Anonymity and Abuse Reports | Hacker News Reader

Anonymity and Abuse Reports

blog.cloudflare.com

33 pointsxxdesmus7 comments

I wonder how we could improve the structure of the Web to ameliorate this sort of problem. It seems like Cloudflare is too central to this structure to be able to satisfy everybody simultaneously.

Cloudflare has always sidestepped their responsibility by claiming not to be a "hosting provider". They claim not to host the content, so they claim not to be able to stop any abuse related to it. If the DNS points to cloudflare, if the content to the rest of the world looks and feels like it comes from Cloudflare, then you're responsible for the content whether you consider yourself a "hosting provider" or not. Providing bullet-proof hosting to scammers, spammers, etc. and then ignoring abuse reports and throwing their hands up in the air because it's not their content has left a pretty terrible impression of Cloudflare to me.

No one is ignoring reports, nor does the blog post say that.

If you have a complete report you can do so at cloudflare.com/abuse

Humans review all submitted reports.

Ignore was perhaps a poor word choice. They do get responded to, but the response results in no action being taken to stop the abuse, which is what I meant by ignore.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Cloudflare's entire business model is "make your content look like it comes from us." Every guide online to complaining about dangerous/illegal content will end with you running rDNS against CF, looking up CF's ASNs, etc. They want to view themselves as a network, but all of the content is coming from them, in every way that matters.

It's strange to see you being downvoted. Cloudflare is, for many intents and purposes, the acting hosting provider. The fact that they locally have a short TTL shouldn't matter in this case.

They are not a neutral party in-between, like your ISP or upstream ISP's. They are being paid by the person hosting the content, their customer, to provide a service in the customers name. This means the comparison to ISPs they make in the blog post just falls flat. In traditional terms, from the outside, they are a hosting provider.

They have daemons running who respond to http(s) requests with someones content and they are being paid for that by that person to do just that.

Point me to an ISP who does that.

I feel like Cloudflare knows this and it's disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise. As much as they would like to be seen as an ISP, there's a fundamental difference and conflating the two very different services muddies the net neutrality debate in a way I don't like.

> many people did not read or understand the disclaimer and were surprised that we forwarded their full abuse report to the host who then, in some cases, could forward it to the site owner.

It's a bad idea to engage in lawfare [1] (in this case, spamming abuse forms to pressure a host/CDN into stopping providing services to a given website) without being familiar with the functioning of the mechanisms one seeks to exploit.

[1] I don't use this term pejoratively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com