Comment by CircleSpokes
4 years ago
That is not how it works both technically and legally. Providing a reverse proxy is not the same as hosting the content.
4 years ago
That is not how it works both technically and legally. Providing a reverse proxy is not the same as hosting the content.
Except, you know, when they were literally hosting the “site is down“ pages that contained anti-trans jokes.
What are you talking about? Cloudflare didn't host the website. They provided ddos protection via reverse proxy. That is different from hosting.
My understanding was they were able to configure a simple page that was hosted by Cloudflare that was shown whenever the origin servers were not accessible. They put a joke about trans suicides on it.
Once that joke was pointed out on Twitter, it quickly disappeared. Probably because it was incredibly obviously against Cloudflare‘s policies and Cloudflare was the one hosting it.
A CDN caches (= stores) the bits they provide. In other words, they are hosting contents on others behalf. I can't speak to a legal distinction, but if you torrent child pornography, I'm pretty sure you aren't going far with a claim that you were "just a CDN".
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Every byte that the end user sees came from Cloudflare's servers. Try making the case that that's not hosting in a court of law.
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>contained anti-trans jokes
Should everything with "anti-trans jokes" be taken down? Better take down every forum, every game chat, Twitter, Whatsapp etc .
Why add this?
The "site is down" pages were hosted by a Ukrainian company, not CloudFlare.
Oh no, jokes, how horrifying…
Did they provide CDN services? Then they store files and I would interpret that as hosting.
Caching doesn't count as hosting legally. In a literal, technical sense, sure, it's temporary hosting, but practically it's not.
According to which laws or court decisions?
Technically that’s literally how it works.
Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
>Technically that’s literally how it works.
No it is not. Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network. When the backend server sends you some bits it hands them off to cloudflare since cloudflare is the reverse proxy ddos protection. In this case cloudflare is acting as a transit provider instead of directly hosting the backend server.
>Legally? Do you have evidence to support that theory?
Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
> Kiwifarms backend server isn't on cloudflare's network
What does that even mean in practice? If you only host the php forum frontend but mysql runs at another DC then you’re also not hosting the backend, right?
Cloudflare was hosting Kiwifarms even if they weren’t hosting the backend.
> Look up safe harbor laws in relation to ISPs. They have very broad legal protection when it comes to situations like this.
And those same laws don’t apply to someone just renting out dedicated servers?
If you know more than me, perhaps you can explain to me how e.g. US law differentiates between a DC renting out dedicated servers and Cloudflare?
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Legally: every court case on Common Carriers.
Why is Cloudflare supposed to be a common carrier but a regular hosting provider isn't?
Cloudflare is a hosting service. It has R2, workers, etc.
And a CDN is a hosting service if you push content there and don’t set it to expire.
In this case cloudflare isn't the host though. They have hosting services but kiwifarms only makes use of their ddos protection (which is a reverse proxy). That means they aren't the actual host.
Ignoring attacks, what will happen to their hosting bill now that requests aren’t going to a CDN anymore?
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They are a cache, not some load balancer. To anyone visiting their site, the difference is immaterial (otherwise, why would it even matter).
In this case cloudflare was the ddos protection via reverse proxy. That is different from directly hosting the website. No backend servers in this case were ever hosted on clodflare's network.
You are still talking about proxies. You misunderstand what Cloudflare was providing, and you are instead talking about "backend servers hosted on clodflare's network" as if that was ever their offer.
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