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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

Apparently a copyright holding company (“LSG - Wahrnehmung von Leistungsschutzrechten GesmbH”) managed to convince a court to block IP addresses. Something which in this form wasn’t done before.

However since those are Cloudflare addresses there is a ton of collateral damage.

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Does the order force blocking of the IP bound to a DNS address? Could piracy sites change DNS A records to arbitrary IP addresses to deny service to other sites?

Unclear. I was unable to find the court order so I’m not sure where it’s coming from.

Seems that they just wanted to block some piracy sites like newalbumreleases.net if you compare the dates and check the IPs behind those domains. Wonder however if this actually enforced because I think there is no IP block and no reports from Austria about collateral damage (or am I wrong and Austria cannot complain because they are cut of from the internet)

Edit: btw, the domains added with date August 29 are already blocked in Germany and some other EU countries for a while: https://onlinefilter.info/cuii-dns-sperre/newalbumreleasesne... .

The strange thing is that this order is still not published (and has a date of tomorrow): https://www.rtr.at/TKP/aktuelles/entscheidungen/Uebersichtse...

> I think there is no IP block and no reports from Austria about collateral damage

There is definitely a good amount of collateral damage, not all ISPs rolled out the block already, but some did.

I myself noticed a lot of sites stopped working or fail to load scripts/external resources. On reddit r/austria there are also multiple complaints.

Most normal users probably just suspect their router/pc acting up. It took me a day too to get to the gist of this issue with sites not loading without tor.

Wow. Interesting. It seems that they finally became aware of the issue and corrected the block list linked in the OP.

Only media backlash and a shitstorm actually was able to correct this and it is unclear if all providers fixed this. Everyone is now blaming high court decision, local government and the EU. Wonder if anything will change.

Here is the verified story :https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000138619757/ueberzogene-n...

I'd be somewhat surprised if a court ordered something vague like "block whatever IP that resolves to at any time in the future", they'll either say "block these IPs" or "stop resolving this domain", anything else would require constant monitoring and continuous involvement of the target of the order.

But wait, isn't Cloudflare exactly offering that as a service?

If the court orders to "block whatever IP this domain resolves into" then you can have much fun by pointing domain to government and bank websites.

Some people played this kind of game with Internet censorship in Russia.

In the past the court hasn't specified how to block sites so they're usually blocked at dns level, just point the DNS record at one of the isp's ip addresses with a block message

If they really are having to block actual ips I would be surprised

auf Wiedersehen Österreich

Which is exactly what Cloudflare wants and has planned all along.

It's pretty much how any CDN would work?

So what that Cloudflare hides behind the fact that it serves a large chunk of the internet?

It's a strategic fact that they use to their advantage, not their ultimate evil goal to make your life worse eventually.

I think we're quite spoiled with how much we benefit from their economy of scale.

It's not hiding behind that fact. It just is a fact.

I'm directly replying to:

  Which is exactly what Cloudflare wants and has planned all along.

The idea that it's all planned and was a strategic bid to get into a stable business position and so on...

They've planned all along to mix bad hosting with good hosting to make any attempts to block them, legal or personal, cause plenty of collateral damage.

So to avoid this, how should they have done things differently?

Maybe they should have confined "bad" hosting to some IPs and disseminated this to countries directly?

P.S.: I'm not serious, of course.

RFC 3514 would be helpful here.

Ah, yes. That’s a much more elegant way.

This is literally the business model. The owner of an IP address is responsible for the content delivered from that IP address. Cloudflare would like to have it both ways -- they get to multiplex sites behind their network infrastructure and accept money for the service, but not be responsible for the content that they deliver, because it originally came from somewhere else.

> The owner of an IP address is responsible for the content delivered from that IP address

Nope, you are totally wrong; they are immune by US law.

AFAIK, CloudFlare removed only a handful of sites, but protected 100s - 1000s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

In case the use of "literally" wasn't enough of a clue, this is incorrect. For the same reason that the DNS service, the ISP, or the internet itself are not responsible for the content.

Safe harbor provisions are for this exact scenario, we must depend on that not corp scale to maintain reasonable governing. Safe harbor has come under attack lately, unfairly so IMO.

The safe harbor has to do with moderation policy.

The historical purpose of safe harbor was to allow AOL to have a walled garden without become responsible for all the illegal content that snuck past.

IANAL, but DMCA safe harbor doesn’t really apply to a companies like CloudFlare, nor is it needed, because they are not moderating UGC on a publishing platform, they are a routing optimization utility.

Not sure where you saw that the DMCA safe harbor provisions apply to moderation policy; It has everything to do with Copyright and removal of copyrighted material; nothing to do with moderation of UGC. It is directly in the name "Digital Millenium Copyright Act".

Content moderation is covered by the CDA section 230; completely separate from the DMCA

And it 100% should apply to Cloudflare as well; if they're caching copyrighted material they need to respond to takedown requests or lose that safe harbor protection. Just as it applies to Google for indexing alleged copyright material; if you've ever seen that "links removed due to DMCA takedown notices" in search results, even when they are not hosting said content.

IANAL also, and I don't know how much DMCA stuff is handled cross borders (I do believe some DMCA provisions are applicable thru trade treaties and the like, but not sure); and I do think DMCA takedowns are rife with abuse; but content moderation really has nothing to do with it..

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