“Here’s a bunch of great things about CloudFlare R2 - and please buy my book about it” leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Also, has CF improved their stance around hosting hate groups? They have strongly resisted pressure to stop hosting/supporting hate sites like 8chan and Kiwifarms, and only stopped reluctantly.
I don’t have to support 8chan or KiwiFarms to say that Cloudflare has absolutely no role in policing the internet. The job of policing the internet is for the police. If it’s illegal, let them investigate.
There is a difference between policing the internet and supplying resources and services to known bad actors.
Their job isn’t to investigate and punish harassment and criminal behavior, but they certainly don’t have to condone it via their support.
> known bad actors
If they are known bad actors, let the police do the job of policing the internet. Otherwise, all bad actors are ultimately arbitrarily defined. Who said they are known bad actors? What does that even mean? Why does that person determining bad actors get their authority? Were they duly elected? Or did one of hundreds of partisan NGOs claim this? Who elected the NGO? Does PETA get a say on bad actors?
Be careful what you wish for. In some US States, I am sure the attorney general would send a letter saying to shut down the marijuana dispensary - they're known bad actors, after all. They might not win a lawsuit, but winning the support of private organizations would be just as good.
> they certainly don’t have to condone it via their support
Wow, what a great argument. Hacker News supports all arguments here by tolerating people speaking and not deleting everything they could possibly disagree with.
Or maybe, providing a service to someone, should not be seen as condoning all possible uses of the service. Just because water can be used to waterboard someone, doesn't mean Walmart should be checking IDs for water purchasers. Just because YouTube has information on how to pick locks, does not mean YouTube should be restricted to adults over 21 on a licensed list of people entrusted with lock-picking knowledge.
Bull.
Cloudflare protects these organizations. Cloudflare goes far above and beyond what most other companies do, and I personally can't wait to see Cloudflare held liable for content they host for which they ignore legitimate complaints.
Imagine if I were to call your phone every hour, on the hour, and my position was that it's not illegal until someone reports it as a crime and the police or a court contacts me to tell me to not do it. That's Cloudflare. They're assholes, and insisting that they're not responsible for anything, any time, until there's a court order is just them being assholes.
> Cloudflare goes far above and beyond what most other companies do
Is this reflective of Cloudflare, or instead reflective of other companies’ willingness to play judge, jury, and executioner?
I like knowing my business on Cloudflare won’t be subject to extrajudicial punishment regardless of the grounds.
> They're assholes
Being an asshole is your constitutional right.
Has AWS improved their stance around hosting resource draining robots.txt defying scrapers and spiders?
Every large company does business with many people / orgs I don't like. I'm not defending or attacking AWS or CF, but merely stating the deeper you dig the more objectionable stuff you'll find everywhere. There are shades of gray of course, but at the end of the day we're all sinners.
I don't have a judgement in this particular case. But I really hate the nobody is perfect argument, especially considering the current political climate. We are all sinners, but we are not all equally bad sinners. Some are deplorable and some are just imperfect and there are a million shades of grey in between. And I don't know where to draw the line, but I can at least make a judgement if you are obviously far, far over that line.