlikely. Something Kiwifarms users have pointed out is that Byuu has gotten in legal trouble with the Japanese police because his emulators broke their copyright law, something that is a very serious offense in Japan.
>2. Chloe Sagal
>Sagal's thread had been inactive for 8 months before his death. Sagal suffered from BPD and extreme mental health issues. He antagonized his room-mates to the point where they kicked him out and he became homeless. He started a GoFundMe to get help from the trans community to get back on his feet, nobody donated to this GoFundMe due to how unpopular he was in the community. Before Sagal set himself on fire in a public park he held a long speech about mental health and homelessness amongst trans people and how difficult it was for him to get help for his situation and how he was abandoned by his own community. He never mentioned Kiwifarms.
>3. Julie Terryberry
>Julie was a mentally ill young woman in a relationship with a man 10 years older than her that started when she was 17 and he was 27. She came from a broken home and extreme poverty. Her boyfriend was abusive and regularly beat and cut her. Kiwifarms repeatedly tried to get her help to escape the abusive situation she was in. Her boyfriend regularly threaded to leave her and she told him in return she would kill herself if he did. He left her and she killed herself. The only person who has ever blamed Kiwifarms for this death was the abusive boyfriend who has an account on the site and was an active participant in her thread
Assuming this is how it happened – you'll have to excuse me for not trusting MTG on her word considering she has demonstrated to have only a passing familiarity with reality in the past – it strikes me as a ridiculous thing to do by an actual KF member, and certainly isn't the kind of action from someone with the best interest of the site in mind.
I read up on the spat that lead to CF's ban a bit, and Keffals claimed to be responsible for the site's owners mom to lose her job, in spite of not being involved in her son's activities at all. Seems pretty mean-spirited, to say the least, and among other things evidence of a "the goal justify the means"-kind of mentality that I'm not a huge fan of.
No one is looking good here; KiwiFarms doesn't have a good look, but this Keffals person also doesn't come off well. She seems like an unpleasant person and while she is right to complain about KF IMHO, that doesn't mean she's the "the good guy" (or gal) in this story, or that everything she says can be trusted at face value.
My understanding of bullying is that it includes that behaviour.
> not proactively harassing them.
That is blind to the mechanisms of stochastic terrorism. One can encourage certain behaviour, knowing that statistically, someone will go overboard and do what they wish would happen. Then they can disavow it and ban them. Rinse, repeat.
Anyone not only getting their info from keffals + supporters can see that this was a coordinated attack. A anonymous call from someone claiming to be a KW member swatting a politician prone to jumping the gun, a dormant account posting a threat that keffals supporters caught immediately and paraded around twitter, that causes matthew prince to cut off KW soon after.
Not only is this a bad precedent to anyone who hosts content that rejects keffals lifestyle choices but this gives many pro-censorship politicians ammunition to push more moderation of the internet while the progressive types continue to do exactly what they claimed kiwifarms was doing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/03/cloudfl...
This looks more and more like a coordinated campaign. A basic search reveals a huge amount of recent articles that clearly aim to sic people on Cloud Flare[3][4][5][etc].
By amazing coincidence all these articles got published within one week of each other and within one week of Cloudflare dropping the website? Sure.
[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/why-taylor-lorenz-can-dox-whoever...
[2] https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/ny-times-reporter-taylor-loren...
[3] https://thenewstack.io/cloudflares-kiwi-farms-support-may-so...
[4] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-cloudflare-pres...
[5] https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/clo...
EDIT: I can see some people may not like what I'm saying; but I actively help organize real marches in Texas for orgs like NAACP, AAIA, PPC, etc. We have a stable of lawyers (TCRP, SCSJ, ...); and, I can assure you this is how free speech works in reality.
Is there anything metaphysically inherit to the internet as free speech? That's up for debate. Would the early internet had been successful if this type had not been the ones to build it, I'm on the fence.
Their core claim is that the post which got attention (a shooting/bomb threat) was made by a sleeper account that had only ever posted a single time before the controversy started. Null also says the post was removed just after half an hour from its creation, having been reported seven times by other community members.
EDIT - RE: The submission title. I quoted the title exactly as per HN submission rules - but I guess the system changed the capitalisation and removed the punctuation present in the title?
They will just flag this post and rejoice that they got a billon dollar internet company to bend the knee only for them to scream a false victory, despite KF still being up and running on another domain with Tor and DDoS protection with another provider. Nothing has changed.
When it comes to a Twitter mob, there is no “Sorry” or “Please I can explain”, or “It’s not what you think it is” or “But the post was removed”. With the Twitter mob, there is just no redemption.
So on to the next villain of the month.
They know that KF will still exist and will move on from Cloudflare. The point isn't to hurt KF, but to hurt Cloudflare for daring to nominally support free speech. That's why they're botting hashtags, putting pressure on the stock price, and encouraging tech decision-makers to move their startups away from Cloudflare. The point is to say: if you do not pander to us, we will come for you.
It's an effective way to cement power over institutions from the bottom-up, without actually controlling those institutions.
It's a similar kind of social movement to the film censorship movement in early 20th century America, which was largely grassroots and yet ended up controlling the US's entire cultural output for most of a century.
There's actually quite a bit of follow up action chasing up both the new providers and hosters. The deplatforming has been shown to work before. Just adding the speedbump of requiring the tor access will kill a lot of interest in continuing the abuse.
Even if you look at the hashtags and the website, you'll see cf wasn't the only target. It's a pretty well planned action, but it's very clearly against kf and not stopping.
Exactly. Proving that this isn't really a problem at all.
Cloudflare has exercised their right to drop this user. And KiwiFarms has moved to someone else.
Obviously it’s completely unverifiable, but in the timeframes we are talking, if 30 minutes is too long to remove bad content, it’s super easy for any bad actor to take down any forum on the internet.
The precedents set here are terrible.
No it isn't. There's a bigger context to the decision. If you find a Justin Bieber fan club forum and post incitement to violence, I guarantee that nobody will want to take down the site, because everyone understands that the forum itself had nothing to do with the post.
> However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
Seriously? I helped moderate a small community at one point and we would see stuff like this on a weekly basis. Or just look at a YouTube or Facebook comment section on a controversial topic. This looks like an excuse to cave to the Twitter mob.
Much like the old site Portal of Evil, another best-of-the-worst aggregator from the early internet, making on-site trolling/harassment plans is a great way to get your account banned very quickly ... or becoming a thread topic yourself.
a random person on the Internet said. Meanwhile, another random person on the Internet[1] said KF has a ToS that bans anything illegal from the site.
I was unable to independently verify either side of the report.
On the other hand, about bloody time they got rid of the site, and if they need to post a public excuse to feel justified in it, sure, whatever.
If you get 5000 from a twitter mob, from people living all around the world, you can still report, but there's pretty much zero chance that anything will happen to any of those 5000 people, because the threats are considered as "not real" and nobody wants to deal with 5000 cases (paperwork, warrants, judical process after, etc.)
We cannot simply accept "free speech" as a value without question: it has to serve an underlying purpose as a tool with which our values are enacted. The purpose of free speech is to serve the best interests of society against bad actors, i.e. governments, who would use censorship to centralize power. Defending hate speech and organized violence contradicts the underlying purpose of free speech as a value in the first place.
Free speech absolutists fail to see through the tool to the values beneath, to the detriment of society.
Oh, did the Twitter Jury return with a verdict already? I didn’t see Judge Musk tweet that the case had completed.
Imagine if private companies started acting like this. You’d suddenly find your power shut off because they read one of your tweets and decided that you’d committed a hate crime for complaining about the rising energy prices…
There is nothing even remotely related to criminal charges or the legal system involved in this case. The CEO of one company decided to censor a forum because he felt like it, without any due process, without even notifying the site.
Your generalization is false -- utilities such as electricity are regulated by the government and provide a life-critical service. No one has suggested that we should shut off the heat for alleged bigots in the middle of winter.
To me, it seems by far fairer to make those decisions, as a society, via the court system and the laws, rather than by leaving them up to private companies.
Naturally, they will vigorously reject claims that it's a hate site: it's in their interests to portray themselves as such, and hate groups are not known for placing a high value on the truth. It's obvious to everyone else that they are, in fact, a hate site, and that their purpose is to organize harassment and violence. We do not need a court's opinion to make this judgement, though I would welcome such an opinion nevertheless -- these people should be held accountable in a court of law.
As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values. In terms of values, I expect them (1) to have values compatible with peaceful society, and (2) to act in accordance with those values. Should they fail to do so, it reflects poorly on the people responsible for making those decisions.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-...
Free speech purists think that bullying people into suicide is categorically different to direct incitement to violence, despite that both of these cause the same outcome. This false dichotomy allows them to cling to their ideology.
The same is not true for anything internet. When I was growing up as a teen the internet was just about to grow into the first e-commerce bubble around y2k. Not linking your real identity to online accounts was common sense and thought to people everywhere.
People seem to have forgotten this. The internet is not a real place. You enable yourself to be cyberbullied by sharing your identity. It can be entirely avoided, easily.
Are you sure that you actually want a world where mens rea plays no role in criminal determination? You're not just making a free speech critique here.
The contact information for DDoS-Guard show it's based in Edinburg, Scotland.
I think they will have to look for another DDoS protection provider very soon.
Anyways that Scottish entity will soon have some bad things happening to it. The UK authorities will come down hard on anyone who supports the shitty "Bully LGBT people into suicide" forum.
The number of folks that confuse government censorship with people deciding that their private company shouldn't support abhorrent content is astonishing, especially for a forum with this level of sophistication.
De-facto, the identity politics activists are provided free tools to reach the attention of the public, any any opposing movements that get popular enough get quickly shut down by equating the entire movement or platform with the worst action of their worst members.
There is a valid opinion that this is a coordinated policy aimed at turning the middle class vs. corporations conflict into a race/sexuality conflict that keeps the corporate interests unaffected [0].
Carol isn't the only messenger in town, and Carol is not obligated to participate in communication they do not agree with. It's a weird position to insist otherwise.
With the bottom right graph removed, this would be believable as something other than an antisemitic /pol/ meme.
However these websites are also blatantly anti-semitic and there is a lot of Holocaust denial going on. Russia has laws against both anti-Jewish hate speech and Holocaust denial.
It will be interesting to witness what happens when the Western far-right collides with their Russian buddy's laws against anti-semitism and Holocaust denial.
The site literally displays taglines like “obviously Hitler had a problem with Jewish people.”
I still support an archive link for availability reasons; I just wouldn't worry about being attacked or something just because you visited the site.
What would be the attack vector?
They now have my IP and the fact I came from https://news.ycombinator.com/
Even if I'm logged in on Kiwifarms so they know who I am they have no idea if I have a login on HN or even what thread I was reading.
This rubs me the wrong way because it doesn’t feel like any sort of justice. It feels like you paid the security guard to step aside so you could read the address on the door, call your friends and mob the store. You didn’t call the cops to shutdown the store. You just cleared a path for more vigilante action.
It’s for this reason I see this as a failing of the legal system. If a website is so abhorrent as to be illegal, then you should be able to open an investigation, and investigators should be able to get warrants to seize the site hosting structure and take it down. If that doesn’t happen, why should it fall to vigilantes to harass and dox the site owners? That’s not justice, and Cloudflare is certainly not facilitating it by abdicating their position. In fact it’s the classic definition of cowardice.
They have been investigated a lot over the years, the operator works with law-enforcement to provide the information they request, and the moderators are pretty quick at removing any illegal content. One can argue that the police concluding that there's nothing illegal going on is because of their incompetence, but it's more likely that the US holds the 1A sacred and has no legal reason to take it down.
Regardless of the law, Kiwi Farms is a place where a significant portion of the content, even when not veering into illegality, is based on harassment. There’s a history. Given the history and recent threats on people’s physical well being, Cloudflare decided they had enough. The same concept of freedom of speech that allows Kiwi Farms to exist is also what allows Cloudflare to decide to not do business with them.
Is that incorrect? Or are you just saying the operator responds only to warrants and subpoenas? I wouldn't call that "working with" law enforcement, I would call that staying within the bounds of the law in that particular matter.
(2) : https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566303971911909376
(3) : https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/599a356e-2bc1-11ed-a4d5-a...
Keffals did something extremely brave in using herself as a live-fire target. She knew she was being doxxed, so she went to Northern Ireland and mentioned looking for a particular kind of restaurant. This inevitably resulted in bomb threats and fake calls to the police.
Bomb threats are taken seriously in Northern Ireland. It seems that this time the threat was given enough credibility for Cloudflare to take it seriously and cut them off.
(As a Brit, there's a deep irony in the idea of someone fleeing to Northern Ireland for their personal safety!)
Northern Ireland is probably one of the safest places in the entire UK to be if there's a threat to your life.
It's also, incidentally, the only place in the UK or Ireland where concealed carry permits are available.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/website-terms/
Hackernews can do the same to your account on their site.
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal#tou
It is what you agree to when you use someone's service.
Pretty much every online service has this clause buried away in their ToS.
Twitter deplatformed an ex-POTUS and he went and built his own platform.
CloudFlare is well within their rights to do so. It might not be "right" to you, but it is their right to do so and they pulled the trigger on KF.
Yeah sure -- you're right, but you're avoiding the real topic.
That CF is trigger happy?
That KF has put forth their argument and CF is being dishonest?
That free speech is being curtailed?
I also, from my perspective, see a lot of "noise" in this discussion. Just as you see noise in my previous comment and that's okay.
Whether you are Team CF, Team KF or a neutral the fact is CF has pulled the trigger for their own reasons and that's that.
We use a world wide network that started with high hopes for openess and freedom, it got monetized, coalesced into a number of large players who proprierized their forks of FOSS standards (IRC == Discord, XMPP == WhatsApp, etc) and we all know governments around the world has allowed this to happen.
Demonstrably untrue. There are literally dozens of posts here in this very ycombinator discussion explaining loudly and often that none of the kiwifarms content was illegal, never mind discussions in other places.
"Kiwifarms was taken down by the Twitter mob"
or
"Kiwifarms was just freedom of speech"
Those people either have clearly never visited the site, or are operating in bad faith. I would visit Kiwifarms occasionally to catch up on obscure drama, get updates on Chris Chan, or just look at the deranged posts from users on the site.
Kiwifarms had always been instrumental in coordinating attacks on people, not just "mean words" but swatting, doxxing, getting people fired, mass well-poisonings (aka "cancel culture"). It was not only a cesspool, but a source of what would probably be called "active measures" in the 20th century.
As for Joshua Moon, he has never been the voice of reason beyond damage control for the site. When eyes are on the site you best believe he's trying his best to control optics. But even then, he's such a deranged psycho that his letter to the press on why Keffal's was "targeting him" used the "Jewish parentheses" and multiple slurs. Taking his arguments in good faith isn't playing centrist, it's extending an olive branch to a holocaust-denying antisemite, whose hobby is running a site that bullies trans people into suicide.
I'm sure it's because Hacker News has a contrarian streak, but people are so willing to buy into this idea that free speech is being persecuted online that they are willing to defend KiwiFarms. If you haven't visited the site before, I implore you to listen to the people who have for years. What KF engaged in was not protected speech.
As you sit here trying to convince people that no, really, that's not free speech. Pragmatists ruin everything, and I've been around long enough to understand "boiling the frog", "not one inch", and that love of liberty creates at times very strange bedfellows.
If you want to make progress dealing with horrible people, stop trying to turn me/everyone else against them, and deal with them. Like an adult. Either avoid, or work with authorities, within the rails of due process, to resolve the issue. If there is no unsavoryness to the non-KF side, there should be no reluctance with regards to letting the authorities deal with it. If there is, then that suggests someone is seeking to leverage the justice system who wants to avoid the inevitable consequences of doing so when one doesn't have clean hands, which I see no reason to offer myself as a conduit to deliver. Investigation and truth cuts both ways.
I will not tell you that taking the easy way out is okay. I will not let you convince me through equivocation to give up a value I cherish deeply, that everyone is entitled to be heard, and to be free to pursue the ends of what they believe in short of actually engaging in violence. In time, it may be my own undoing, but I accept that. Too much has been sacrificed on the altar of the hypothetical in my life Clean hands and evidence, or it's just more "tit-for-tat" playing out at large.
That's exactly what these people did by getting Cloudflare to take action. Kiwifarms still has the "liberty" to host their hate site elsewhere, which just so happens to be the freedom-loving nation of Russia.
A corporation choosing to cease to do business with another corporation is avoidance. So CloudFlare is following your prescription here.
He (Moon) doesn't actually know that though, it's very easy to disprove an argument when you set that argument up yourself - I took Matthew's statement to be a more general observation on the state of dozens, if not hundreds of problematic posts on the forum that were overwhelming Cloudflare, but that's just me
Cloudflare may be able to handle a botnet that can generate 250GBps of traffic, but a few hundred problematic forum posts coupled with some Twitter outrage totally jams them up. (Purposely leaving aside the qualitative details here.)
This shows that Cloudflare is completely defenseless against a certain variety of meatspace attacks.
Furthermore the KYM page is convenient for other uninformed readers, but it is obviously incomplete and not a primary source of information for me because I watched this entire episode unfold in real time.
This situation is highly nuanced. However, the KYM page gives fair treatment to the issue.
Cloudflare may be hypocritical, but it's good they pulled the plug.
I get why this site is so infamous.
> but they at least have teams of salaried people dedicated to dealing with it.
As pointed out in the post, their volunteer moderators didn't notice the offending post for 14 minutes.
Facebooks paid moderators and advanced AI let a terrorist stream for 29 minutes before noticing.
Some perspective: I run Facebook Pages and Groups with many times more users than that. Whole Facebook Pages and Groups consisting of many more users have been terminated over far less from a single user.
Stay hydrated and keep cool. I've made silly statements before on HN when I'm dehydrated or flustered, and I'm not one to chastise or mock over it, but really, look after yourself if you aren't already, mate.
Given that a friend of mine had to jump thru many hoops to report to CF a website that was very clearly and obviously abusive with hard evidence for it. It was a blackmail type website that was preying on women in the cam industry.
> This seems to be based off one of two things (lists two cases)
But it's just guesswork, we don't know if and what cf saw and what was reported to any law enforcement.
Random possible alternative: Cloudflare got a considerable increase in their "kf complaints" pile and because of the outside pressure legal actually looked at them for the first time and said "we can't take this risk". There's just so many ways this could've played out, null's "it wasn't even us, promise" is just meaningless.
Neither kf nor cf is great at being truthful and open at the moment. We can wait for the arrests or court documents if any will happen.
"On August 31st, Matthew Prince released a strong statement defending his role as a service provider and not a regulatory body. 3 days later, something scared him. I don't know what it was, but it achieved the desired result. In his explanation post, which reads as rushed and irrational, he tries to mitigate the whiplash between the two opposing statements by saying we are the worst site he has ever seen - because one post (which was already deleted by the time he pulled the plug) made a violent threat.
The precedent has been set. At Cloudflare, with enough pressure, a single post by a strange account can be made to threaten a 9-year-old community and the tens of thousands of people who have used it every day for years. There has never been a violent incident in our history, which cannot be said for many other sites still on Cloudflare. This narrative feels like a lie spun up to save face."
Meanwhile, no one will ever see this comment because I'm shadowbanned.
You sure?
Read a book about iptables. And be done with 3rd parties between you and your visitors.
IPTables won't cut it when the traffic is big enough to saturate the network:
https://www.linode.com/blog/cloud-computing/christmas-ddos-r...
(I do agree about 3rd parties though, which is what makes this problem hard.)
This is the world you wanted. This is the reaping you have sowed. Enjoy it!
What is even happening here? Why doesn't anyone else see it?
People died. People have been driven to death. The people of this place know what they did. They know not to keep things centralized. To do harassment in a multi pronged off site method. That isn't evidence of innocence when you can't find posts on there anymore.
