Comment by stevenicr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenicr | Hacker News Reader

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I've been researching these things a bit here and there. Certainly having hosting and domain names and the infrastructure that does not have a history of shutting people down would be a good start.

So yeah godaddy and cloudflare would be out from the start.

ddos sucks - been there deal with that a time or two.

but yeah, if servers could be replicated in many places, and plans for multiple ways to move to a new domain name, or dns, or ip or whatever and such are already laid, and this info is already given to the users so they can move to new X when Y happens..

I really want to deploy a keybase-like blockchain kind of thing that is auto replicated - and if someone has an individual account blocked in country A then friends of that person would know that another account is already active via service/infrastructure B.

I dunno, it seems there are many pieces already out there that could make these things happen - and it's not going to be easy to get it setup at first, and some of the pieces would be blocked in various regions - but give the end users the tools to jump to E F or G... it can be done.

The internet is already going in this bifurcated (trifurcated / qua..) direction anyhow and I see no way to stop it, might as well replicate for it.

Do CloudFlare have a history of shutting things down? From what i recall there were two incidents which were extremely egregious (Daily Stormer and a chan) and CloudFlare only acted after months of outside pressure.

> Do CloudFlare have a history of shutting things down?

They will readily shut down anything that might expose them to legal liability (i.e. CSAM, credit card fraud). Daily Stormer and the various xChan projects are vile, but mostly legal under US law, in contrast.

> They will readily shut down anything that might expose them to legal liability

Well.. yeah, and so will anyone.

Stop normalizing censorship. No, "anyone" will not immediately shut down anything that exposes a legal liability.

> Stop normalizing censorship.

We're talking about pedophiles and fraud here. Stuff that is illegal everywhere in the civilized world.

As for the Daily Stormer and the xChan projects: the stuff hosted there also violates laws, holocaust denial or many forms of antisemitism are a crime in most of the European Union. And the only people calling that "censorship"... well, they tend to be Nazis or have no problem supporting Nazis.

Remember the time when the ACLU fought for the right of American Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois?

The leader of the ACLU at that time was a Jewish guy. He didn't like the American Nazis, but he recognized that the bureaucratic machinery used to prevent them from assembling was almost entirely identical to the bureaucratic machinery used against the civil rights movement in the South.

The ACLU has a broader strategy in mind with the cases it picks and a century-long track record of winning key civil rights victories that benefit everyone. I don't think that could be said of most people or platforms that want to publish all speech without discretion, discernment, or commentary.

And you should know that the world has evolved since then. A Nazi website today had drastically more reach than a Nazi march in a small town decades ago. The fact that the ACLU decided to take a principled stance for specific reasons doesn't negate the dangers of letting Nazis fester.

I don't think that any extreme ideology should be just ignored, but going after websites sounds like a cop-out. It is my opinion that extreme ideologies tend to take hold among people who feel left out, disenfranchised or see no future for them and their families.

The original Nazis were nobodies in the roaring economy of the Weimar Republic. Their support soared when the Great Crisis hit. This is a familiar story; Lenin got to power in Russia after the country was almost destroyed in a senseless war.

Contemporary Germany seems to have the worst neo-Nazi problem in bleak places like Hoyerswerda or Chemnitz, where the local economy doesn't have any good jobs for less qualified youths.

But this is an order of magnitude harder to solve than banning fora online.

This is false. If you look up the grandparent comment, you will see that they very clearly stated "anything" that will cause a legal liability. They did not say "only actually illegal things" that cause a legal liability, they said "anything". Most things which will cause a legal liability are legal (not illegal). So your claim that this discussion would be only referencing illegal things is simply false.

Also, I do not believe that the ACLU are nazis.

Cloudflare booted Switter off with no notice, and no apparent outside pressure.

See: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876040 * https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xk78x/switter-down-cloudfla... * https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla...

It's not just the history - which does indeed show a 180 on dumb pipe / just transferring data to yeah we'll shut down speech if it's bad mkay..

but they also said they are going to get proactive in inspecting data that your site and your visitors send through the pipe and proactively send info about your site and visitors to agencies with letters and guns..

and they are also going to start lobbying gov'ts to make new laws so that they are more easily compelled to give even more data to different govs. (I mean, microsoft kind of did the same thing with the cloud data thing not long ago - so meh on them too)

At least that's how I read the blog post from the head guy in charge a while back.

I warned that this was going to happen a while ago and that cloudflare would either have to bifurcate and create a cloudf-japan, cloudf-uk, cloudf-blahblah - or they would end up being a prime target for court data from all over the world and would be helping to send guns with fingers on triggers to places for all sorts of things eventually.

well here we are years later - where instead of splitting it up - they are consolidating even more of the web instead.

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