What this really says that they opened a hole which got them into a questionable legal area by removing them, and they regret not just remaining neutral.
It comes down to content moderation. If a company begins to moderate content that travels through its network, it can be held liable and forced to remove things that any entity or governmental body could disagree with.
For example that means if the Republican Party was hosting on Cloudflare and the Democrat Party disagreed with the Republican Party, they could force Cloudflare to remove the Republican Party's websites from transiting their network.
Another example is if the Washington Post and Fox news both went through Cloudflare, and Fox disagreed with the Washington Post they could force Cloudflare to remove the Washington Post.
The moment you set the precedence it becomes an expectation -- by Cloudflare remaining neutral they can't be forced into that position.
I’m glad Cloudflare is taking a neutral stance to this. I’ve long said if a service provider, in any capacity, starts moderating content without a court order then it’s a slippery slope. I’m not saying the sites are good, but, why does Cloudflare need to be the internet police here? They can’t and shouldn’t be.
Neutrality is key, how would you feel if your content was suddenly pulled because someone on the internet disagreed?
We're a young, energetic company hiring for multiple roles on contract. We help companies build everything from custom-designed software to entire networks to power hundreds of gigabits a second of traffic.
We're hiring for the following positions:
- Jr Systems Administrator (EST timezone preferred)
- Jr Network Engineer (EST timezone preferred)
- Jr Systems Administrator (GMT to GMT+2 timezone preferred)
A brief:
- Our choice of Linux OS on managed systems and machines is Ubuntu (mixture of 20.04 LTS, 21.04 currently), with some various Alma/CentOS thrown in the mix
- We work with various industries (ecommerce, networking/security, IoT, etc) and take security very seriously
- Our clients span multiple countries and timezones, from LA to AU
Here's what we're looking for:
- You know Linux pretty good
- You know Ansible, you've used it (we do it a lot!)
- You have a good understanding of Python (we use Python to automate a lot of system monitoring alongside ansible for automating deployments/updates/tasks)
- You're comfortable with some PHP (Symfony/Laravel/Wordpress)
- You're comfortable with some Go (we're just trying some new things here, so more the better!)
- You understand security in environments (eg, PCI compliance, SOC2, etc)
- You're good at communicating and are able to self-prioritize tasks
- You maintain a good work life balance
If this sounds like fun to you, drop your resume to: team[@]packetrabbitinc[.]com along with a brief cover letter and we'll be in touch!
As a network operator, you would be surprised how many AS operators are hostile or simply don’t respond. It’s unfortunately very common, even Tier-1’s are hostile.
Out of the last month, I sent out 191 abuse reports, of which 10 got replied to, 2 were resolved 6 were “no f** off” style, and 2 were told “can’t fix / won’t fix / don’t know how to fix”.
I’m not just referring to Chinese ASNs either, some US Telco’s, German, Australia even.