Comment by cobbzilla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cobbzilla | Hacker News Reader

"Do you really want that? What if you can't take down the website? Daily Stormer is really interesting; we shut off service for it, but you can go to Google and read it."

I don't even know what type of content is on Daily Stormer but I presume it is controversial. I find this quote just a tad disingenuous. I understand Cloudflare is well within its rights to decide there are certain companies they won't work with, but to say this causes no harm whatsoever isn't entirely true.

There are very few CDNs that can withstand a DDOS attack, and certainly very rare for a small publishing company to have that capability in-house. If the content you want is under a DDOS attack and unavailable because no CDN will carry it, then yeah, that would kind of suck.

One can always publish to various P2P platforms that are highly DDOS-resistant, but now the audience has some more work to get to it; it's a barrier. Not an impassable one, but a barrier nonetheless.

For the record, I like Cloudflare, but I also really love free speech. The quote struck me as overly minimizing.

It's a neo-nazi/white nationalist forum. It's still active I believe behind Tor, but not nearly as accessible, far fewer people actually participating. We're in an era where young men radicalize each other on message boards like these until one of the truly unhinged members heads to a synagogue to murder people worshiping. As we've seen so many times in the past year, they'll often post before they do it, leaving behind a manifesto and a crowd egging them on to get a "high score."

I wish this was actually an outlier and not very common, but unfortunately if you monitor these forums you'll see men working up the courage to commit a mass murder of their own every single day.

In my opinion we should try to put as many barriers we can in front of these types of communities, and it sucks that cloudflare is still working with some of them.

yeah that is pretty controversial stuff! I guess for me this falls into that fringe category of stuff that really should best be only found by those truly seeking it, so I’m morally OK with barriers without total censorship. But I’d also like to think more about how to help those people who get sucked into such things. The more private it becomes, maybe the harder it is to see & help?

All that said I still stand by my original comment, there is a chilling effect on free speech, not to be so glibly dismissed.

It's literally Nazis.

It's literally not literally Nazis.

Daily Stormer isn't a Neo-nazi site you say? Ok then.

I didn't mean that and for the record I abhor the views espoused on that website, which I have only viewed a few times.

Oh, no. I'm not having that. The Daily Stormer is absolutely, actual, non-metaphorical Nazis.

Here's the first paragraph of the wikipedia entry:

The Daily Stormer is an American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for the genocide of Jews.[2][3][4][5] It considers itself a part of the alt-right movement.[6] Its editor, Andrew Anglin, founded it on July 4, 2013, as a faster-paced replacement for his previous website Total Fascism. The website also publishes its content in Spain and Latin America, Italy and Greece.

In conclusion: Nazis.

> I find this quote just a tad disingenuous.

Everything about Cloudflare is disingenuous! Remember the bullshit they pulled with Tor and then tried to blame it on Tor being a DDOS vector (defying all logic).

I have more than once got into a debate about how many bags of dicks that Cloudflare sucks, only to find out near the end that the person was a Cloudflare employee and just kept that point to themselves the whole time.

I really wish some company would overtake them in that sector and send them packing, just on principle.

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