[HN Gopher] Parody site ClownStrike refused to bow to CrowdStrik...
___________________________________________________________________
Parody site ClownStrike refused to bow to CrowdStrike's bogus DMCA
takedown
Author : stalfosknight
Score : 371 points
Date : 2024-08-06 18:07 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Just another day: some megacorporation trying to use scary lawyer
| letters to take down a parody site, banking on some member of the
| public not having the legal knowledge to know they're full of
| shit.
|
| Also, complete 100% bullshit on it being unintentional. I'd
| imagine some executive in their organization found that and had a
| right tizzy about it. It's exactly the sort of completely
| meaningless deck-chair rearranging that the C-suites LOVE to send
| urgent-marked emails about, speaking from both anecdote and
| personal experience.
| daft_pink wrote:
| They need a parody Lewis Hamilton advertisement.
| surfingdino wrote:
| The guy who tried to sue the Hamilton watch company for naming
| themselves Hamilton decades before he was born?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I do wonder if one could learn enough of the law to cheaply
| defend themselves against bogus DMCA notices. You see this sort
| of things all the time in emulation where the product itself is
| technically legal, but the people hosting the project have to
| shut down anyway because they know the legal costs of mounting a
| defense would bankrupt them.
|
| It would be nice to turn the tables and say to N 'ok, we can do
| this all day, enjoy burning a mountain of cash with your legal
| team'
| bombcar wrote:
| It's possible, the biggest downside is to legally respond to a
| fake DMCA you have to dox yourself to the filer.
|
| But if your dox is already out there, there's really no
| downside once you learn the process.
| HankB99 wrote:
| I had a post on Reddit taken down a while ago. It was
| entirely my content and did not even include any quotes. I
| looked into responding, but it would have included far more
| information than could be gleaned from my Reddit bio and I
| suspected it was a sort of phishing scheme to get that
| information. (I did not respond, it was not an important
| post.)
| cesarb wrote:
| It goes beyond just doxing yourself; to legally respond to a
| DMCA notice, AFAIK you also have to consent to the
| jurisdiction of the USA courts. Which might be acceptable to
| a resident of the USA, since they're already under the
| jurisdiction of USA courts, but it can be problematic to
| residents of the rest of the world.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| As the other comment says, you have to basically dox yourself
| to respond in the legal sense, and of course there's expenses
| even to just doing everything yourself.
|
| The law inherently favors corporations because every Tom Dick
| and Harry in the US of A doesn't have a lawyer, let alone an
| entire legal department. Yeah they might be wrong but they have
| basically infinite resources to drag out the process of you
| proving that until you call it quits for your own sanity, or
| simply run out of money to fight back.
|
| Like the author of the post says, most of America's legal
| system is set up pretty explicitly to serve corporations.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| It is, and I get it, but there's a defiant part of me that
| says 'oh really, you want to come after my open source
| project? Let's go'.
|
| I mean, other than my time, if I'm well informed enough to
| fight _just these lawsuits_ , what are the costs?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Almost any court of sufficient level has filing fees for
| every legal motion that may be required in your case. Also,
| many courts require you to be physically present to argue
| your case, which depending where your case is actually
| being heard, could cost jack shit, or could cost a fortune.
| Not to mention the loss of income if you work a typical
| job, since you'll be taking time off, hopefully paid, to go
| to court. And of course hours and hours of research and
| uncompensated labor just to do all the paperwork involved.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Yeah, I'm mainly thinking of defending open source
| projects in retirement. The thought of being a nuisance
| to John Deer, Nintendo, Sony, etc tickles me a bit.
| kbolino wrote:
| Just responding to the one point about physical presence:
| post-COVID, is it not possible to appear virtually?
| omoikane wrote:
| In this case, it sounds like CrowdStrike could have gotten
| CloudFlare to take down the website whether the DMCA notice was
| valid or not, without having to go through a legal process,
| since CloudFlare wasn't exactly helping.
|
| If ClownStrike had not made the news, maybe CrowdStrike would
| continue to try the same DMCA trick with Hetzner.
| toast0 wrote:
| It doesn't take much to send your service provider a DMCA
| counter notice [1].
|
| > (3) Contents of counter notification.--To be effective under
| this subsection, a counter notification must be a written
| communication provided to the service provider's designated
| agent that includes substantially the following:
|
| > (A) A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.
|
| > (B) Identification of the material that has been removed or
| to which access has been disabled and the location at which the
| material appeared before it was removed or access to it was
| disabled.
|
| > (C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber
| has a good faith belief that the material was removed or
| disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the
| material to be removed or disabled.
|
| > (D) The subscriber's name, address, and telephone number, and
| a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of
| Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the
| address is located, or if the subscriber's address is outside
| of the United States, for any judicial district in which the
| service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will
| accept service of process from the person who provided
| notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such
| person.
|
| However, if your service provider wants to be under the DMCA
| safe harbor, they must keep your content down for at least 10
| days and no more than 14 days after they receive the counter
| notice (unless they receive a further notice from the
| originator of the DMCA that they have filed a case regarding
| the alleged infringement --- in that case the content will
| remain down until the case is resolved).
|
| In a lot of cases, having the content down for 10-14 days is
| kind of too long. Also, you may not want to provide your
| identity information to the originator of the complaint or your
| provider. You may also not be willing to state your good faith
| belief under penalty of perjury.
|
| If the originator is willing to take their complaint to court,
| that's going to be an adventure --- but if they just send out
| mass DMCA complaints and don't follow up, you might be fine. If
| you actually want to take them to court over their complaints,
| even though they don't want to, that's an adventure too.
|
| You may also try to convince your provider that the originators
| complaints aren't structurally valid DMCA complaints if they
| aren't, although that requires a sympathetic provider. I've
| only read summaries, but this case is a potential example of an
| invalid complaint, as the summary says it's a DMCA complaint
| about trademark infringement; the DMCA doesn't cover trademark,
| so the complaint is not structurally valid --- the provider has
| no duty to process it, and receives no safe harbor from doing
| so. They may or may not have a duty to take action on trademark
| complaints, but it doesn't arise from the DMCA.
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 section
| (g)(3)
| HankB99 wrote:
| > The subscriber's name, address, and telephone number, ...
|
| Yeah, no. (Re: Reddit DMCA takedown.)
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean, I get it, but it's very hard to participate in the
| courts and pre-court process unless you're identifiable and
| contactable. So if you don't want to be identifiable, the
| easiest option is to let the takedown go through and just
| post it somewhere else.
| immibis wrote:
| It doesn't matter. Your hosting provider either doesn't care
| about the DMCA at all because it's run by some ideological free
| speech warrior (e.g. njalla; these hosts cost 5-10x more so you
| aren't using one) or it cares about taking things down and
| doesn't care about putting things back up (these are the ones
| people actually use e.g. Hetzner, Cloudflare).
| jmclnx wrote:
| >Reached for comment, CrowdStrike confirmed that the takedown
| notice probably never should have been sent to Senk
|
| yea, right. They got caught and said "oops, sorry". Too bad Senk
| cannot charge them for the cost of moving his site elsewhere.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| Sometimes companies are so big the left hand doesn't know what
| the right hand is doing. Maybe the legal department is
| overeager but the PR team would never had let this happen,
| given the chance.
| namuol wrote:
| Indeed. It (further) begs the question: Should we depend so
| heavily on such corporations to protect our infrastructure?
| packetlost wrote:
| idk, the DMCA has done an immense amount of damage to society
| because of what amounts to bullying from those with large
| legal departments. I usually err on the side of blaming
| incompetence, but a well-run legal department should know
| this is a bogus claim.
| rangerelf wrote:
| If it were possible to sink your teeth into them and extract
| enough cash such that it would sting, things like this
| wouldn't happen.
|
| It's only because it costs them exactly zero dollars and
| cents that they feel they can get away with bullying anyone
| they want.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| It does cost them, actually, but they will not be able to
| measure it. Though they didn't have much good will and
| trust to start with.
|
| I'm more surprised by how CF is handling this. They seemed
| like the "good guys" (for the Big Tech anyway) so this is
| not how I would expect them to handle the situation.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > They seemed like the "good guys" (for the Big Tech
| anyway)
|
| There was a time when Google was seen as the tech heroes
| of the Internet.
| alex_lav wrote:
| A company being too large to be competent is maybe not the
| excuse you think it is.
| usefulcat wrote:
| An excuse, no, but maybe an explanation.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Every time one of these cases comes up, everyone wants to
| blame "bad apples in the legal department", but newsflash,
| the legal department aren't a bunch of cowboys that just run
| wild and do whatever they want - they often require the
| approval of someone higher up in the company to commence
| action.
|
| Stop this. Stop letting companies you like off the hook by
| compartmentalizing the things you don't like to "the guys in
| the legal department".
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Sometimes companies are so big the left hand doesn't know
| what the right hand is doing
|
| So it's really amazing, then, that they somehow remain
| profitable and in business. It's interesting that their
| "largeness" only seems to create problems for their customers
| and never for themselves.
|
| Meanwhile if you have a company that's too large to
| reasonably coordinate, then you shouldn't be allowed to
| exist, as you're effectively admitting you don't actually
| exercise any authority over the business.
| whateveracct wrote:
| > Sometimes companies are so big the left hand doesn't know
| what the right hand is doing.
|
| Some companies are just disfunctional, yeah.
| deathanatos wrote:
| We shouldn't permit corporations to abdicate responsibility
| like this.
| namuol wrote:
| Apparently the DMCA takedown notice was filed by some third party
| that specializes in this form of trolling. I wonder how big the
| market for this nonsense is.
| nottorp wrote:
| They're everywhere. The real question is, are they using AI or
| are they a boring old style company that will get left behind
| by progress?
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Senk immediately felt the takedown was bogus. His site was
| obviously parody, which he felt should have made his use of the
| CrowdStrike logos--altered or not--fair use. He immediately
| responded to Cloudflare to contest the notice, but Cloudflare did
| not respond to or even acknowledge receipt of his counter notice.
| Instead, Cloudflare sent a second email warning Senk of the
| alleged infringement, but once again, Cloudflare failed to
| respond to his counter notice._
|
| I am generally a fan of Cloudflare and I think they are good
| players and good people, but this is something they really need
| to fix. The DMCA system is already heavily stacked against the
| little guy. The least Cloudflare (or any host) can do is listen
| to both parties. Ideally they should be a neutral arbiter.
|
| I use Cloudflare extensively and spend a lot per month with them,
| but this really gives me pause about whether I want to have CF
| hosting my actual content. I've never had a DMCA takedown claim
| against me, but I know people who have been abused by that
| process. It can really happen to anyone.
|
| Cloudflare, please don't be part of the problem. You've long been
| a champion of a more open web, one in which little people can
| operate. You've done more to enable creators like that than just
| about anyone I can think of. Please, don't be a facilitator or
| enabler for the DMCA bullies.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Funny how companies (not only Cloudflare) are super-responsive
| when it comes to forwarding takedown notifications from other
| companies, but drag their feet and "forget" when it comes to
| doing the same for counter notifications, even though both are
| required by the DMCA. Also, funny how (to my knowledge) no
| company has been criminally prosecuted for filing a false DMCA
| takedown notice. Likely because you have to prove intent. The
| law is comically stacked against the little guy.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I regularly receive DMCA outside of America, which I wished I
| could reply to "your law doesn't apply to me, cite the right
| one in my jurisdiction or get lost".
|
| But I can't.
|
| Because my hosting will process those by default and shut my
| sites down unless I just comply to the take down, no matter
| how legitimate it is.
|
| It can be even a bogus take down from a US point of view, or
| even a take down for a non existing content.
|
| Doesn't matter. I have to show that I comply, or 48h later,
| my server is shut down.
|
| That's seriously messed up.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| The DMCA is the United States implementation of the World
| Intellectual Property Organizations treaties. So there
| likely is an equivalent statute in your jurisdiction.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| It doesn't matter. DMCA is an _implementation_ of the IP
| protection (and a very biased one). While the treaties
| might agree on the principles, fortunately most other
| countries don 't have an equivalent mechanism. "Yet.", a
| pessimist would add.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Not really sure what the point of this comment is to be
| honest. Other jurisdictions didn't simply copy and paste
| the DMCA. OP's desire to be threatened in terms of the
| regulations that they're actually beholden to is
| completely valid. Because, spoiler alert, international
| treaties aside, not every implementation is as terrible
| as the DMCA.
| Teever wrote:
| Is this actually true? I was under the impression that
| the DMCA came first and then similar stuff was put into
| WIPO treatries but not necessarily ratified or fully
| implemented in the domestic copyright law of other
| countries.
| remram wrote:
| If your hosting provider is a US company, you might be
| wrong about this law not applying to you.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Of course it's not.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Check the terms of service and the acceptable use policy
| of your host; even if the DMCA doesn't apply to you
| directly, it would apply to a U.S. based host, and you
| agreed to _their_ terms when you became their customer.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| US based host? Their terms?
| MrOwen wrote:
| You're aware hosting companies can have locations in
| multiple countries but still be controlled by a parent
| company in the US? So if the US parent company doesn't
| play ball, that has the potential for downstream issues
| in the other hosting locations. Easier/safer as the
| company to just play ball. If you're so concerned about
| this, find a host based and run solely from a safe
| country and not controlled by a US-based entity.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's not.
|
| I have selected my hosting specifically for this.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| In that case, you might just email your host's support
| team and ask them directly.
| remram wrote:
| Your hosting company is bound by US laws. Their defense
| for hosting illegal content is the DMCA, which allows
| them to claim that it is your responsibility (the end-
| user's).
|
| This is the entire point of DMCA: exempt service
| providers from indirect liability for content on their
| network (at the cost of taking action for that content
| upon receiving notice).
|
| If DMCA applied to them but not to you, how could that
| possibly work? A US company could host content that no
| one is responsible for?
|
| In other words: this is not about you but about your
| hosting company. They are the ones the DMCA apply to, and
| was written for. This is true no matter where you live,
| if your hosting company is US.
| immibis wrote:
| If your hosting provider is in the EU, the Digital Services
| Act shields them from liability for hosting illegal
| content, provided they respond swiftly to takedowns, which
| is why they do.
| greyface- wrote:
| I disagree that Cloudflare is super-responsively following
| the DMCA takedown notice requirements. The DMCA requires them
| to respond to a takedown notice by expeditiously taking down
| the content, and to a counter-notice by restoring the
| content. Instead, they responded to a takedown notice by
| forwarding it to their customer, along with a commitment to
| wait for 72 hours before taking anything down.
| eli wrote:
| Upon receipt of a counter notification, the DMCA obligates
| them to wait at least 10 business days before restoring the
| content to give the original party an opportunity to sue
| first.
| AmVess wrote:
| Clownflare. Different circus, same clowns.(tm)
| kstenerud wrote:
| What he should do is set up a clownflare site.
| HankB99 wrote:
| clownflare.com is available from godaddy for a bit less than
| $3K USD.
|
| It looks like clownstrike.com has been redirected to
| crowdstrike.com. (Likely purchased by them or a friend.)
|
| Edit: I see it's clownstrike.lol and is at this time up.
| clownflare.lol has "recently been registered."
| eli wrote:
| I think the article correctly places most of the blame on the
| DMCA. It's a bad law and always has been. I'm not sure how
| much customer service and legal support one can expect from a
| company that you are presumably using on a Free tier.
| RIMR wrote:
| CloudFlare has promised to side with their customers,
| paying or not, for these kinds of things. Any lawyer could
| have easily dismissed this takedown request as invalid, and
| prevented the company from making a sloppy move that throws
| into question their core promises to their customers.
|
| Now we all know that any given Cloudflare customer is
| vulnerable to a fraudulent takedown request, because
| Cloudflare doesn't do their due diligence. That's entirely
| on CloudFlare.
| eli wrote:
| Cloudflare loses DMCA safe harbor protections if they do
| not follow the law and disable content after receiving a
| notification with all the required elements. Correct me
| if I'm wrong, but the DMCA doesn't say anything about
| verifying the merits of the takedown. (Setting aside the
| practicality of having an expert on copyright law review
| each notice even for customers who aren't paying
| anything)
|
| In the case, if they had ignored the notification and
| CloudStrike sued anyway they could be stuck as a
| defendant on that lawsuit.
| stemlord wrote:
| >Cloudflare, please don't be part of the problem. You've long
| been a champion of a more open web
|
| How exactly? Cloudflare has been a threat to the open web for
| as long as I've been paying attention to them
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Without Cloudflare, _a lot_ of the internet sites you use
| daily would have had to give up rather sooner than later.
|
| The dream of a free and equal Internet died on the day
| shitheads could rent 0wned devices for ddos attacks for 10$
| an hour in bitcoin. There would have been a tiny window where
| governments could have stepped in and demanded that ISPs
| follow up and act on abuse reports, but Obama on his last
| legs didn't have the power any more and Trump didn't care.
|
| Ideally, there would be an FCC regulation requiring ISPs
| above 500 customers have a time frame of two hours between
| getting notified of an attack originating from their network,
| investigate it, and cut off the other party unless they had
| shown evidence of effort to be a better netizen. That would
| also have led to economic pressure on Microsoft and other
| vendors (looking at you Java) to actually make their products
| more secure.
| apitman wrote:
| It would be nice if there was some sort of system in place
| to resolve attacks at the source. Sounds like a really hard
| problem though. Based on reports ISPs can identify which
| routers are causing problems. With more invasive routers
| they might even be able to identify the specific devices.
| Then I guess they inform the customer via email or
| something? What happens if customers don't do anything
| about it?
|
| Also what's to prevent attackers from sending tons of bogus
| alerts to ISPs to muddy the waters and undermine the entire
| system?
| trte9343r4 wrote:
| Cloudflare gave up neutrality when they terminated Daily
| Stormer. Before that, there was even discussion if they have
| technical ability to terminate single site like that (deleting
| content from distributed store is hard).
|
| More political activism they do, more damage for them!
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| why would it be hard to delete content for them? you can
| literally in seconds delete files/sites from cache in
| cloudflare
| trte9343r4 wrote:
| It was 2017, technical difficulties were they argument
| against DMCA strikes or censorship. That argument was
| rendered void after that.
|
| Gmail initially did not had delete button for "technical
| difficulties".
| sophacles wrote:
| It's political activism to terminate service over TOS
| violations?
|
| It was pretty simple really - all they had to do was not lie
| about Cloudflare endorsing them (per the contract that had
| extremely standard boilerplate language about such things).
|
| People seem to get really upset when Nazis are held to the
| same basic contract law standard anyone else would be held
| to. Just because the politics of promoting hate makes it hard
| to find vendors, it doesn't mean that vendors need to make a
| special TOS just to coddle those that do.
| kbolino wrote:
| I think you assume this detail is widely known about the
| affair, but I didn't know about it.
|
| Here's an article from the time describing what happened:
| https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-
| to...
|
| Importantly:
|
| "I realized there was no way we were going to have that
| conversation with people calling us Nazis," [CloudFlare CEO
| Matthew] Prince said. "The Daily Stormer site was bragging
| on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of
| them and that is the opposite of everything we believe.
| That was the tipping point for me."
| trte9343r4 wrote:
| I do not know background of that. But Stormer at some
| point also endorsed Hilary Clinton (as a satire). I could
| imagine they were trolling BBC or CNN, that compared
| Cloudflare to nacist, for not censoring them.
| eli wrote:
| Sorry but continuing to host Daily Stormer is not neutral
| either.
|
| There is no neutral and apolitical option on this issue.
| function_seven wrote:
| Yes there is. Don't look at the content unless the law
| requires it.
|
| That's neutral. You host sites, regardless of their
| content.
| eli wrote:
| You're describing a philosophy called Free Speech
| Absolutism. It's a perfectly reasonable stance and I get
| where you're coming from, but it is not objectively more
| correct than any other approach. And it's definitely a
| choice with political implications.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Hosting something that doesn't break your local laws or
| your ToS is as neutral as it gets. Not hosting something
| because you don't agree with them - is not.
|
| In this case, they broke ToS and got removed from CF.
| eli wrote:
| Isn't the operative question here, what should the ToS
| include in the first place?
|
| Also: I don't really agree. Enforcement of ToS is
| inherently political too.
| remram wrote:
| I agree to some extent, but if the user is on a free account it
| seems complicated. You are asking Cloudflare to review sites on
| a case-by-case basis, evaluate legal documents, and potentially
| open themselves to legal risk, all for a non-paying user they
| don't know.
|
| The user might very well lie about their situation, but also
| their contact info, and can easily create many accounts to
| avoid genuine DMCA requests.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| They are neither good nor evil. They are for profit.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Being "For profit" to the detriment of everything else is
| like, children's cartoon evil, like disney villain evil.
| RIMR wrote:
| CloudFlare when their customer is Kiwi Farms, a neo-Nazi hate
| community that stalks and harasses people: "We don't censor
| free speech"
|
| CloudFlare when their customer is CrowdStrike, a tech company
| who caused the world's largest IT outage due to negligence: "We
| don't tolerate negative coverage of a fellow tech company"
| encom wrote:
| Clownflare did drop Kiwi Farms. I don't particularly care for
| Kiwi Farms, but I don't think characterising them as a neo-
| nazi community is accurate. Throwing that label at any
| disagreeable person or community is counterproductive and
| devalues the term.
| samstave wrote:
| They should be forced to keep it up until proven guilty in a
| court of law, no?
|
| "Presumed legal, until it isn't" should be the same as presumed
| innocence"
| schappim wrote:
| I found Cloudflare completely useless when trying to take down
| cloned scam websites using ".shop" domains. We had to go
| directly to the registrar to get them removed.
|
| Moreover, the constant CAPTCHA prompts by Cloudflare are
| incredibly frustrating. This practice is a form of abuse and
| needs to be called out for being so.
| encom wrote:
| >Moreover, the constant CAPTCHA prompts by Cloudflare are
| incredibly frustrating.
|
| I despise Cloudflare with a burning passion. Currently
| they're blocking access to the danish parliament website
| (ft.dk) by putting up a CAPTCHA wall. Of course it's wrong of
| the admins to put essential danish infrastructure in the
| hands of a shitty american tech giant, but as you say this
| crap is everywhere. I refuse to interact with any CAPTCHA
| unless I absolutely have to.
| apitman wrote:
| > I am generally a fan of Cloudflare and I think they are good
| players and good people
|
| Companies generally don't have immutable characteristics like
| "good" or "bad". They have lifecycles. Today's scrappy startup
| fighting for the people becomes tomorrow's hated big tech
| oligarch.
| ape4 wrote:
| After its taken down, he can put up CrowdStink.lol
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| ClownStroke
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
|
| Nice job ClownStrike legal. I wouldn't have heard of the site
| otherwise.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion at the time (1221 points, 5 days ago, 229 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133917
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| The thing about CloudFlare is, I'm fairly comfortable expecting
| one of their executives to appear out here in the next few hours
| to own and address this in a common sense way.
| charles_f wrote:
| Following the unfortunate announcement of our screw-up that
| resulted in what some (unfairly) qualify as the outage of the
| century, rest assured that we are doing everything in our power
| to keep our customers happy and as uninformed as possible. Since
| we're very, very sowy, and since we said "we're sowy", we don't
| appreciate people making fun of us. Please stop ridiculing us, or
| say mean things about us. In fact: we'd appreciate you leave us
| alone, it's already a hard time for us. Dont talk about us,
| unless, of course to pay us a compliment.
| gmerc wrote:
| at least clownstrike.com goes to the real clowns
| willguest wrote:
| > just big companies using big processes
|
| Too big to care?
| khanan wrote:
| Huge disappointment in Cloudflare right there. This needs to be
| remedied immediately!
| danielspace23 wrote:
| > [Senk] told Ars he is "a proponent of decentralization."
|
| sounds funny when talking about a guy who hosted their site on
| Cloudflare.
| oddevan wrote:
| It's impossible to be ideologically pure with every single
| decision. We live in a messy world.
|
| In this case, I think he could be forgiven for (a) wanting to
| use his existing skillset to get his site online quickly and
| reliably and/or (b) actually believing that Cloudflare--based
| on previous actions--would robustly defend his site.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| It's possible to support things without being fully invested
| personally in the idea. Does every proponent of
| decentralization also live off-the-grid and make computers by
| mining silicon by hand?
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Hilarious trolling. Crowdstrike falling into the trap only makes
| it funnier.
| amne wrote:
| is this dmca complaint the second thing (that we know about) from
| crowdstrike they release without following the proper processes?
| monksy wrote:
| Crowdstrike yet again attempts to use the legal system to avoid
| responsiblity for their actions (theres talk right now if they'll
| be held financially responsible for the damage caused), fix thier
| PR (the Delta v Crowdstrike), and demonstrate that they will
| bully people engaging in fair use parody (clownstrike).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Every court officer who signs off on a bogus DMCA notice is
| violating their oath and is subject to disciplinary action. They
| are also committing barratry which appears to be a civil tort in
| some states.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I don't believe any court officer is necessary for a DMCA
| notice.
| RIMR wrote:
| Why do businesses insist on learning about the Streisand Effect
| the hard way?
|
| I would never have known about this low-effort parody site, and
| even if I did learn about it is of poor enough quality that I
| would never have shared it.
|
| But now I am 100% behind this site, and interested in spreading
| the word, since it apparently touches a nerve.
| RIMR wrote:
| The real story here is that CloudFlare, the company that fought
| tooth and nail to protect Kiwi Farms, a community that stalks and
| harasses LGBTQ people online with the mission of driving them to
| suicide, on the basis of free speech and being neutral on
| content, had no problem terminating a completely unoffending
| parody site because another tech company sent them an obviously
| fraudulent takedown request...
|
| You would think that when one of your customers, embroiled in
| controversy, is sending you takedown requests for content
| critical of their business, that the first thing you should do is
| scrutinize the shit out of those requests to make sure you aren't
| being taken for a ride.
|
| It is deeply concerning that a company as deeply intwined in
| global Internet infrastructure would make decisions like this so
| flippantly and without any nuance.
| frereubu wrote:
| I set up a site around 20 years ago - now on
| https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/ - and got threatened with a
| lawsuit by Dannon / Danone. I had to give them the first domain
| because it was a trademark (but not before I'd set up a 301
| redirect and let Google catch up with the change). That was in
| more innocent pre-DCMA times when corporations wouldn't really
| know how to contact an ISP and get something banned without
| getting lawyers involved. I enjoyed a realtively long email
| correspondence with what I hope was a very expensive lawyer from
| Danone.
|
| Edit: I set up the site on bifidusdigestivum.com after getting
| too irritated by adverts where they talked about their amazing
| bacteria "Bifidus Digesivum", which was just so ridiculous I
| found out as much as I could about it and wrote about it in as
| SEO-friendly a way as possible so anyone searching for it found
| my site. It's had something like 1.5m views since then, and still
| gets 400-500 visits a month. Not huge in the grand scheme of
| things, but it still gives me a chuckle every now and then when I
| remember it.
| lemarchr wrote:
| The comments section gives me intense astroturfing vibes,
| especially the way it abruptly starts and stops between 2014.
|
| Edit: Although the negative comments stop too. Maybe people
| were just more passionate about yoghurt a decade ago.
| frereubu wrote:
| Yeah, it was kind of weird - pretty sure the positive
| comments about it weren't organic, but there are some other
| anti comments that didn't feel quite right either. I'm not
| even sure if the comment section works any more!
| mewse-hn wrote:
| They way this story usually goes: hosts are legally required to
| respond to dmca takedown requests as quickly as possible, please
| spare me the outrage.
|
| In this case: cloudflare claims they never received any counter-
| notices from the parody guy (he sent two), and sent a weak "we
| would've helped you" after he moved the site off their services
| and they started getting negative attention. They screwed up
| royally.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I vaguely remember that copyright law allows for damages for
| bogus copyright violation claims. I wonder if this is warranted
| here?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It's absurd that they're attempting to use the Digital Millennium
| Copyright Act to enforce their trademark, and from their reply
| they seem to have made the same move to 500 other websites
| without any recourse.
|
| I hate that companies have seen how places react to DMCA takedown
| requests and have responded by trying to force everything into a
| DMCA takedown request. Using it to avoid the necessary steps for
| a circumvention bypass was bad enough, trademark is covered by a
| whole range of unrelated laws.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Isn't spurious DMCA request criminal?
| smsm42 wrote:
| Only if you claim that you own copyright that you don't, and
| even that probably won't be prosecuted. E.g. see:
|
| https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-
| bee...
| kornhole wrote:
| If you think Crowdstrike and Cloudflare are not political actors
| used to take down undesired speech and speakers, remember
| Kiwifarms and Russiagate.
| https://yandex.com/search?text=bill+binney+crowdstrike
| move-on-by wrote:
| Who is hosting it now? I'm inspired by this website, and hope
| maybe one day I can have a parody website made popular by the
| Streisand effect. But who should I use to host it? Who should I
| use as a registrar? I'm a Cloudflare customer, but it's clear I
| cannot trust them in this endeavor.
| mikeyinternews wrote:
| Why is he using the CSC logo?
| o11c wrote:
| "Apparently, Cloudflare never received" is a much bigger deal
| than anything else surrounding this.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-06 23:00 UTC)