A great read! I have been using Cloudflare's workers and pages tools to build websites, mostly due to their generous free tier. It seems like they are a pretty good company overall.
A great read!
I have been using Cloudflare's workers and pages tools to build websites, mostly due to their generous free tier. It seems like they are a pretty good company overall.
This always turns into it's own massive debate every time it's brought up, but whether infrastructure providers should be policing content is a contentious enough issue that it can't be used as a...
This always turns into it's own massive debate every time it's brought up, but whether infrastructure providers should be policing content is a contentious enough issue that it can't be used as a sole judge of whether a company is "good" or "bad".
Good people acting in good faith can fall on either side of that debate with justifications that are grounded in reality. It is not the sort of issue that can act as a litmus test.
Infrastructure providers can choose to police content or not. They chose to. That's not the issue. The issue is what they've chosen to police. They've made their political beliefs very clear, and...
Infrastructure providers can choose to police content or not. They chose to. That's not the issue. The issue is what they've chosen to police. They've made their political beliefs very clear, and they're awful.
From the wiki page, it sounds like their political beliefs are along the lines of "DDoS-protection and caching infrastructure should be available to everyone, including Nazis, and any limits on...
From the wiki page, it sounds like their political beliefs are along the lines of "DDoS-protection and caching infrastructure should be available to everyone, including Nazis, and any limits on publishing should be applied to the original host and not at the cache". All the wiki examples are along the lines of "Cloudflare didn't want to stop serving a bad legal thing but eventually gave in to angry criticism" or "Cloudflare stopped serving a good(?) illegal thing and complained about it".
I guess this means they aren't consequentialists: they think that e.g. if a person is hurt because two Nazis were able to encourage each other along the path of Nazi-ism because their website was up instead of down because Cloudflare was providing it DDoS protection services, Cloudflare doesn't necessarily have any responsibility for the moral wrongness, and it instead lies with other people (presumably the Nazis, or them and their original host). Possibly factoring into this is the idea that, since DDoS attacks are not actually allowed, people have a right to be protected from them that is not terminated just because the overall outcome would be better if they weren't.
...there was a time when content-agnostic common carrier infrastructure was widely hailed as a good thing; based upon the tone of discourse here, i expect tildes' userbase comprises a...
...there was a time when content-agnostic common carrier infrastructure was widely hailed as a good thing; based upon the tone of discourse here, i expect tildes' userbase comprises a preponderance of that demographic...
Yeah, the idea that infrastructure providers should be content-agnostic has always been a popular one here, which is kind of ironic considering Tildes itself was founded on the idea of this...
Yeah, the idea that infrastructure providers should be content-agnostic has always been a popular one here, which is kind of ironic considering Tildes itself was founded on the idea of this platform not falling victim to the paradox of tolerance.
Personally, I think Cloudflare made the right decision when they booted Daily Stormer, 8Chan, and Kiwi Farms off their service. They should have done it far sooner though, and it's a shame it took Matthew Prince so long to finally wake up to the reality of what his company being "content-agnostic" inevitably leads to; Becoming a defacto Nazi bar. But I would even take that concern a step further, since (IMO) "neutrality" in the presence of genuinely evil ideas and actions is not actually neutrality, it's just another form of support for said evil due to the paradox of tolerance (i.e. "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance"). However, I tend to keep quiet on this particular topic these days, even here, since I am bone tired of arguing with the more libertarian minded techbros about the subject.
A great read!
I have been using Cloudflare's workers and pages tools to build websites, mostly due to their generous free tier. It seems like they are a pretty good company overall.
Well, they did a good thing here, but "good company" might be a stretch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare#Controversies
This always turns into it's own massive debate every time it's brought up, but whether infrastructure providers should be policing content is a contentious enough issue that it can't be used as a sole judge of whether a company is "good" or "bad".
Good people acting in good faith can fall on either side of that debate with justifications that are grounded in reality. It is not the sort of issue that can act as a litmus test.
Infrastructure providers can choose to police content or not. They chose to. That's not the issue. The issue is what they've chosen to police. They've made their political beliefs very clear, and they're awful.
From the wiki page, it sounds like their political beliefs are along the lines of "DDoS-protection and caching infrastructure should be available to everyone, including Nazis, and any limits on publishing should be applied to the original host and not at the cache". All the wiki examples are along the lines of "Cloudflare didn't want to stop serving a bad legal thing but eventually gave in to angry criticism" or "Cloudflare stopped serving a good(?) illegal thing and complained about it".
I guess this means they aren't consequentialists: they think that e.g. if a person is hurt because two Nazis were able to encourage each other along the path of Nazi-ism because their website was up instead of down because Cloudflare was providing it DDoS protection services, Cloudflare doesn't necessarily have any responsibility for the moral wrongness, and it instead lies with other people (presumably the Nazis, or them and their original host). Possibly factoring into this is the idea that, since DDoS attacks are not actually allowed, people have a right to be protected from them that is not terminated just because the overall outcome would be better if they weren't.
Are these the awful political beliefs?
...there was a time when content-agnostic common carrier infrastructure was widely hailed as a good thing; based upon the tone of discourse here, i expect tildes' userbase comprises a preponderance of that demographic...
Yeah, the idea that infrastructure providers should be content-agnostic has always been a popular one here, which is kind of ironic considering Tildes itself was founded on the idea of this platform not falling victim to the paradox of tolerance.
Personally, I think Cloudflare made the right decision when they booted Daily Stormer, 8Chan, and Kiwi Farms off their service. They should have done it far sooner though, and it's a shame it took Matthew Prince so long to finally wake up to the reality of what his company being "content-agnostic" inevitably leads to; Becoming a defacto Nazi bar. But I would even take that concern a step further, since (IMO) "neutrality" in the presence of genuinely evil ideas and actions is not actually neutrality, it's just another form of support for said evil due to the paradox of tolerance (i.e. "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance"). However, I tend to keep quiet on this particular topic these days, even here, since I am bone tired of arguing with the more libertarian minded techbros about the subject.
Ugh, seems nothing is good.