this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Direct from the Cloudflare Blog
I find their write ups to be fascinating.
They have me in a weird spot, because I fundamentally don't really like the sheer volume of information they are MITMing at all times, and don't really like the idea of letting them do so for my small site.
But their decisions with respect to security threats pretty consistently seem well measured and as minimally invasive as they can be (eg they have intervened and rewritten content as a result of a supply chain attack, but were very transparent that it was desperate measures, that they didn't really want to do it, and only did it by default for the free users that were most likely not to know enough to enable it themselves). They've also pushed back against stuff like piracy shield trying to turn them into outright surveillance for private companies.
Their business model and size obligates them to walk carefully - they want users and clients to forget or not know they even exist and have such a leverage over them - that really helps them selling their products. I think they have top of the shelf specialists, hardware, etc and that naturally upholds their frightening monopoly. Piracy shield goes against them masquarading as invisible non-actors and puts a lot of unpaid responsibility on them.
I get all that, and that's why I feel weird about it.
Some of the stuff they do only works well with scale, though. And I definitely think at least some other leadership groups would abuse their market position assuming that their critical mass would be very difficult to displace. If they had just agreed to piracy shield, do you really think corporate customers would be scared off?
If I was doing actual stuff state level actors care about, I might still assume they're not "safe", but as a normal person? The fact that pirates can use their services reasonably safely and reasonably effectively definitely gives me a level of confidence that they're unlikely to use their position in a way that harms me, maliciously or recklessly. I have a VPS as well and will eventually use that as a tunnel instead, so it's actually end to end encrypted and I control the keys, but their consistent pattern of behavior doesn't make me feel that much urgency about it.
Yep, and I don't disagree with you. We just somehow forgot about what bad, not shitty capitalists are. And that we can not trust them, but can somehow rely on their consistency.
'We'd look into your shit as it passes by' is a powerful statement that'd hurt their profits a lot, especially with corporates. That's why MS's Copilot is a risky gamble even with their leverage. They don't want it at all, and these customers overshadow any of us easily.
Their scale is also why they won't give a damn unless you violate something serious or really piss some nintendo. Small clients, millions of them, aren't overseen by people, just 'bots' that can flag you for a personal review if you leave the margins and patterns of their average userbase, or if they have someone's takedown demand. As we can't dismantle it just now, it's cool we can use it to further some anticap\anticenzorship goals.
They lost me when they refused to do anything about Kiwi Farms. Protecting privacy is one thing, facilitating hate crimes is another.
What do you mean?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
They only did that after A LOT of backlash. Their initial stance was to do nothing. This article sums it up really well:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/6/23339889/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-content-moderation-ddos
It's a good thing that they're not taking freedom of speech lightly, isn't it? That can become unpleasant at times. This is difficult for an ISP that in principle wants to maintain net neutrality.
Hate speech is not protected by freedom of speech. You can't yell fire in a theater, you can't plot someone's death on the internet. And corporations don't have to follow freedom of speech. They only refuse to step in because they either agree with what's being said or don't want to lose money.