Blocking is the wrong terminology here. Cloudflare is not an ISP which fetches whatever you ask for from third parties. It's a company contracted by the web site owners to distribute their websites. It's much more accurate to say that Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for pirate sites in the UK.
The shocking part of this isn't that they aren't participating in that form of crime in the UK, it's that they're somehow able to participate in it in the rest of the world.
And I say this as someone who thinks that copyright laws are largely unjust, preventing people from engaging with their own culture, but that doesn't make them not the law.
Most of the world doesn't bother playing whack-a-mole with pirate sites because it usually doesn't work. The UK, however, is no stranger to enacting policies that are known to be ineffective.
Do you also refer to steam games that only sell in some regions as "geo-blocking"? I don't. Steam doesn't (they call them region restrictions). There's no blocking going on, merely declining to offer something in the first place. Cloudflare is the host here, they aren't blocking anything, they just aren't providing the pirate site in the first place.
> when they don't have legal obligation to.
While I know relatively little about UK law I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that cloudflare does not have a legal obligation to not knowingly host websites committing copyright infringement.
See https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blo... : I'm slightly surprised that this hasn't caught up with them too. It used to be important to stay somewhat "below the radar" when pirating, not creating an account at one of the largest internet services. But then anti-piracy enforcement is about money and going after soft targets.
The implied parentheses were intended to be "(Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for pirate sites) in the uk" not "Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for (pirate sites in the uk)".
Copyright laws don't prevent people from engaging with their own culture. They just insist that users pay what the creator wants. Any person who is willing to pay can engage as much as they want.
It's like saying that laws against shoplifting prevent people from eating food at a supermarket.
Not so, there is no obligation on copyright owners to sell at a reasonable price. If you want to create a derivative work that the copyright holder ideologically disagrees with it is very likely that it is simply impossible to purchase the rights to do so. Nor is there any obligation for the copyright owner to make themselves known and available to negotiate with, there are numerous things that aren't available at any price because no one even knows who has the right to sell them (many old games for instance fall into this category).
Moreover it is simply unacceptable to say that poor people (which in many cases here means less than multi millionaires given the minimum deal size most copyright holders are interested in for derivative works - and less than centi-millionaires if we mean "affordably as a hobby") cannot legally engage with the work of the culture they grew up in.
I don't see any discussion on the claim that cloudflare is acting as a host. Are they?
Usually we only describe the last link in the chain as the host. Everything else is usually not "the host" for a website. DNS providers, TLD registries, Domain registrars, IP address providers, VPNS, reverse proxies, web caching, CDN (which often, but not always, act as caches), DDOS protection, IT management layers, micro services, backups, IP management, (and many more) do not call themselves hosts for websites. The ones that call themselves as host are usually web hosting providers, web shops, "cloud", and vps. Hardware as a services seems like a bit more of a grey zone, similar to rented space in a data center.
The article specify that the pirate shops used cloudflares services of pass-through security and CDN. The more accurate description I would describe that is that cloudflare are selling services to pirate sites, and that this services has been blocked. How shocking that is depend on how much responsibility we as a society want to place on people who provide those kind of services. How much liability should a service provider have, say a security management services, when their customer is known to break local law?
Reminds me a bit of the specific case law in Sweden used in the pirate bay case. The law that the prosecutor used was a law directed toward biker gangs that targeted the bars that those gangs tended to use as a base. The law specified that even if the bar itself operated legally, the fact that the biker gang used it as a base made the owner legally liable if the bar provided services to those members.
> I don't see any discussion on the claim that cloudflare is acting as a host. Are they?
This is definitely how Cloudflare attempts to defend themselves! In essence, my above comment is rejecting Cloudflare's interpretation.
They aren't a preliminary step in the chain like DNS/domain stuff, they are the final step, they are the service the user asks for the actual content of the pirate site, and they return the actual content.
They aren't a tool being used by the user like an ISP or VPN that might have a privacy defence of being deliberately blind to the traffic they are forwarding, they are rather specifically contracted by the pirate site.
There's no expectation on the users behalf that when they query the pirate site hosted by cloudflare that query will go beyond cloudflare (like with a proxy). The user is perfectly happy if cloudflare serves that request entirely by returning data stored on their own servers. So is cloudflare, and as much as the time as feasible that's exactly what cloudflare does.
So I'm rejecting the notion that cloudflare is distinct in any relevant way from a typical webhost here.
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> The more accurate description I would describe that is that cloudflare are selling services to pirate sites, and that this services has been blocked.
I'd be happy if the title read "court blocks Cloudflare from providing services to pirate sites" (though that's not the editorial slant the article was going for). Your phrasing leaves the blocking party ambiguous, which is sort of missing the point of my complaint.
If you mean "this services has been blocked [by Cloudflare]" like the original title, it runs into the same problem as the original title. You've changed the party Cloudflare is declining to transact with from the end-user to the pirate site. It's still the case that this is merely Cloudflare declining to provide services, not those services being blocked (which would only be possible if Cloudflare chose to provide them) by Cloudflare.
The distinction here matters because this isn't Cloudflare acting as an extension of law enforcement to step in and block a crime from occurring, this is merely Cloudflare itself choosing not to commit the crime. Maybe because a court ordered them not to, or maybe just because they decided not to (which the article seems to be trying to suggest).
Are they themselves denying DNS requests whose purpose was to assist in communicating with them? No. They are just choosing not to communicate with whomever sent the request.
I don't actually use Reddit or Twitter, but I sometimes come across NSFW posts from links. I've found that old.reddit.com seems to allow you to bypass the filter(s) without needing an account. For Twitter, I tend to use the xcancel.com Nitter instance, though there are other Nitter instances that work fine.
Bonus for using Nitter here, you can also see the latest posts from an account instead of the most popular posts, and see replies/interactions to individual tweets. Oh, and it gives you plain HTML.
Reddit pisses me off so much that despite the fact that I don't even use Reddit, just so that my experience sucks less when I'm linked to Reddit or have another reason to lurk it,
- I use the "Old Reddit Redirect" extension to force the browser to go to old reddit
- I use the "Load Reddit Images Directly" extension to bypass Reddit's hideous image viewer that tries to load if your browser makes the mistake of having text/html in the "Accept" headers when opening an image in a new tab. (Dear Firefox/Chrome/etc: maybe stop doing that? If I open an image in a new tab, there is a zero percent chance I want HTML.)
Reddit is also very aggressive at blocking VPNs. Mullvad is constantly blocked. Occasionally I'll turn it off, but Reddit is just a terrible place so I usually go elsewhere (I'm only going because of Google search results. I'd rather use an LLM than turn off my vpn for Reddit)
Is the reddit equivalent of xcancel/nitter (i.e., redlib https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib) also blocked? Presumably if the instance is hosted outside the UK it would work since I think it effectively proxies your requests.
The tor network essentially relies on donated exit node bandwidth, and there's a finite capacity at any point in time. Torrenting is a bandwidth hog (and a lot of exit nodes will filter it out anyway)
> Tor is great but the bandwidth/latency kinda sucks for casual browsing activity
It is reasonably decent these days. Generally there are periods where Tor network is slow.
> A VPN is a more realistic workaround to this kind of geofencing
Generally I tend to use a combination of Tor / VPN depending on what I am doing. Some gossip sites have onion urls and I will use Tor if visiting those. Other sites that are geo-fenced (sites like Odysee) are easier to get to via VPN.
> I almost said "solution" instead of workaround, but of course the only actual solution is to fix the legislation.
That isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. In fact I expect it to get worse over time.
I wrote a similar comment but then realised that if you're using tor per GP's recommendation, you'd be fine as long as your exit node isn't in the UK, or other regressive jurisdiction.
There is literally no point in signing those petitions. The only disagreement between the major political parties in the UK is how draconian it should be.
If it hits 100k then it needs to be debated in parliament. However the bill was already debated in parliament and got through and the petition doesn’t bring anything new to the table.
There would be more of an impact if, perhaps, everyone in the UK who has had to shut a web site because of this law wrote to their MP.
Funny in a US state I'm finding more and more places are popping up with an age verification. Doesn't really bother me so much content out there but yeah.
It's weird too how I don't want to prove my age, guess it's the taboo aspect of it vs. say showing your id at a bar.
Bars usually don't write down your data or associate every movement you make while there with your id, so it's definitely more risky than the traditional meatspace verification process.
Part of the issue is that for my entire life, age was either not enforced or a promise. It feels wrong having gates up where they previously didn't exist.
I get it; I wandered into gay porn sites and irc chats when I was in the 4th grade back in the 90s, and my friends and I loved chatting up those interested in our pre-teenage selves at the time. But I still will never provide a legit id for any age restricted services. Though I do have fakes for non us based companies to deal with financial kyc but haven't used them in some time (years), so no idea if they would work in the days of oligarchic identity management saas.
Even if it does, nothing will change. They've been trying to push through this legislation for 10 years. They don't care what the citizens want - their need to spy takes priority.
Not really been much advance notice of that to account holders. I wonder how the normally sane and well balanced people left using Twitter will react to that. Or even how they determine "UK account" anyway, given all the usual geographical qualifiers.
I came to the realisation recently that the free Internet only happened (in the West) because:
- The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what was this Internet thing about.
- The US Intelligence community understood it was a powerful tool to operate abroad.
- Nobody dared derailing the only engine of growth and progress in many economies
It obviously got out of control and is very abnormal in fact if you consider how power really works.
As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks.
Anyway we are one major cyber disaster away for our the state to switch from a blacklist to whitelist paradigm. A safer and better Internet for everyone.
We will probably still have ways to access the "Free" Internet. It is gonna be fun, slower and might get you in serious troubles.
The thing is, the Internet was supposed to be P2P initially (in Spanish it had the motto "La red de redes" (the network of networks, meaning that it was supposed to connect several LANs together).
But as soon as you had ISPs started, centralization came. Now, most countries will have at most 5 major ISPs, and in reality geographical availability within countries make 1 or 2 available.
Then, originally people had their own websites (I was there!) in their own servers. But Geocities started the centralization trend. And then CDNs, and then MySpace/Facebook and all that.
The only way we are going to get the "freedom" network as it was before is through mesh-networks or similar technologies. Which maybe so far are very slow and cumbersome, but they will have to evolve. I know it is not very fashionable here in HN, but the only see that capable of happening is implementing some kind of "incentive mechanism" that incenvitives people to let data pass through their node in the mesh network; aaaand cryptocurrencies offer an possible solution for that.
> The thing is, the Internet was supposed to be P2P initially (in Spanish it had the motto "La red de redes" (the network of networks, meaning that it was supposed to connect several LANs together).T
The Internet is just a commercialised ARPANet. ARPANet was designed to survive bombs taking out a fair percentage of it's nodes. The Internet still has that robust resistance to damage. You can see it in action when anchors cut ocean cables - barely anyone notices. And as the old saying goes, the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.
However, the commercial enterprises built on top of the internet love centralisation. CloudFlare is an interesting case in point. They have been champions of an uncensored internet for as long as I can remember, which is one of the reasons they grew to their current size. That growth was always going to compromise that core principle, because once a significant amount of traffic passed through them they would become an attractive target for groups wanting to inflict their views of what's proper viewing for the rest of the world.
But while CloudFlare can't exist without the internet, the internet will continue on without CloudFlare. So while the self appointed gatekeepers have indeed blocked the large hole in the sponge that is CloudFlare, underneath the sponge is still a sponge. Information people find interesting will just take other routes.
Or to put it another way, if they think they have stopped or even appreciably slowed down teenage boys from accessing porn, they are kidding themselves.
I find this hard to believe. In New Zealand, the tiny country I live in, I can name off the top of my head at least 10 ISPs. You're telling me most countries, which on average are far bigger than mine, have fewer? I don't believe it. Another made-up statistic.
Something I have always been wondering is: how much was WiMAX a threat to this centralisation and the 3 - 5 ISP per country model?
I remember around 2010 there were cities with several small new ISPs providing fast home and mobile Internet for cheap and with very good coverage.
Infrastructure costs were probably very low. Order of magnitude I guess compared to 4G, cable or fiber.
You could find phones supporting it (HTC was one of the maker) and it seemed to be the perfect solution for most users.
I am not sure if those small ISPs already had a roaming system in place but it would have made a lot of sense.
Anyway, when Intel finally gave up I thought there are probably strong forces wanting to keep access to the Internet in a few hands, expensive and centralised.
> As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks.
I have to do that using corporate and residential US networks, simply because I use Firefox.
As great as Cloudflares services might be to each individual user, the centralization of infrastructure, and by extension the centralization of power, doesn’t seem to be worth it at a macro level. The tragedy of the commons strikes again.
You're forgetting that that the Internet was intertwined with the phone system at a time when the latter was the only reliable form of communication at both local and long-distance levels. Interference with the Internet would be interference with the international telephone system.
I don't see how the fact that dial-up was the norm for the internet "last mile" changes anything wrt the ability to block it. It would be done in exact same way it is done today - by forcing ISPs to do the blocking on internet protocol level.
Every computer is a general purpose computer. What would you do to force me to participate exclusively in your nanny-net? I suspect any answer to that question requires an incredible amount of coordination and participation.
The real problem with the internet, as I see it, is centralization. This is a product of monopoly, which is the core feature of copyright. A truly better internet would replace the authoritative structure of copyright with a truly decentralized model.
As far as I can tell, the only hard problem left in decentralized networking is moderation. No one wants to browse an unmoderated internet. The problem is that moderation is structured as an authoritative hierarchy, so it's not compatible with true decentralization.
I propose we replace moderation with curation. Every user can intentionally choose the subset of internet they want to interact with, defined by attestations from other users, all backed with a web of trust. This way everyone is the highest authority, and users can help each other avoid content they are disinterested in.
The decline of internet began way before trump, I'd say with the rise of facebook and everything moving on there (your local restaurant used to have a website, then switched to facebook only).
Centralized power, centralized censorship.
At approximately the same time, social networks became less social and more propaganda feeds.... so it went from a feed of content made by your friends for other friends (from complaints in status messages to photos of their plates) and moved to whatever crap they try to serve you now,...
The internet was a very good tool in subverting dictatorships and influencing elections.
Now that adversaries of the West have mastered it and the shoe is on the other foot ,internet bad
Previously, a convenient and low-latency way to bypass UK internet censorship was to proxy via a local datacentre - it's only the residential ISPs that are under pressure to censor traffic, commercial ones less so.
But if the blocking is happening somewhere other than the ISP, this is less effective. A hypothetical TPB user might want to proxy via Luxembourg now (seems like the shortest hop to somewhere with sane legislation)
My ISP (Virgin Media) does DNS filtering and IP-based blocking and TLS SNI inspection. So you have to use ESNI or domain fronting, which last time I checked my browser could not be easily configured to do.
Cloudflare has said pirate sites as clients - they are not (and cannot) block any pirate sites that are not their clients. The remedy is for those sites to no longer be patrons of Cloudflare.
If an analogy helps anyone understand better - imagine you have a lemonade stand. You use your neighbor's yard to set up the stand for some reason (maybe since its closer to a main road, the why doesn't really matter). The city tells your neighbor that they will be fined if they continue to have a lemonade stand in their yard, so your neighbor parks their truck in front of the stand, hiding it from the street.
In that analogy, cloudflare is the neighbor and your lemonade stand is the pirate site. You aren't prevented from selling your lemonade, but you can no longer freely use your neighbor's yard unless you want to direct people around the truck ahead of time.
About a decade ago, there were proposals for a "driver's license for the internet."
Nowadays... I actually think it might be a lesser evil. Picture such an ID, if there were a standard for it, enrolled into your computer.
If it were properly built, your computer could provide proof of age, identity, or other verified attributes on approval. The ID could also have micro-transaction support, for allowing convenient pay-as-you-go 10 cents per article instead of paywalls, advertising, and subscriptions everywhere. Websites could just block all non-human traffic; awfully convenient in this era of growing spam, malware, AI slop, revenge porn, etc. Website operators, such as those of small forums, would have far less moderation and abuse prevention overhead.
Theoretically, it would also massively improve cybersecurity, if websites didn't actually need your credit card number and unique identity anymore. Theoretically, if it was tied to your ID, it's like Privacy.com but for every website; much lower transaction friction but much higher security.
I think that's the future at this rate. The only question is who decides how it is implemented.
This is so naive. Big tech would be the first to get various exceptions to train their greedy AIs. They would lobby so hard to lock down personal computers, just to make sure you are not tampering with your digital passport. Google would finally have their wet dream of locked down PCs that have no adblock.
Politicians would be salivating at the idea of getting the real identities of dissenters, and religious fucks would finally have their way of banning porn and contraceptives.
German national ID has this built-in; you can cryptographically prove that you are currently in possession of an ID (and its PIN) over a certain age, for example, without revealing your date of birth. It's just not in widespread use.
I'm in favour of A) a restricted internet with an encryption scheme based on state controlled hardware devices, like Estonia has, that's accessible by default from browsers, and B) an unrestricted internet that's available to anyone who clicks through a few scary browser warnings, but is generally regarded as weird, dangerous, and not commercially viable except for weird or dangerous stuff.
This is a big deal. We knew since the beginning that replacing the World-Wide Web with a centralized system would make it vulnerable to government censorship, however well intentioned Cloudflare's founders were. This is only the beginning.
Classic mafia racket economics would claim that Cloudflare themselves created the botnet ddos problem so that they themselves could solve it, and now they have the power to do this, especially when governments ask them very sternly to do so.
They existed before, but websites selling DDoS as a service were easier to track down and competitors would DDoS eachother. Cloudflare provided a strong layer of protection for everyone, including these DDoS websites, and took no action to take them down when reported
Though certain mafia economics would suggest exactly that, I personally am not suggesting it. It's just an extremely interesting possibility that could only be proven with evidence.
Readit News
The shocking part of this isn't that they aren't participating in that form of crime in the UK, it's that they're somehow able to participate in it in the rest of the world.
And I say this as someone who thinks that copyright laws are largely unjust, preventing people from engaging with their own culture, but that doesn't make them not the law.
Personally, it's always sad when a company agrees to censor on their own merit when they don't have legal obligation to.
> This is geo-blocking, by definition.
Do you also refer to steam games that only sell in some regions as "geo-blocking"? I don't. Steam doesn't (they call them region restrictions). There's no blocking going on, merely declining to offer something in the first place. Cloudflare is the host here, they aren't blocking anything, they just aren't providing the pirate site in the first place.
> when they don't have legal obligation to.
While I know relatively little about UK law I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that cloudflare does not have a legal obligation to not knowingly host websites committing copyright infringement.
I understood from the article that it was for users in the UK, not for hosts in the UK.
Deleted Comment
It's like saying that laws against shoplifting prevent people from eating food at a supermarket.
Moreover it is simply unacceptable to say that poor people (which in many cases here means less than multi millionaires given the minimum deal size most copyright holders are interested in for derivative works - and less than centi-millionaires if we mean "affordably as a hobby") cannot legally engage with the work of the culture they grew up in.
Usually we only describe the last link in the chain as the host. Everything else is usually not "the host" for a website. DNS providers, TLD registries, Domain registrars, IP address providers, VPNS, reverse proxies, web caching, CDN (which often, but not always, act as caches), DDOS protection, IT management layers, micro services, backups, IP management, (and many more) do not call themselves hosts for websites. The ones that call themselves as host are usually web hosting providers, web shops, "cloud", and vps. Hardware as a services seems like a bit more of a grey zone, similar to rented space in a data center.
The article specify that the pirate shops used cloudflares services of pass-through security and CDN. The more accurate description I would describe that is that cloudflare are selling services to pirate sites, and that this services has been blocked. How shocking that is depend on how much responsibility we as a society want to place on people who provide those kind of services. How much liability should a service provider have, say a security management services, when their customer is known to break local law?
Reminds me a bit of the specific case law in Sweden used in the pirate bay case. The law that the prosecutor used was a law directed toward biker gangs that targeted the bars that those gangs tended to use as a base. The law specified that even if the bar itself operated legally, the fact that the biker gang used it as a base made the owner legally liable if the bar provided services to those members.
This is definitely how Cloudflare attempts to defend themselves! In essence, my above comment is rejecting Cloudflare's interpretation.
They aren't a preliminary step in the chain like DNS/domain stuff, they are the final step, they are the service the user asks for the actual content of the pirate site, and they return the actual content.
They aren't a tool being used by the user like an ISP or VPN that might have a privacy defence of being deliberately blind to the traffic they are forwarding, they are rather specifically contracted by the pirate site.
There's no expectation on the users behalf that when they query the pirate site hosted by cloudflare that query will go beyond cloudflare (like with a proxy). The user is perfectly happy if cloudflare serves that request entirely by returning data stored on their own servers. So is cloudflare, and as much as the time as feasible that's exactly what cloudflare does.
So I'm rejecting the notion that cloudflare is distinct in any relevant way from a typical webhost here.
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> The more accurate description I would describe that is that cloudflare are selling services to pirate sites, and that this services has been blocked.
I'd be happy if the title read "court blocks Cloudflare from providing services to pirate sites" (though that's not the editorial slant the article was going for). Your phrasing leaves the blocking party ambiguous, which is sort of missing the point of my complaint.
If you mean "this services has been blocked [by Cloudflare]" like the original title, it runs into the same problem as the original title. You've changed the party Cloudflare is declining to transact with from the end-user to the pirate site. It's still the case that this is merely Cloudflare declining to provide services, not those services being blocked (which would only be possible if Cloudflare chose to provide them) by Cloudflare.
The distinction here matters because this isn't Cloudflare acting as an extension of law enforcement to step in and block a crime from occurring, this is merely Cloudflare itself choosing not to commit the crime. Maybe because a court ordered them not to, or maybe just because they decided not to (which the article seems to be trying to suggest).
Otherwise, probably yes.
You can also access 4chan, Tattle Life, and other nasty gossip websites that the UK nanny state wants to ban.
And you can access the porn on Reddit and Twitter (though in some cases you'll have to make an account). And of course the "tube" sites work fine.
After you've done that, as a UK citizen, please go to https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 and ask the government to repeal their awful law.
Bonus for using Nitter here, you can also see the latest posts from an account instead of the most popular posts, and see replies/interactions to individual tweets. Oh, and it gives you plain HTML.
Reddit pisses me off so much that despite the fact that I don't even use Reddit, just so that my experience sucks less when I'm linked to Reddit or have another reason to lurk it,
- I use the "Old Reddit Redirect" extension to force the browser to go to old reddit
- I use the "Load Reddit Images Directly" extension to bypass Reddit's hideous image viewer that tries to load if your browser makes the mistake of having text/html in the "Accept" headers when opening an image in a new tab. (Dear Firefox/Chrome/etc: maybe stop doing that? If I open an image in a new tab, there is a zero percent chance I want HTML.)
if you make a Reddit account, you can flip an obscure setting so that www.reddit.com serves the same site as old.reddit.com
Deleted Comment
> please go to https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 Signed!
So, you anonymously make the requests through an exit node, but the request contains your IP, which defeats the entire purpose of Tor.
bandwidth is a scarce resource on tor.
And get to solve a dozen whack-a-mole intentionally-slow-loading reCAPTCHAs just to see the page, or worse, end up in a Cloudflare redirect loop.
I almost said "solution" instead of workaround, but of course the only actual solution is to fix the legislation.
It is reasonably decent these days. Generally there are periods where Tor network is slow.
> A VPN is a more realistic workaround to this kind of geofencing
Generally I tend to use a combination of Tor / VPN depending on what I am doing. Some gossip sites have onion urls and I will use Tor if visiting those. Other sites that are geo-fenced (sites like Odysee) are easier to get to via VPN.
> I almost said "solution" instead of workaround, but of course the only actual solution is to fix the legislation.
That isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. In fact I expect it to get worse over time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4ep1znk4zo
There is literally no point in signing those petitions. The only disagreement between the major political parties in the UK is how draconian it should be.
There would be more of an impact if, perhaps, everyone in the UK who has had to shut a web site because of this law wrote to their MP.
They may work out that UK has a 2 party system where each one just takes turns and none of it makes much difference.
It's weird too how I don't want to prove my age, guess it's the taboo aspect of it vs. say showing your id at a bar.
Part of the issue is that for my entire life, age was either not enforced or a promise. It feels wrong having gates up where they previously didn't exist.
I get it; I wandered into gay porn sites and irc chats when I was in the 4th grade back in the 90s, and my friends and I loved chatting up those interested in our pre-teenage selves at the time. But I still will never provide a legit id for any age restricted services. Though I do have fakes for non us based companies to deal with financial kyc but haven't used them in some time (years), so no idea if they would work in the days of oligarchic identity management saas.
That procedure depends upon your platform and client.
http://www.b3rn3d.com/blog/2014/03/05/tor-country-codes/
Edit: Use this link instead (thanks mzajc!):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180429212133/http://www.b3rn3d...
"uBlock filters – Badware risks"
Deleted Comment
Not a fake one, but the real deal trying to charge me £0.00.
I don’t have the patience to investigate that further but I am all behind banning scummy sites like that.
Dead Comment
- The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what was this Internet thing about.
- The US Intelligence community understood it was a powerful tool to operate abroad.
- Nobody dared derailing the only engine of growth and progress in many economies
It obviously got out of control and is very abnormal in fact if you consider how power really works.
As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks.
Anyway we are one major cyber disaster away for our the state to switch from a blacklist to whitelist paradigm. A safer and better Internet for everyone.
We will probably still have ways to access the "Free" Internet. It is gonna be fun, slower and might get you in serious troubles.
But as soon as you had ISPs started, centralization came. Now, most countries will have at most 5 major ISPs, and in reality geographical availability within countries make 1 or 2 available.
Then, originally people had their own websites (I was there!) in their own servers. But Geocities started the centralization trend. And then CDNs, and then MySpace/Facebook and all that.
The only way we are going to get the "freedom" network as it was before is through mesh-networks or similar technologies. Which maybe so far are very slow and cumbersome, but they will have to evolve. I know it is not very fashionable here in HN, but the only see that capable of happening is implementing some kind of "incentive mechanism" that incenvitives people to let data pass through their node in the mesh network; aaaand cryptocurrencies offer an possible solution for that.
The Internet is just a commercialised ARPANet. ARPANet was designed to survive bombs taking out a fair percentage of it's nodes. The Internet still has that robust resistance to damage. You can see it in action when anchors cut ocean cables - barely anyone notices. And as the old saying goes, the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.
However, the commercial enterprises built on top of the internet love centralisation. CloudFlare is an interesting case in point. They have been champions of an uncensored internet for as long as I can remember, which is one of the reasons they grew to their current size. That growth was always going to compromise that core principle, because once a significant amount of traffic passed through them they would become an attractive target for groups wanting to inflict their views of what's proper viewing for the rest of the world.
But while CloudFlare can't exist without the internet, the internet will continue on without CloudFlare. So while the self appointed gatekeepers have indeed blocked the large hole in the sponge that is CloudFlare, underneath the sponge is still a sponge. Information people find interesting will just take other routes.
Or to put it another way, if they think they have stopped or even appreciably slowed down teenage boys from accessing porn, they are kidding themselves.
I find this hard to believe. In New Zealand, the tiny country I live in, I can name off the top of my head at least 10 ISPs. You're telling me most countries, which on average are far bigger than mine, have fewer? I don't believe it. Another made-up statistic.
I remember around 2010 there were cities with several small new ISPs providing fast home and mobile Internet for cheap and with very good coverage. Infrastructure costs were probably very low. Order of magnitude I guess compared to 4G, cable or fiber.
You could find phones supporting it (HTC was one of the maker) and it seemed to be the perfect solution for most users. I am not sure if those small ISPs already had a roaming system in place but it would have made a lot of sense.
Anyway, when Intel finally gave up I thought there are probably strong forces wanting to keep access to the Internet in a few hands, expensive and centralised.
I have to do that using corporate and residential US networks, simply because I use Firefox.
As great as Cloudflares services might be to each individual user, the centralization of infrastructure, and by extension the centralization of power, doesn’t seem to be worth it at a macro level. The tragedy of the commons strikes again.
The real problem with the internet, as I see it, is centralization. This is a product of monopoly, which is the core feature of copyright. A truly better internet would replace the authoritative structure of copyright with a truly decentralized model.
As far as I can tell, the only hard problem left in decentralized networking is moderation. No one wants to browse an unmoderated internet. The problem is that moderation is structured as an authoritative hierarchy, so it's not compatible with true decentralization.
I propose we replace moderation with curation. Every user can intentionally choose the subset of internet they want to interact with, defined by attestations from other users, all backed with a web of trust. This way everyone is the highest authority, and users can help each other avoid content they are disinterested in.
Centralized power, centralized censorship.
At approximately the same time, social networks became less social and more propaganda feeds.... so it went from a feed of content made by your friends for other friends (from complaints in status messages to photos of their plates) and moved to whatever crap they try to serve you now,...
But if the blocking is happening somewhere other than the ISP, this is less effective. A hypothetical TPB user might want to proxy via Luxembourg now (seems like the shortest hop to somewhere with sane legislation)
Cloudflare has said pirate sites as clients - they are not (and cannot) block any pirate sites that are not their clients. The remedy is for those sites to no longer be patrons of Cloudflare.
If an analogy helps anyone understand better - imagine you have a lemonade stand. You use your neighbor's yard to set up the stand for some reason (maybe since its closer to a main road, the why doesn't really matter). The city tells your neighbor that they will be fined if they continue to have a lemonade stand in their yard, so your neighbor parks their truck in front of the stand, hiding it from the street.
In that analogy, cloudflare is the neighbor and your lemonade stand is the pirate site. You aren't prevented from selling your lemonade, but you can no longer freely use your neighbor's yard unless you want to direct people around the truck ahead of time.
Now it's torrent sites and next it's going to be other things the party in charge doesn't like.
Similarly, I struggle to believe they're not providing much of the data they collect to the CIA.
Nowadays... I actually think it might be a lesser evil. Picture such an ID, if there were a standard for it, enrolled into your computer.
If it were properly built, your computer could provide proof of age, identity, or other verified attributes on approval. The ID could also have micro-transaction support, for allowing convenient pay-as-you-go 10 cents per article instead of paywalls, advertising, and subscriptions everywhere. Websites could just block all non-human traffic; awfully convenient in this era of growing spam, malware, AI slop, revenge porn, etc. Website operators, such as those of small forums, would have far less moderation and abuse prevention overhead.
Theoretically, it would also massively improve cybersecurity, if websites didn't actually need your credit card number and unique identity anymore. Theoretically, if it was tied to your ID, it's like Privacy.com but for every website; much lower transaction friction but much higher security.
I think that's the future at this rate. The only question is who decides how it is implemented.
Politicians would be salivating at the idea of getting the real identities of dissenters, and religious fucks would finally have their way of banning porn and contraceptives.
no, fuck this idea so hard. if this is inevitable, our duty is to build technology that defeats it
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...because this is far from the first time this has happened with Cloudflare.
if cloudflare were to host malware on their own IPs, it would have been trivial to see CF's steps.
Unless you want to suggest that CF is developing and distributing sophisticated malware and making botnets across the world