skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How exactly is this stopping them?

They didn't post this on Twitter or FB already but every news media person found his manifesto quickly - just like they always do. There will be another 8chan to fill that void soon enough.
They'd changed their mind by the end of the day.

> Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack.
I wonder why it's mobile only, since I'd love something like this in a web interface. Maybe they data mined from your device is factored into the cost?
Yeah but now they can be DDoS’d.
It would be better if cloudflare terminated service for all media outlets. Every time you turn a mass shooting into a national spectacle, it inspires copycats in rapid succession as we've just seen.

Mass shootings (generally) don't kill that many people. They are scary, yes, but not that deadly (statistically). Keep it local news, don't publish the name of the killer, basically keep the story away from the front lines.

By turning every mass shooting into a hysterical emotional maelstrom, you signal a green light to all the other potential shooters that this is how you get attention.
“Trying to destroy an ant nest with a leaf blower”, like when Reddit shut down some of their more cesspooly subs.
People who post threats via Tor tend to get caught for being the only plausible suspect using Tor at the time of the threat.
Wow, English could really benefit from this.
Did you read the killer's message? It amounted to "Tomorrows the day!" With no actionable information otherwise.
"Some" will condemn this ban by appealing to freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not absolute. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, as per the Guardian:

"I am an unswerving advocate of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but it is not absolute. Article 20 of the same covenant says: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law."[0]

As so often, different values are in tension with each other. And different societies draw the line at different places, somewhat favouring one or the other value. I hope we can agree that 8-chan, due to the lack of sensible moderation, is way past that line by all standards.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/24/k...

Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to be a strawman. By "some", I don't mean some here or alike, but those in 8-chan , TD, etc., who have brought forward this argument in the past.
Hosting is an inexact but entirely acceptable term of art for the services that are provided by a CDN.
A lot of articles don't nourish me, they make me stupider. I wouldn't pay for a poisoned meal.
> It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work

Obviously it would be more work than doing nothing. That's not an argument to do nothing though. There are plenty of topics moderated away (interpreting the age of teens/children in images for example) and yet those get handled with all of the subjectivity just fine. So that's also unrelated to why.

Noone said that 8chan was intentinoally created to be what it's become - what was said was that it has been allowed to become what it has become with no intervention.

And to your final point, even it's original creator says it should be shut down given what it's turned into. If the principled founder says "this has gone too far", maybe it's time to take it seriously.
I think you'd find a great many talented engineers don't share the same politics you do, and an even greater number who are far too apolitical for it to factor into their job search.
I bet 8chan was on the free plan.
I don't know if the article was updated or what, but near the end:

"Late Sunday, following hours of public criticism, Cloudflare announced a major reversal, saying 8chan had gone too far and “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” Its access to Cloudflare services was scheduled to terminate at midnight Pacific time, making it more vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack."
You have a pretty valid point. At this point in history, all out warfare would destroy the species. Although on the flip side, that has not prevented us from having just shy of all out warfare.
I dodged a bullet indeed. Out of the dozen other devs there, there was exactly one person I'd care to work with again. They got pushed out a month or two later, and post-shenanigans felt infinitely better.

My advice is to do what you gotta do to pay the bills, but don't delude yourself into thinking that a crazy sauce employer will change its ways because you try extra hard to change them when they resist your attempts to do so.
This isn't a specifically an Australian thing, I hear this all the time in America.
When Slaveowners Got Reparations While Slaves Didn’t Get 40 Acres and a Mule
Wow, protection from ddos attacks and from unsavory opinions? What more could one ask for?
Well, they're at least making their position clear here. They are not a government or a public forum. As such, they can decide who and what they will support on the internet. Can't argue with their decision on that point.
> the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan

Is this because he posted his manifesto on 8chan or other sources point to 8chan as the source of his extremism?
How NVIDIA Started (2013)
HN Comment Guidelines:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://github.com/logpai/logparser has a nice collection of research on this topic, in case anyone is interested.
There is nothing inherently virtuous about talented engineers, and in fact some of the most talented engineers I’ve come across in the industry have very loose morals.
> Netflix eats online news

If Netflix is eating online news both in terms of attention and money then why wouldn't they partner with Netflix? I know a few seniors that are reluctant to switch because it doesn't have news or weather.
If you build a system that is technically possible for someone to censor, particularly if you make it easy to do (and in fact where not doing so would cost them potentially billions of dollars in market cap in an upcoming IPO, recruiting, sales, vendors, etc), you shouldn’t be at all surprised when they do censor. It is interesting that Cloudflare has only really censored two sites (dailystormer and 8chan) outside of a fairly clearly articulated terms of service. There are clearly a large number of sites on Cloudflare which are a net liability to them and always will be, so the “free speech” stance is genuine.
Clearly a river cannot have legal rights. If the river bursts its banks and floods my house, can I sue the river? Clearly I cannot because how do I sue the river, who represents the river and how does the river have money to pay me? The river cannot appointment executives to represent its interests.

In reality the local government acts for the protection of the environment, so why pretend the river has rights? If you want cleaner rivers then pass legislation with appropriate level of punishment such as fines/prison.
> Why does Cloudflare feel the need to take action here?

The linked article gives their reason.
He should fire his PR. Terrible writing and hard to read. And probably 4-5 times longer than needed.

Also it is bad idea to get political. And I feel that a lot of those companies are gonna get punished in the next few years.

And he didn't managed to even make his case. He accused 8 chan of lawlessness while never actually stating which law they broke.

Just say they are too much trouble and be done with it, without sounding fake.
One thing I still like about Perl is how well the regex syntax is integrated into the language, combined with being installed in just about every Linux modern Linux system,
makes it really accessible from your fingertips.

If you're in a hurry and just need to do some one-off slicing and dicing, there's not much more powerful than
being able to say, eg:

$data = "foobarfoo";
$data =~ s/bar/baz/g;
print "$data\n";

versus python's more dramatic and formal:

import re
data = "foobarfoo"
data = re.sub('bar', 'baz', data)
print data

For some reason, the Perl =~ notation sticks in my head
much more easily than the Python method.

Of course you can string a bunch of sed commands together in a shell script as well, but I find that becomes unwieldy pretty quickly in a lot of situations.
No, it's not. That comment being inappropriate had nothing to do with the candidate's sexual preference. It had to do with a candidate making an inappropriate sexual remark during an interview.

If the comment was "X women do it better" it would still be inappropriate.

Ironically, the HR staff member present during the interview was a gay man himself. I guess he must be homophobic in your eyes also for discarding the application?
This is great news.

There will be lots of people who are frustrated by this. They may say that Cloudflare shouldn't remove content unless they are legally required. Or that a CDN like Cloudflare is a platform layer, deep in the stack, and that it shouldn't be making decisions based on content. That they are a essentially a utility, and that they should provide the the same service to everyone.

But at the end of the day, companies are run by people. And those people should consider the positive and negative concequences of the services they provide. It is the moral thing to do. It is the right thing to do. It is the courageous thing to do.

That doesn't mean they must block every potentially bad actor. And they don't need to block based explicitly on content. Here, the line was drawn at "platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design." But when situations arise that cause decision makers at an organization to re-consider providing their services to their customers, they should take that opportunity to re-evaluate. They should ask, "Do we want to be hosting this?"

In this case, they said "No."

Maybe some other customers will leave, afraid of being kicked off next. They should take that into account. If you think your service is sufficiently like 8Chan, you should probably leave Cloudflare. Or if you think Cloudflare's decision was arbitrary and that worries you, you should leave.

But maybe others will be happy that their CDN doesn't need to be associated with hosting 8Chan's content. I know I feel that way.

Maybe the goodwill you receive will lead to more financial success. But you'll probably never know. In all likelihood, so long as your customers aren't leaving in droves after you kick someone off your platform, you'll never know if the decision was the right financial decision.

You'll probably never know if it was a net positive or negative on your balance sheet. But you might sleep better at night. And maybe sites that enable the propagate hate will find it a little bit harder to survive. And I think that's great.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-p...

This is a good read if you are non-snarky and were really looking for an answer.
Political discussion happens all the time on Hacker News, but you don't see many mass shooters from HN. Culture of the online communities matters a lot (and moderation). I don't think chans create gunmen per se, but they assist to radicalize antisocial young men.

I don't think anything is gained from political discussion on *chans. Free speech is important, and no company should be legally punished for providing these spaces, but that doesn't mean discouraging them from existing is wrong.
Punishable as a federal crime (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or 18 U.S.C. §1030).
It's not their job?

And you really, _really_, don't want it to be.
I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees.

We should send tax cases to juries for decisions.
They will find another CDN. Piratebay and others have been around for ages.
" they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths."

What insane nonsense. Whatever motivates mass murderers caused the deaths, not where they posted. They get rewarded with tons of attention from all forms of media, too. Just kill a minimum number of people to get the popularity in the corporate and social media they otherwise wouldn't ever earn. They revel in it. 8chan disappearing doesn't change that.

I've always favored all the mass media agreeing to not even mention the killers names, achievements, etc in favor of just belittling or dismissing them. Focus on everyone else in the tragedy instead. Make sure the abusers or killers get nothing out of it. Meanwhile, they'll get plenty across the media with Cloudfare getting some good PR not supporting one of the sites a few wrote on. My prediction: more people will do mass killings since this wasn't a causal factor or even help stop them.
A lot of not-so-subtle support for 8chan leaking into this thread.

Cloudfare aren't a government. They aren't a democracy. I don't know why some people seem to think they should act any differently.

If you own a notice board in the real world, and someone put something horrible on it, you would take it down. This is no different.
> How exactly is this stopping them?

It's not necessary for an action to completely stop something bad from happening to be worth doing. It's OK if it just makes it harder.
"It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate."

To me this seems like the broader context that's necessary to actually decrease hate and hate related attacks. These are real people online posting things that really express their feelings about society. A ton of trolling too, of course. But these people aren't just going to go away or get healthy.

Maybe censorship is a good measure to reduce attacks, as it's harder for these individuals to organize and promote each other to act. But then again maybe this response is just the obvious thing corporate entities have to do to wipe their hands of it while we further decentralize hate and make it harder to monitor.

I don't know. I don't have the data and I'm certainly not advocating anything nor saying somethings bad. To me the conversation just doesn't intuitively lead me to believe that were attacking the right problem.
See here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-m...

There is an article in the Washington Post about how they're not taking action, and quotes from activists about how they need to take action. Their general counsel had to answer questions from a journalist (on a weekend!) about whether they were taking action. That constitutes significant pressure.

Further, as the article helpfully mentions, they took action before. After you take action once, a failure to take action a second time stops being a principled "we never take action", and starts being, at least partially, a defence of the target. If you drop the Daily Stormer but not 8chan, you're saying, implicitly, that 8chan is not as bad as the Daily Stormer.

This may or may not be true, but it's absolutely not a discussion a company wants to have in the national media in the context of the aftermath of a mass shooting.

> By staying idle

Arguably that was never an option. Today, it's absolutely not an option.
No it was a serious question. I read his very short manifesto and didn't see any mention of 8chan or obvious online sources of his extremism. I'll read more into it...
Or propaganda block for countries with dictators. Usually their face is plastered everywhere to remind everyone of their benevolent master.
"I promise I wont' do it again" - Guy who does it again.
Good reasoning in the article. Acknowledges that refusing them service won't take the site offline but makes a good argument for doing so.

"They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem."

These sites are breeding grounds for extremism, more and more I feel this free for all on the internet probably hasn't been a net positive.
They don't tend to advertise the means by which they stop terrorist activities that are still in use, to be honest. If you had the best honey trap in the world, would you go on the television and announce it?
> Only a minority believe that 8chan is the culprit in creating these gunmen

I seriously doubt this, even amongst people who were aware of 8chan before today's spate of articles. After them, I'm pretty sure that 99% of people aware of 8chan blame it for this stuff. Which is also why Cloudflare needs to take action, because it becomes endangered itself.

The founder is saying that it should shut down in the NYT; if that's not a demand for a response, I don't know what is.

edit: I agree that it's a scapegoat, I read militia newsletters circulating in the early 90s, and I'm a collector of old John Bircher stuff. Angry white people will find and act out this model no matter what; it's part of the fabric of the US (and the rest of the West.)

And I'm not saying this hypothetically, those newsletters were in the air leading to OKC. It's actually a good sign that these remain loner shootings by the socially rejected; race riots and pogroms are basically when this happens, but other people on the verge decide to join in. When one of these mass shootings happens, and two or three other people who don't know the shooter come and help, that will be the scary transition for me.
The (sarcastic) point was about the fact that no real world code actually relied on a malloc() of half the address space.

I'm sure it "worked" in some sense, though I'd be really surprised if you could make that happen with a default-linked C program on any distro that ever shipped. The holes just aren't big enough. You'd need to link the app with special care, and potentially write your own dynamic loader to keep the region you wanted free. And if you do that... you might as well just mmap() the thing.

The point was that doing this with the system heap on a 32 bit system was never a serious thing. There are apps that would do management of memory spaces that large, but they didn't do it with malloc.
It would be curious to know whether the resistance was just to the killing effect of the mosquito or if it still continued to repel and stop them from biting.

One of the huge advantages of DDT over later pesticides is that it stopped them from biting, the other ones keep them biting until they're dead.

I'm of the mindset that DDT should have remained legal as a residential application to the house (screens, nets, walls). The quantities applied here were much smaller than for agricultural use, and there has never been a study that convincingly showed harm to mammals. (Even the bird egg shell thinning theory was tenuous at best, TEL in leaded fuel could have had the same effect in the targeted time period)
I see, they've put themselves in a tough position indeed. I'm still sorry the conversation have gone this way.
Most of us work for whomever pays top dollar, regardless of politics.
Yeah, and it could have been 100 megatons. But they chickened out.

As I understand it, the Soviet Union was way behind the US in modern electronics. Including targeting systems for reentry vehicles. But they were perhaps even ahead on launch capacity.

That's why they focused on such large bombs. They could deliver them, but they didn't need to worry so much about how accurately.
I believe the research is more nuanced.

The murderers like the idea of their face on TV and their words read to the world. And content that shows chaos.

They don't like stories about the victims portrayed as people with lives, scenes of community comming together, and etc.

NPR did some stories about that research and shortly after you saw more stories about the victims lives.
> Did they ask you nicely (initially) to pick it up?

Nope. It was "Are you going to buy that?" and other rhetorical heckling questions. I said "yes" and didn't give them the attention they want. Eventually, looks over to my girlfriend, turned back to me, and commands me "go pick that up". If they simply asked "did you drop that?" I would have immediately said "oh, sorry, I didn't see that" and done so.
Cloudflare serves many odious sites, such as https://godhatesfags.com/. They only terminate service when some site gets a lot of heat in the news.

I like to think I'm a pretty talented engineer. I've avoided using Cloudflare and I've avoided applying to them because of their wishy-washy stance on censorship. They are a utility. PG&E doesn't terminate electricity service based on what was said on a property. So too should it be for data services. Otherwise, you get people lying and doing false flags to get their enemies kicked off the internet.
That's fine. They won't be using Cloudflare, one less option for them. That's worth doing.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395
4chan banned some of its more disgusting users, and they migrated to 8chan. By design it is a hate-speech echo chamber (aka "free speech zone")
That swerve doesn't apply to the US's actual unswerving protection of freedom of expression, it was ratified with the following reservation (the first among others):

> (1) That Article 20 does not authorize or require legislation or other action by the United States that would restrict the right of free speech and association protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
Who is going to deplatform Facebook and Twitter? After all plenty of shooters have used them too. Before the usual: " But 8chan is a cesspool of bla bla" Probably it is, but, either the users are doing something ilegal in the site and you close it if the owners refuse to comply with a legal request, or they are not doing anything illegal so they have to be left alone.

For the "Free Speech is freedom from government prohibition and this is a private company" brigade. I dont want to live in a world where colored people is being prohibited to enter a night venue, or gay people cannot order a simple cake, or YES, dudes who think their race is more superior being able to blabber their nonsense online as long as it is nothing illegal. After all similar sentiments are expressed (veiled or openly) from many powerful spheres and nobody does nothing.
MD5 is not an encryption algorithm. There is no key!
Ahh well then it’s definitely not grey. And serves me right for scanning the comments here and not actually reading the article.
For all the rhetoric in the tech industry over diversity, "Culture Fit" seems a bit of a catch all exit hatch and anything but diverse.
Does this start to open CloudFlare up to legal issues for all the sites they host? I was under the impression they were more of an infrastructure/utility type service, and weren't liable for what took place, the same way gun manufacturers aren't liable for shootings or gas stations for car crashes.

But if now they're manually deciding who goes on their network and who doesn't, it seems like they're more responsible for everything else that's on it that they allow.

They're a private company and I support them choosing to do business with whoever they want, but I thought there was some sort of legal distinction if they were totally agnostic to what travels over their wires. Is that not the case?
Yeah a prosecutor is definitely going to try that case lol
...before saying "yes" later.
Why not hire someone to build out your side projects?
> Bed bugs are a thousand times worse!

Yeah, no. Bed bugs don't kill you. Mosquitoes do.
Tech giant prefers making money to setting it on fire.