skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My guess is that the people who pressured CF to take down kiwifarms knew about this, and knew that they had bowed to public pressure before and removed sites.

There was a lot of compromising and embarrassing information on KF about the activist who started this campaign (a streamer called Keffals). It looks like the whole feud actually started when Keffals wanted to take down this site to remove the embarrassing information, solicit donations, and gain some activist street cred. Users of KF did not respond well to the initial calls to take it down, and things escalated from there.
> calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing [...] exist on Twitter and Reddit

You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.
Josh has received no contact from federal law enforcement. He has never not complied with their requests and is open about every request he does receive. He does this by creating a post notifying the community of the post and how he responded.

He’s also pro-active in both deleting and reporting any posts that advocate violence, whether that’s a bombing, shooting or stalking.

There is no credible evidence of any physical violence or deaths resulting from KiwiFarms.

Chloe Sagal stated in her farewell messages that her pain came from negative comments made about, and to, her by fellow members of the broader LBGTQIA+ community.

Byuu/Near faked his death, as he did not appear on any Japanese or US death lists. He also has been seen by other developer expats in the time that has passed since his purported suicide.

There is no evidence for the claims being made in the drive to cancel this website. I say this as someone who has never posted there and personally find much of it reprehensible to my ethics and politics.
>The site has already led to the deaths of multiple people

So has Instagram (by far!), FB, Discord, Twitter and site or program where people can type.
and 1/10 too.
Protecting your eyeballs from UV is probably pretty important.
They seemingly can if they just stop posting every waking moment of their life on the internet so it can be scooped up and analyzed by kiwifarm trolls.
Microsoft isn’t a top-payer like Google et al.
> CF CEO (eastdakota) blocked this customer when he complained about it

GossiTheDog was publicly attacking a deceased former employee of Cloudflare (Jaime Cochran), and eastdakota was offended: https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1565575185159204864

I'm pretty sure that's the reason why eastdakota blocked GossiTheDog – not because he was complaining about being doxxed by Kiwifarms
If you don't believe Italy, or the Nordic countries are European I will not be able to convince you. Our world view is simply too different to come to an understanding.
> This seems like it's some 'muh free speech' post from this new account in response to Cloudflare removing KF's services...

Personal attacks are clearly against HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Compared to waterfall, it is fundamentally less constrained. Waterfall demands that we know the system and all the possible problems upfront

How I know you don't know what you're talking about in 2 dozen words or less.
https://archive.ph/WDYVc
It's been my browser home page since I got on the Internet in 1994.
I'm on the cusp of 50, taught myself programming 1980ish or so. Went to college after already working in the industry. Actually switched across various industries: finance, journalism, defense, real estate. I also teach college, am a kung fu instructor with as much experience as I do with programming. Serious, though amateur, Mongol historian. Cut my teeth for a decade or two professionally programming C++ before switching to other languages. (Go, Python, Rust, others...) And I recently changed from Back End Engineer to Data Engineer.

So yeah, this article is basically on the nose.
Hey, can you give me an email or contact me via the email in my profile? I'd be interested to use the executive HH that you mentioned.
They positioned themselves as a low level internet infra provider, they are not technically "giving platform". The closest thing they are doing to giving them a platform is protecting them from DDoS.
Endless reminder that having multiple layers of moderation protects free speech, it doesn't restrict it.

You do not want the government to be the sole arbitrator of what content should be online. That is exactly how you end up with laws like SESTA/FOSTA.

Our government exists to set a baseline of unacceptable speech that private services can build on top of. As we move futher up the stack to the network level, and then the hosting level, and then the forum level, we allow more moderation -- each level refines its definition of acceptable content a little, and then the next level builds on top of that.

In this case, I actually do agree that Kiwi Farms probably crossed that government baseline; it was such an egregious case that it probably should be addressed in law in some way. But in general it is a bad idea to say that we're going to solve every decision about what content is and isn't acceptable by hauling someone in front of a judge. That's a recipe for chilling speech, not expanding it.
> phantom_of_cato had all of his replies flagged and removed in today's thread.

Flagging on HN is mostly done by the users, not by the moderators.
> Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs"). The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling, harassment, and stalking, including real-life harassment by users. Harassment stemming from Kiwi Farms has been implicated in the suicides of three people targeted by users of the site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
That anecdote about Netflix is not correct according to a friend of mine who was a manager there at the time. Quote below.

“It wasn't until the streaming business was massively ahead of the DVD business before the execs on the DVD side weren't going to the overall strategy meetings. A lot of us had roles on both sides until like 2012ish when there was a clear split internally and a DVD-only executive team was officially set up.”
> they have a history of cutting off sex workers who use their services

You are making irrelevant aspersions - they cut of sex workers because they are adhering to the US FOSTA laws: "We also terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States — where Cloudflare is headquartered. This includes Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as well as content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)."
Everybody in America who doesn't have the state department's line on the war is subject to censorship and retribution. They're just less honest about it here.
The minute you say "the elves weren't dark!" I'm probably going to start doubting your opinion on the matter almost immediately, as whether they were pale as a sheet or black as coal has nothing to do with what they represent.
What if a democracy voted to reinstate slavery? Is that valid?
One side wants to legalize a basically harmless drug, and the other is (literally) trying to kill trans people. Let's not pretend they're even close.
This so eloquently describes the whole picture, esp in red states
The survey appears to have asked if people “would consider” buying an Apple car. If so, it seems inherently biased to me. It’s easy to “consider” buying something that doesn’t exist, especially in comparison to something that does exist, has an actual price tag, and actual tradeoffs.
So Dang is the deep state?
> Tearing down a straw man is not an impressive feat.

Neither is being cynical.

Everyone is at a different point in their life and has different skills and has the potential to do good work.

I don't know what problem you're referring to. Maybe you could enlighten us and tell us what it is about self awareness, insight, and experience and gazing into crystal balls that make developers, "good."
Interesting how that screenshot on Keffals' Twitter feed crops out the number of downvotes that post would have received, as well as the replies from other posters calling that poster a fed and a glowie.
Ask HN: How do I overcome crumbling under pressure?
Any resources on how to practice getting comfortable in high-pressure situations? Wether a math test or a chess tournament I am fine until either a) there is a clock timing me or b) large groups of people watching me. It is not so much public speaking and more that I simply can not function when something is at stake.

Cheers in advance!
Eh, this is particularly questionable.

Most customers do not have means of being harmful to the utility by their actions of using the utility itself. If for example your use of the power network caused damage to the network and effected other customers than you can believe you would get an immediate cut off order until the situation was remediated.

Sites behind cloudflare, in theory (lots of debate here) could be considered harmful to cloudflare's network by their behavior, hence presenting a risk to the network and its customers.
> except Kiwi Farms and one radical feminist blog.

Oh yeah I’ll believe anything I read on those. Real trustworthy sources!
Internals are great but they have reached their ceiling to an degree. Co-founders and me started new businesses and they are going very well.
>pretty disgusting

Sure but is it dangerous? A threat to life?

Do these sites need to be offline too?
https://www.lifewire.com/free-people-search-sites-the-best-o...
I didn't even realize it was a thing back in the day but I had a Windows 95 CD and happened to be poking around on it one day and discovered the video. I was like "Wow cool!"
Unelected technocrats taking the law into their own hands and using arbitrary judgment calls to manipulate infrastructure is not an improvement on the current legal system. Especially when they are making promises they don't keep and when they then try to gaslight people into thinking this has nothing to do with external political pressure.
Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.

Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.

What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.

On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
I think a lot of companies arbitrarily inflate/misuse/invent titles for their own purpose. I saw EngiineeringLadders[1] here on HN that I can appreciate for it's attempt to quantify things a little more clearly.

[1]: http://www.engineeringladders.com/
https://archive.ph/8xvAr
So the lack of evidence of wrongdoing is evidence of wrongdoing. Got it. That will certainly fly in court.
Wait till you hit 10, 15, 20 etc.

The prospects of passing leet code interviews without major time investment are not great .
I looked into KF as this was all breaking last week. I don’t have any links as they’re no longer accessible, so take what I say as you will.

When I went on, on the forum’s official home page put front and center there was a link to a post written by an admin/moderator (which was also pinned by moderators) doxxing some trans woman with her address and last known location and the need to bring her to “justice”, whatever that meant.

Frankly it was appalling and I felt like from that one post alone (there were hundreds of posts) I had seen enough
Articles rambles a bit but you do see a pattern were a multitude of options just don’t make sense when trying to interact with major life choices.

Be it retirement, healthcare or education

Take retirement accounts - can you open a 401k ? You need an employer, but your employer might only have crappy high fee options. Self employed ? different plan

Healthcare - price obscurity. Insurance ? have an employer you can have great health benefits or crappy ones

ACA ? Which state, different options. Kids ? They get MediCal in California

Education? You need a degree to navigate all the options available to you as a teenager
Although this is an interesting argument, the issue in this context is that the US legal system, has yet to declare what it is that KF is doing to be illegal.

Maybe they would have lost in court. But as of yet, even though there has been multiple lawsuits against KFs, KF farms has won every thing lawsuit.

That is the issue you have to grapple with. That, for all known knowledge that we have, from the legal system, nobody has proven their actions to be illegal.
I think the parent's comment was saying to find reviewers whose tastes align with your own, then trust their reviews for new content. This requires 1) that the media they publish through prints the name of the author; 2) when you read a review, you pay attention to who is writing it; and 3) a period of time to establish a relationship with a reviewer and build a sense of how much your tastes align.

I find the easiest way to do that is to generally read reviews, and when you go see the thing/buy the thing that got reviewed, think back to which reviewers closest aligned to your reaction, then read more of them, and eventually you'll find a small group of reviewers who you trust.

I admit that I haven't found "my" TV reviewer yet, since it seems the world of TV critics is afraid to offer any significant criticism of the shows they're reviewing. I'm not sure if that's an industry thing or if I've just been looking in the wrong places.
I suspect this speaks far more about you than the readership here...
Pretty cool, much like their buddy holly music video being a demo as part of the Windows 95 installation.
All levels of awareness have responsibility. While telcos and ISPs do have enforcement mechanisms when they are made aware, using Cloudflare's own suggested model, Cloudflare is closer to the content and therefore responsible earlier.
I mean that's kind of par for the course for having an Amazon spy center in your home...
I'd like to honestly better understand why, if there is a threat of violence, law enforcement cannot act.
I sincerely hope you or someone in your family does not develop some serious illness or pre-existing conditions or some major medical condition. That fancy lifestyle will come apart pretty soon when someone gets laid off has a major health issue and has to get a surgery or treatment .
There are two parts of the issue at hand:

1. By denying people the opportunity to voice and discuss their disagreements in a civil manner by means of deplatforming, targeted harassment (cancel culture) and other forms of witch hunting, it pushes them to participate in platforms and groups they otherwise would never associate with. Think prohibition act and what it did to the ABV of the drinks people were consuming;

2. Every crisis that doesn't outright kill a particular system or group of people either forces it to evolve or develop maladaptive mitigations. Regular social networks are a good example of the latter, becoming completely unusable and losing the very value they used to deliver. Eventually, this might encompass services like CloudFlare, the walled (or not so) gardens that Android and iOS are built upon, etc.

However, the incentives stay - it seems the amount of people who are simply unable to voice their mild opinion that does not conform to the blind and hypocritical fit of praise to shtick of the day is reaching critical mass.

Maybe we'll finally see the technology start moving back towards decentralization, which was the initial premise of the Internet, but now with very solid theory and research behind Tor, I2P and other networks/protocols yet to be invented. I don't mind that we all will be paying for hosting a little (more), as long as it kills the current adtech and puritan conformity-driven everything riddled with perverse incentives and absolute centralization of control.
And now law enforcement cannot monitor it
Yeah, this is basically what I meant. Even Discords on TG groups that are "public" but still require your identity to attached and therefore "doxxable" in some respect are still off the radar in the sense that they're not included in research datasets.

I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).

At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.

There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.

Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.
great point, thanks
It is far more than just a few posts. It goes far beyond speech online.

The entire history/founding of KF is predicated around violence perpetrated against trans people.

They actively stock, harass, and cause harm IRL. Even far-right anti-trans people like MTG allege they were behind the SWATs against her - and that is not the first accusation.

This has resulted in deaths.

They recently followed a women into a different country, after they chased her from their home.

They tracker her down and someone posted a photo outside of her new residence.

like a cartel hostage sign. A not so implicit threat that they can find you no matter where you hide and are an IRL person is literally a hundred feet away.

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15658039736716369...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-trolls-cheer-trans-woman...
So you admit you had support. What about the people who don't?
"because the scope works fine right now, nobody thought it prudent to invest the tens of thousands it would take to future-proof it."

My "appeal to authority" was in response to this comment - this department has proven its ability to manage its affairs for far longer than the lifespan of the software running their equipment.

Windows 3.1 came out in the early 90s (late 80s?). How often have the driver APIs, the electrical buses, etc changed since? Should the department have bought new equipment at every change to be "up to date"?

This department did the right thing. They invested in other equipment and kept a couple thousand dollars of spares on hand.
"Our decision..." who are you?
A fair chunk of southern and western US consists of "right-to-work" states, in which one cannot be compelled to join a union as a condition of employment.
There is no law preventing your ISP from surveilling you. Are they responsible if you harass someone online and they allow you to keep your service?
I ran into that one for a while, and I read that newer DP cables’ standard has better shielding to prevent it. I got a newer cable and the issue went away, ymmv
This, my fellow citizens, is what we call a "bad faith actor". They volunteer a position on questionable premises, get asked about their internal philosophical consistency, then dodge the question.
Most places I've worked testing is just table stakes and built into the processes of all the teams. Getting to the higher "seniority" levels is generally just about putting together a history of impactful accomplishments to cite, and using that experience to have a wider impact on the business besides the code you write. Like when you are in a meeting you are the one suggesting better ways to solve a problem, or you get a bunch of engineering teams to go in the same direction together to solve a problem no one team could solve alone, or you solve an important problem no one asked you to solve because only you could see it was a problem. Stuff like that. Also people like working with you and you socialize your self and are aware of what's going on in the business.
> This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with.

"We'll keep doing it of course, even after we said we wouldn't do it any more."

After all, it's been all of 3 days since they wrote,

> Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.

(https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...)

Edit: And to be fair, they do link to that post: "As we outlined last Wednesday, we do not believe that terminating security services is appropriate, even to revolting content.", "The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy." - did I miss the part of that post where they tack on "well, except for the times when it's really bad"? I went and skimmed over it just now to see if they left themselves a loophole that they're using today and I'm not seeing it.
Speaking as the lead on the project, this is partially due to this weekend being ElixirConf, so things are hectic, but you can also blame me, as I probably should have written this post, but didn’t make the time as I was pretty heads down on the lead up to the conference.

I’ll make sure to do a follow up post in the near future that is more in depth
There's always tor and other networks.
Had a FAANG interview where the interviewer said I was wrong... about a topic I was teaching the Graduate course on that topic at that very semester. Realized I needed to dumb down my answer to freshmen undergrad level intro class level, rewording the exact same answer, and he congratulated me for "fixing my mistakes".

I can almost guarantee you the problem is the FAANG interview, not you.