It had much more freedom. Currently it's up to Cloudflare to decide whether you will read that article or not. Tomorrow some stupid law will mandate certain ideas to be hidden from children[1] and Cloudflare will happily comply.
The growth of Cloudflare is what makes the law possible.
Several countries have stupid laws around online child protection, that are universally ignored and universally not enforced simply because there is no reasonable way to comply. Others might be tempted to introduce new stupid laws once they become feasible.
That doesn't make it Cloudflare's fault, but the centralization is still a problem.
I think it's being pointed out as an inherent weakness of greater centralization when it comes to the internet's resiliency against government interference and censorship. The internet used to be much more decentralized than it is today.
Because human nature is what it is. The best way to eat better isn't to be a better person, it's to not keep junk food at the house. It's not Cloudflare's fault that they're successful, but it's now everyone's problem that they're an easy throat for governments to choke.
Also, remember that time that Cloudflare didn't take down a Nazi website because they didn't want to be arbiters of the internet but then everyone accused Cloudflare of supporting Neo Nazis. That this led to boycotts so they ended up taking down the site and wrote a blog post being like "fine, but this is dumb"
That didn't really have to do with the law. You could segue it was a free market action. Though there were definitely legal threats as well. (There's even people here in this thread making similar claims of Cloudflare supporting specific groups/content)
Businesses are not expected to protect your freedom of speech. If you want to say stuff that no one wants to print, you can't sue a business for not printing it.
The government can't stop you from requesting a permit and saying it on public lands, though... And back when telecoms were common carriers, you could have done such from your home Internet, now you can only do it from your voice line.
Right but ISPs and services like CF should be neutral parties just like the Cisco routers and Corning fiber. They should not be arbiters of what’s currently acceptable. Thats not to say they are not subject to jurisdictional law but rather they should not be their own law imposing their views.
Now of course if they want to provide you the user with tools to filter or hide things you disagree with out, by all means.
Yep- your phone or electrical provider don’t monitor your speech for objectionable content and neither should someone like Cloudflare once they achieve ’utility’ like status.
Sorry, but sometimes they are. Laws are reactive so can only be updated when harm is done. But if businesses and people act to hold up the spirit of those laws then the harm doesn't happen in the first place. It's proactive vs reactive.
Plus, bring proactive saves everyone a whole lot of time and money. So many things would be better if people (and every entity) was just trying to do their best and no one was trying to fuck each other over. You may call it a dream and that's fine, but also remember that the vast majority of people already operate that way. A small number of people do the most harm
Are you arguing for a system where employers consider your political views before hiring you?
And no this is not an attempt to in anyway belittle what Nazi German did during WWII. Assuming the employee you are referring to has never been engaged in such acts, though, that feels like a very slippery slope.
Yes. Discrimination in hiring with regard to personal viewpoints (ie adult decisions, not built-in traits) is one of the best ways we have to shape society for the better.
As private entities, we have freedom of association - including freedom to shun certain groups. Use it!
Once we start that, we cannot control if it is going to shape the society for the better or worse. Should feminists be prevented from joining a company? How about pro-choice rights activists? And one persons better society would be totally different from the other person's better society.
We should aim to reduce discrimination not encourage it for select causes.
For anyone not understanding this comment and similar ones try this for me: replace "speech" with "encryption" and "Nazis" with "pedos and terrorists".
Here's the thing, authoritarians use abhorrent groups to justify authoritarian laws. It creates a power creep. Even well meaning rulers will push for more autocratic power with the justification that they can do more good with it. But unless you can place strong guarantees that no malicious ruler can come to power, you should evaluate powers as if they are the ones wielding it.
It's the entire concept of Turnkey Tyranny. A thing we are actively watching being exploited in America and across Europe. Because you can't prevent a malicious ruler from gaining power in a free society, but you can greatly limit their ability to do harm. But this can't be done with myopia.
In my view, this whole stance is completely indefensible, and it frankly shocks me every time I hear this from the progressive side of the political spectrum.
You want to introduce additional discrimination at every workplace in order to get rid of viewpoints you don't agree with?! This is honestly closer to Nazi ideology than the actual Nazi would probably be that you want to discriminate against.
How would you ever prevent policies like this from being leveraged against minorities? How could you ever make sure that you are never gonna be a "Catholic church against Galilei" equivalent?
You do realize that such a policy would've been used like 30 years ago to exclude every pro-LGBT person from hiring, after being used against anti-racial-segregation advocates in the decades before and everyone in favor of womans voting rights well into the 20th century?
If you want some totalitarian society that enforces state-sanctioned viewpoints I would kindly ask you to build your own, preferably as far away as possible, because that stands diametrally opposed to the principles the US was founded on.
What if my neighbor was born gay (can't help it), but I just decide that I want to try gay this week? Is it fine to discriminate against me, but not him? I made an adult choice this week.
> Are you arguing for a system where employers consider your political views before hiring you?
Yes? Such a system already exists and is currently in place in virtually every country in the world.
If I go online and trash talk anyone, that might prevent me from getting hired.
Similarly, if I work someplace, and I call my boss a jackass, I might get fired!
You're trying to invoke "political" as a sort of shield here. No, it's not just politics.
Its called being an asshole. Assholes might be unemployable because that's how human socialization works. Have you met a Nazi that isn't an asshole? Because I haven't. So, there you go.
> If I go online and trash talk anyone, that might prevent me from getting hired.
> Similarly, if I work someplace, and I call my boss a jackass, I might get fired!
Those examples have nothing to do with your specific political views. Both issues there are about how you engages with others and are a reasonable example of why you might cause problems on a team. The specific views you would have shared rudely have nothing to do with the actual problem at hand.
> Those examples have nothing to do with your specific political views.
Yes they do - as I've said, you can't invoke politics as a shield.
You can be fired for your beliefs. Politics are a belief. So you can be fired for politics.
If you're trying to say that you can just be an asshole in private - sure. If you share your political beliefs, it's no longer private.
Most companies don't want to hire people they think are assholes.
Ultimately, it's very simple human behavior. I don't want to work with people who suck. You don't either. Okay, so we must discriminate based on politics or other beliefs.
Hiring, in it of itself, is just discriminating. We're discriminating based on skills, personality, beliefs, and fit. That's what hiring is.
There's only a select couple of things we can't, or shouldn't, discriminate on. Politics isn't one of them. If you think black people need to be exterminated or whatever, there's no gun to my head making me hire you. No, I'm not gonna hire you.
> Yes they do - as I've said, you can't invoke politics as a shield.
That isn't the issue at hand. You are describing using ones political views against them simply for them holding those views, not someone being an asshole and attempting to justify it as a political act.
> Most companies don't want to hire people they think are assholes.
Sure, though they would base that on behavioral tendencies rather than a political survey.
> Ultimately, it's very simple human behavior. I don't want to work with people who suck. You don't either. Okay, so we must discriminate based on politics or other beliefs.
Ultimately you're the one worse off for viewing people this ways. Views and beliefs don't make a person suck, actions do.
If you know I have political view X, I have shared my view. That doesn't mean I have acted on them.
Do you view holding or discussing a certain view as acting upon them? Is a distaste for Republicans in America today, for example, tantamount to acting on said distaste and assassinating someone?
Their politics were expressed as behaviors: proclaiming "I'm a nazi" publicly, taking over leadership of GNAA from Stormfront's administrator, etc. These were not private beliefs that were uncovered through surveying. There was no survey.
Or by behavior do you mean that public support of terrorism isn't grounds for an employer to avoid hiring or termination? That the standard for that would be actual terrorist acts?
I'm not sure who the they are you're referring to here, sorry. If anyone acted on their opinions and discriminated against someone, or worse, of course an employer could consider that.
The whole conversation here, though, was whether someone's beliefs alone are enough to discriminate against them in a hiring process. My argument has been that beliefs or opinions shouldn't be discriminated against, but actions are fair game.
Part of being a Nazi means the sincere believe that the Aryan race is superior to all others and that eradicating them is a sensible goal.
Thats not a political view. Its one of racism and finding genocide acceptable. I would sincerely hope that any sensible person would refuse to hire someone like this.
I can't say that I have seen any party documents floating around, but I'll take your word for it here. A person having those views or beliefs still isn't a crime, acting on them is.
A person in a workplace can have whatever views they want. Holding a view in no way prevents them from being able to do the work well. Its a different story if they cause a problem at work, but that is viewpoint agnostic - anyone starting political fights or worse at work is a problem.
> I can't say that I have seen any party documents floating around
There are quite literally millions of well recorded documents, pictures, movies, personal accounts of affected people available about what Nazism did and does. If you do need a place to start, feel free give the Wikipedia article a read and use the underlying sources to learn more.
The Nazi Party no longer exists and you're linking to ideology in Germany at the time. We could similarly link to pretty terrible political party views of Republicans or Democrats over our history.
By no means am I defending Nazism here, I would take huge personal issue with any holding those views. That's entirely separate from the topic here though, and I don't agree with discriminating hiring processes based on political views regardless of what they are. If someone can go to work, get the job done, and be a net-positive member of the team I have no reason to act against them.
A person is entitled to hold any political views they wish, and a business is entitled to not hire them for those views. Just like freedom of speech does not entitle you to a platform or give you immunity from the consequences of saying things.
Not hiring people only for personal views they hold is just a weirs bar to set. Judge people by their fit for the role and their actions. Attempting to both uncover and judge a person's beliefs is a losing battle at best.
It is not a weird bar at all when the "personal view" here is being a Nazi. The action of believing in Nazism is actually a disbarring for any role of trust, integrity, or value in our society.
Being a Nazi is not a protected status (yet) and you should expect to be fired immediately if you espoused those views anywhere, at all.
Not sure how they are involved in this discussion nor do I know their current ideology besides the media reports, but collaborators were/are not uncommon. Abraham Gancwajch, for example, seemed to have no issue with betraying his people.
Be careful with your reasoning. Remember that the current ruling party in America (as well as growing movement in Europe) is using the same rhetoric to go after liberals and trans people.
The problem isn't that any sensible person supports genocide, it is that insensible people can get to power and trick normal people into thinking genocide is necessary or not happening at all. They do the former by saying "if we don't commit genocide then they will commit genocide against us".
The problem is who gets to pick who is right and not? The problem is that if you limit the right to limit speech then good rulers won't abuse that power but evil ones will. It's because they are the ones who pick and choose. It's why you have to protect the rights of those you abhor. Because if you don't you build the powder keg of Turnkey Tyranny. Doesn't matter how many signs you put up, eventually someone will light a match. My accident or because they want to watch it burn.
So yes, to protect those groups being persecuted (trans, minorities, and Jews alike) you need to protect the speech of abhorrent groups like Nazis. You don't have to like it. And you don't have to, and shouldn't, protect the actions of Nazis, but you do have to protect the speech. It's exactly why the ACLU has done this in the past because every authoritarian loves to use abhorrent characters to justify overreaching laws.
We're on Hacker News for fuck's sake! How often have we seen the same play but replace "speech" with "encryption" and replace "Nazis" with "pedos and terrorists". It's the same stupid game!
> The problem is who gets to pick who is right and not?
we all do, collectively, as a society
> So yes, to protect those groups being persecuted (trans, minorities, and Jews alike) you need to protect the speech of abhorrent groups like Nazis.
there is actually a categorical difference between advocating the persecution of minorities, and advocating the persecution of nazis. and furthermore it is actually possible and good for a society to say one of these things is bad and should not be allowed, while the other one is good and should be allowed.
I agree. But at the same time do you not recognize that collectively, as a society, Nazis decided to attack Jews, trans, disabled, and others? It's not an easy game to play and I think that's what most people here are trying to convey. In the end very few people think they themselves are evil.
> there is actually a categorical difference between advocating the persecution of minorities, and advocating the persecution of nazis.
This line is clear to you, but think harder. Abstract just a little and you can see. You program so I am confident you can handle abstraction. (if you can't program, well you're probably on the wrong forum)
Have you ever listened to the right wing talking points these days? I'm not saying you need to believe them, but "know your enemy". They are justifying their hate of minorities by making claims that those people are attacking them. They frame it as self-defense, not offense. It is absolutely critical to understand this, because that's how they have brought people to their side. It is the same way the Nazis did. But again, think carefully, were no one to actually act on said beliefs then how do you know? If you make a "preemptive strike" then you only empower their claims of acting in self-defense. Even if you can justify your "preemptive strike" as a self-defense measure too!
I think you are oversimplifying the problem because you are relying far too much on the obviousness of Nazis being evil. But if you make that mistake you'll have missed the important lesson of how the Nazis gained power and got support from so many people. If you truly believe that evil is trivial to identify then you'll have to conclude that the entire country of Germany one day decided that they wanted to be evil and then the next day they didn't. The ability to flip such a switch would be gravely concerning in of itself, and if unique to Germany then should you not conclude that they should not exist because they have such capacity for evil?
OR you can believe that things are more complicated. That evil creeps and infests. It disguises itself as good, tells you half lies so you have truth to found yourself on (even if that truth is distorted). That the road to Hell is paved by good intentions and that evil can be created by good men trying to do good things.
This is an underlying philosophy to those that acknowledge Turnkey Tyranny. And I say acknowledge, not believe, because look around you. Do you not see these leaders abusing their authoritarian powers? Look at the origins of many of those powers, especially with Trump. They don't all come from right wingers who were playing some long game. He's exploited powers brought in by Biden, Obama, and Clinton, just as he's exploiting powers brought in by Bush, Bush, and Regan.
Evil loves to convince people that everything is simple and evil is clearly identifiable. Why would it not? Do you really believe the snake isn't going to be a snake?
Yes. Naziism is terrorism. People lose their jobs for publicly supporting terrorism. The employee was self-proclaimed "Nazi" (including to quote, "I'm a nazi", posted publicly while working there) per views and advocacy. They also took over leadership of "GNAA" from Weev (a Nazi with Nazi tattoos etc.) while employed at Cloudflare (I won't type out what it stands for here)
> Are you arguing for a system where employers consider your political views before hiring you?
Would you put a Nazi and a Jewish person in a room every day (or on a Zoom call or whatever) and expect something productive to happen? Well, no. It's a ticking timebomb. If you have an organization with multiple employees, they'll have to be people who can work together. So as a workplace, you need to either rid your employees of their discriminating views or rid yourself of employees who cause problems.
I don't care what religion or political views they have. Its a workplace, if either person can't check it at the door then that's the problem to deal with.
Honestly its pretty insulting to both of the people involved for you to assume so strongly that they couldn't be professional that (a) you never give them the chance and (b) you chose to hire only the one who you agree with (or disagree with the least).
the people talking to you are talking about something very different than simply "political beliefs that you disagree with"
the appropriate level of capital gains tax at the 80th percentile is a political belief that you can tweet about in your personal time and allowing there to be a civil relationship with your colleagues in a professional environment. this is a political belief that reasonable people can disagree with.
asserting the supremacy of the white race is not a political belief that you can tweet about in your personal time while still allowing a civil relationship with your colleagues in a professional environment. this is not something that reasonable people can disagree with.
If they can be professional, yeah? I have diverse private interests that don't really get mixed with work. Don't see why my political interests should. I've worked with people I don't personally like. It's more tiring since there's less chit chat but the work gets done all the same.
Is this fictitious Nazi working with a fictitious Jewish person acting on those views or discussing them at work? If not then why should their employer care, and why should we actually support the idea of workplace discrimination?
> Is this fictitious Nazi working with a fictitious Jewish person acting on those views or discussing them at work?
There's a reason I say "ticking time bomb" in my comment. Hypothetical Jewish person keeps kosher for instance. Is that "acting on" being Jewish at work? What about wearing a yarmulke? If that is, how do you rectify it? If you allow yarmulke, is a swastika armband okay? Both are clothing choices depicting "views".
The employee in question did not keep these beliefs private, and posted publicly (and not hiding behind anonymity) about them. They were also a public figure as the "GNAA" president, a hate group, a position they took over from Weev, the Stormfront administrator.
> Would you put a Nazi and a Jewish person in a room every day
Today's Nazis have more diversified targets for discrimination. Concentrated antisemitism was a side effect of the personal issues of the most famous Nazi exponent in history, but they're more about racial supremacy. Today they might be Islamophobic more then antisemitic.
To answer to your question, their thoughts and views don't matter in the office, their behavior does. You can deeply dislike a colleague for various other reasons too but the effect is the same. I don't want to be fired because I unilaterally hate, or even love, my colleague. As long as I don't act on it, that is.
I know people working together in the same office where one's grandfather was in the Nazi military guarding one camp, the other's was a civilian killed in that camp. Whatever their deep feelings, they mind their job as expected.
It's both. In allowing Cloudflare to grow so big, we now have one huge universal button for governments to push. If instead all of these customers were dispersed over hundreds of different services from different countries, good luck with trying to keep them all in line with your specific country's whims.
Worse, governments can also just block Cloudflare's IP ranges wholesale - because Cloudflare is used to launder IP addresses for sites with shady and/or illegal content.
Legitimate sites get blocked too, but most governments probably won't care.
Isn't this an argument in favor of centralization? Right now, those legitimate sites include many government websites which means that most governments do care. You know what IP block they definitely don't use? A tiny provider for DIY blogs or whatever.
So, interestingly, the places that actually did the worst in the Holocaust were generally the places where there were the least legal structures--even though you would expect it to be worst for Jews in Germany, it was often Poland and other states that had all legal structures and civil institutions destroyed who had it the worst.
For example, recently certain big corp ask me to verify something. I clicked on the link in the E-Mail and it was suck on Cloudflare the click button over and over again. No matter how many times I clicked.
No, it's a common issue. A bit of traffic is always misclassified and one day you'll be the unlucky one. And there's nothing you can do about it beyond trying different device on a different network.
No VPN (unless your ISP is extremely shady, then do use a VPN or change ISP), no overly zealous adblock (ublock origin on default settings should be fine), no JS blocking / weird privacy extensions / whatever, nno PiHole, just what your average, relatively tech-savvy geek would use.
HN readerships's problems with Cloudflare are mostly their own fault. "normal" internet users don't have these problems[1].
[1] except for people in specific countries, and I do feel sorry for those.
>[1] except for people in specific countries, and I do feel sorry for those.
Normal people also travel, and ended in those said countries sometimes. Which is the time when you need these things to work from any kind of connection.
Hmmmm, it's rare that I'll bite, but in this instance, I just have to
> You need to become more like a "normal person."
Isn't in inherently problematic that there is even a definition of a "normal person"? Who gets to judge this? Why do I have to conform? This immediately creates in-groups and out-groups. We should all know better than to allow this to happen. Classification is fine. Probably even needed to help with inclusion. Restriction based on classification can very quickly become problematic.
> No VPN (unless your ISP is extremely shady, then do use a VPN or change ISP)
That's all ISPs by now. You should never just trust any authority logging what you do. What is fine today might not be fine with tomorrow's government and those logs (as much as some might pretend they are not) are permanent.
VPN bans will start to pop up all over the place soon and everyone half-paying attention knows why
> no overly zealous adblock (ublock origin on default settings should be fine)
And what is the definition of overly zealous? Chrome has already dropped support for ublock, more or less. Adblocking is directly hostile to the data-hoovering machine. That should be enough reason to use very restrictive adblocking. I am using every filter list there is with Firefox on Linux. Cloudflare's checks are basically always fine. ReCaptcha, however, is a nightmare.
> no JS blocking / weird privacy extensions / whatever
Well, most of the web doesn't work when blocking JS outright. So I guess we've lost that battle. Though I'd argue that things like reader-mode and the ability to just get text content is pretty important to quite a lot of people still, especially those with disabilities. I don't understand the derogatory tone used when calling privacy extensions weird and the 'whatever' part is just a flippant dismissal of an entire ecosystem of extensions and applications that have a right to exist
> nno PiHole
PiHole is soon going to be the only way to protect yourself, considering what Google is pushing for with manifest v3. I don't yet use it, because it's a pain in the ass, but I'd rather have less internet and more control than vice versa
> just what your average, relatively tech-savvy geek would use.
Why do you think that you should be the one to define what or who that is? Furthermore, why should anyone be given that right?
What are we really losing by allowing people to have custom setups vs. what are we losing when we don't?
> HN readerships's problems with Cloudflare are mostly their own fault. "normal" internet users don't have these problems
This reliance on the definition of "normal" is problematic, for the aforementioned reasons. You don't know what normal is and having a gate-keeper of this definition will lead to ever-smaller circles of people falling under that definition, until one day you are no longer normal and then what?
> [1] except for people in specific countries, and I do feel sorry for those.
Get ready to feel sorry for yourself in the near future :)
Nearly any company under a government's jurisdiction will comply to a legal order to censor content, especially if its done in the claimed goal of protecting children.
Those companies that don't comply will be shut down or targeted in some way if the legal order had any political teeth behind it.
There's no way around that unfortunately, short of limiting government power in the first place so such an order would never be lawful.
The problem with Cloudflare is that it does business everywhere, so it has to appease all governments.
If you're a news site registered in the US or a porn site registered in Canada, with relatively few ties in other countries, you have far much less pressure to comply with unreasonable demands from India or Bahrain. They just don't have that much leverage. If you use Cloudflare, they can put the pressure on Cloudflare instead.
To make matters worse, some governments will demand worldwide removal / blocking of certain content they don't like.
This is what makes the internet so weird and pre-internet intuitions about how governments work so treacherous.
in other words, i was trying to imply that the only way to prevent gov't overreach is to continue developing technical solutions which are distributed and decentralized, so that there's no single button for which the gov't could press for removal of these fundamental rights.
Yes, it's unfortunate that a network service provider whose primary business model is checks notes preventing network abuse would try to detect and prevent abuse via various heuristics such as captchas.
I also agree that Cloudflare should get all the blame here, since none of their customers voluntarily chose to use them, and Cloudflare doesn't give their customers a huge variety of options for bot detection sensitivity.
Matt Prince personally kidnaps CTOs and waterboards them until they agree to use Cloudflare, and the thousands of configuration options and rule combinations on the WAF are just for show - customers can't actually use them.
It had much more freedom. Currently it's up to Cloudflare to decide whether you will read that article or not. Tomorrow some stupid law will mandate certain ideas to be hidden from children[1] and Cloudflare will happily comply.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children