Cloudflare proves they can never be trusted
About two years ago Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince mentioned how nobody should have the power to decide whether or not someone should be allowed on the Internet, after he decided to take down The Daily Stormer website. Here’s what the moron had to say:
Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
Well guess what? Today Prince decided to stop providing services to 8chan after the mass shootings in Texas; as he explains on the Cloudflare blog:
We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we’ve considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive — regardless of the content of those websites. […] We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.
Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare’s network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site’s operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor.
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I have little doubt we’ll see the same happen with 8chan. While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online.
I’m sorry, come again? I thought you said “nobody should have the power to decide who’s allowed on the Internet”? Looks like Prince is more interested in being politically correct and “taking the heat off” of Cloudflare instead of doing the right thing — which is to not censor or deplatform anyone.
But a more alarming quote from his blog post is the following:
In the two years since the Daily Stormer what we have done to try and solve the Internet’s deeper problem is engage with law enforcement and civil society organizations to try and find solutions. Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained an indication of potential violence. We will continue to work within the legal process to share information when we can to hopefully prevent horrific acts of violence.
You mean surveillance, right Matthew? Spying? Is this why Cloudflare wants to man-in-the-middle (MITM) all ((encrypted) (HTTP)) traffic on the Internet? I guess sooner or later the mask had to begin coming off right? Looks like Cloudflare is going down the same path of breaking all privacy and security on the Internet like Facebook.
This is exactly why I said before that Cloudflare cannot be trusted with their 1.1.1.1 App and Warp VPN service:
This product seems to fit into their general strategy of wanting to man-in-the-middle (MITM) themselves into most of the traffic on the Internet, […] The question is, can you trust them? Do you want to take the risk of trusting them? Keep in mind that if you use their Warp VPN product, they will be able to see and inspect all your Internet communications, and will be able to block you from visiting certain websites if they want to. Or perhaps even serve you a completely different version of a website without you realizing it. And yes, this is a possibility for every VPN out there, not just Cloudflare’s Warp. But again, the thing about Cloudflare is that they have already demonstrated to act contrary to their promise to “protect” their users from attacks. They have demonstrated to break promises, just like other corporations such as Facebook.
The same goes for their IPFS gateway; it can’t be trusted. So let me be clear and reiterate what I said before: “anyone who trusts Cloudflare today has got to be a fucking idiot.”
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