A reminder that Cloudflare is a private company. They can choose who to do business with. They are fully entitled to kick any entity off their service for any reason or no reason at all.
Criticism is detrimental to the originator if it is not valid. My reminder was pointing out the invalidity of the "criticism". It is not a criticism to point out totally normal behaviour of a company. It is like saying "American Airlines kicked out two people not following the crew's instructions from their flight, even though they had paid for tickets!".
It's their company, their plane, their website, their platform. Obey the rules or GTFO.
Let me get this right: private companies/citizens can drop business from anybody with zero notice and any amount of harm because "they're private", but private companies/citizens can't express criticism because harm? Do I get that right, is that your reasoning?
Private entities you like can do anything and private entities you don't like can't do anything to the ones you like, because?
How many articles, podcasts, tweets, and comment replies did it take to finally put a dent into the endless repetition of the myths about Section 230? Cloudfare is continuing to use the very same faulty logic: that, somehow, preventing the most egregious misuse of their service would create some sort of requirement to do so perfectly, in every case, or to assume liability for everything crossing their servers.
There is no such mechanism in either law, logic, or morality.
Morally, rescuing a drowning child does not create a requirement for you to rescue every person in danger of drowning, everywhere. Because that would obviously disincentivize anyone from ever helping, and it would also just be impossible to do.
Legally, there just is no law or principle of that kind. The laws that exists, for specific domains, do the opposite: Good Samaritan Laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law) protecting individuals rendering help, as in the drowning-child example, from any liability, including for failing in that very rescue effort, for whatever reason.
More similar to the Cloudflare case, Section 230 does exactly the same, but for publishers on the web.
As to logic: if you once jumped into the water and got that child out, just in time, people may indeed expect you to do it again, under similar or easier circumstances, because they remember that you are a good swimmer.
But in the Cloudflare case, acting in the obvious case does not change anything, because there is absolutely no doubt that they have the ability to shut down any customer they do not want on their service. Doing so therefore does not give any (valid) extra ammunition to further requests to act.
No. Kiwifarms requires cloudflare DDoS protection to stay operational. Denying them that service would pose a serious issue to its continued existence, possibly leading to it going off the internet.
Have we really reached a point where DDoS mitigations are useless unless they're done by cloudflare and nobody else has a chance of keeping a site from being forced offline by these attacks?
I'd like to think that cloudflare isn't the final word on who is able to maintain a web-presence, or at the very least that they have competitors capable of offering a sufficient (if unequal) level of protection, but I honestly don't know.
There are other companies providing this service. It's not the ddos protection they're after though, but rather the identity / origin protection. Everyone else has been dropping them pretty quickly - only cloudflare is ok with using their lawyers to actively protect the attempted murders.
Cloudflare is not used to prevent ddos in this case, but to hide the identity and the actual hosting service of kf, so that they can't be pressured/sued. And apparently for legal defence since cloudflare was happy to proactively protect them in court.
He posted to the forum decrying his users for immolating anyone they could possibly get their hands on. Talked about how they've been booted from hundreds of hosting providers over the years and how he's spent thousands of dollars keeping that hateful raft of shit afloat
And then concludes by saying "we are in the right"
The person who lead the charge to cause Byuu/Near, a person who spent over 20 years of their life on a Super Nintendo emulator to end their own life proudly proclaims they're "in the right"
It is pure revisionist history to pretend otherwise.
Edit: I just realized that the actual assertion here is apparently not just that Kiwi Farms didn't cause Near's death, but also that Near didn't actually die and is still alive today? Which is such a ludicrous claim to make that it's probably not worth dignifying it with a response.
Like, be clear here. Have the guts to say the wild thing you're implying out loud. Is your assertion that Near did not write that suicide message and that they are not dead?
> Since no one impartial actually knows anything for sure about the real person behind the account, no one can do any sort of investigation that's anywhere close to ethical.
Quick reminder that Kiwi Farms has entire threads dedicated to digging up hearsay and dirt on trans/autistic targets, and for people to now say, "well, have we really rigorously proven that this person is dead, and has that proof come from a fully impartial 3rd party source instead of just from friends and family members?" -- is an extremely selective call for rigor. Since when has Kiwi Farms ever cared about the neutrality of primary vs secondary sources of information?
I don't buy that Kiwi Farms is just stepping back and saying, "we don't want to jump to conclusions", because if they were really against jumping to conclusions, I'm not sure that their site would even exist in the first place.
It's not my intention to play whataboutism on this, but:
A) if you're really concerned about rigor during callouts, that alone is already reason enough for you to dislike Kiwi Farms.
B) pushing someone to the point where they would fake their own suicide and basically abandon their online identity is also a really messed up thing to do, and I'm not sure that it changes anything about the situation or makes Kiwi Farms any less culpable or awful. "We only bullied someone into virtual suicide" doesn't make the site look any more sympathetic at all.
C) A lot of people close to Near have confirmed their death, and it really quickly gets into conspiracy theory territory to claim that Near had the resources or community organization necessary to pull off a ruse like that. Really, the only reason why doubt is being thrown on this in the first place is because the outcome is inconvenient to Kiwi Farms, this is not a level of rigor that is typically demanded in other situations.
D) Incidentally, if we're going off of Wikipedia's editorial standards for recently deceased people and asking how they should be applied in this situation, Wikipedia states Near's death as a fact, so apparently the evidence is good enough for them.
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I can't tell people how they should or shouldn't defend Kiwi Farms, but my gut instinct is that to a casual observer, pulling an Alex Jones defense and claiming that the multiple suicides that have been blamed on Kiwi Farms are all community-pushed "false flag" events, is probably not going to endear people to the site. If anything, it just makes the site's community seem even more disconnected from reality.
They hide behind proxies, VPN, Tor. They obviously don't care about the harm they do to their victims, and the judicial system is mostly powerless to find, even less prosecutes these trolls online.
This is simply a reaction to an extreme that obviously doesn't care about the law, combined with a judicial system that is way behind the times technologically.
Well, there are anti-terrorist task forces in various countries. FBI alone has stopped many threats and continue to do that quite effectively. Federal law enforcement can lawfully work with corporations.
> This is simply a reaction to an extreme that obviously doesn't care about the law, combined with a judicial system that is way behind the times technologically.
Seems naive and glib, there should be a higher bar for throwing the baby + bathwater, the entire justice system, that has served for over 245 years just fine.
And still, trolls are abusing law enforcement response against their own citizens by swatting them. Call me cynical, but the system is broken, and there's gotta be some pushback one way or the other.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876040 https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla...