Kiwi Farms is down across all domains as DDoS-Guard terminates service

I think it’s interesting that so many people see the danger in a Twitter “mob” effectively running Kiwifarms off the public, visible internet, without recognising that Kiwifarms themselves were a mob, with the precise goal of running people (including the recently targeted streamer) off the public visible internet too. The tactics were different, but the goal is effectively the same.<p>The key differences are Kiwifarms is targeting individuals personally. And that they’re doing it kind of randomly, for the lulz. Whereas their main opponents here are targeting a company&#x2F;community, and acting in self-defence.<p>I know who I think is more worthy of protection.

Kiwifarm&#x27;s owner statement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220905182626&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poa.st&#x2F;notice&#x2F;ANFcT4JQ0sKGObHi6K" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220905182626&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poa.st&#x2F;no...</a><p>This whole thing is kinda fascinating, if not extremely scary. After learning about the situation from the last couple threads here and going down the rabbit hole of sources, the future of the internet seems pretty sad... If cloudflare doesn&#x27;t reinstate the website after dealing with said immediate danger they claimed was the reason to remove its protection it just shows how hard you can shut someone down by just twitter outrage.<p>If the threat really was so dire, and if there really was something of the sort sure i can see allowing the obvious DDOS in the background go thru and take the website down. But not reinstating it after the time they were claiming to buy by doing it was already bought it means if you scream loud enough on twitter, even while having an obvious army of arsonists behind you, the firefighters will just stop serving said target.<p>Sure, cloudflare is a private company and all that, nobody questions it, but it doesn&#x27;t make it any less unsettling.

Real principled stance there from their CEO - 3 days to totally flip-flop? I mean, if your stance is we will ban content we arbitrarily find bad then just state it as such. Put into your agreement terms precisely what is and isn’t allowed. Be consistent. This “conflicted” act makes them look weak and of questionable leadership.<p>Either take a principled stance on speech or put into your terms how you censor speech.

The thing is, it&#x27;s hard to feel bad for kiwifarms. They seem to be one of the worst sites there are. But freedom of speech&#x2F;expression&#x2F;opinions aren&#x27;t about defending those who speech&#x2F;expression&#x2F;opinions you like but all of them.<p>Personally, I think the site being shutdown is a good thing. But it&#x27;s hard to look at the fact a few corporations can remove a website from the internet and think this is good for a free and open society.

I personally have never seen any content on Kiwifarms that would lead to statements as we saw the other day from Cloudflare. It is a place where people say some horrible stuff, but I think 4chan is worse (including CSAM) and they are protected by Cloudflare as far as I know.<p>I don&#x27;t know much about the people who post there, other than that they say some nasty things. I have also seen such content on Facebook and Twitter - nastier content, in greater volume, with a larger audience.<p>I have found comments about people on kiwifarms that have been moderated out of other sites (not death threats or harassment, but factual information), in that regard it has been somewhat useful.

Deep down in our heart we all know that kiwifarms is a forum made for hate and cloudflare has no responsibility to host them.<p>Yeah, sometimes the Twitter mob comes and cancels someone for no real reason, but this is not the case here.

It looks like KiwiFarms is still running on their onion site:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz...</a><p>(Need TOR browser or Brave)

They host (or shield) a bunch of high-profile piracy sites (the largest repacker for example) and hosted Parler after it was kicked from AWS. I&#x27;ve never heard of anyone being suspended by DG. Great achievement, that surely wasn&#x27;t easy.

Something I&#x27;m curious about in this whole thing: who is DDoSing kiwifarms? Most people find their content reprehensible but does that usually translate into people DDoSing something?

Is this a good thing? That internet vigilantes are able to decide what can stay and what must go? If Kiwifarms was a hive for so much illegal activity then certainly the FBI must have heard of them by now and I&#x27;d expect them along with the courts to be the arbiters of justice rather than some angry people on Twitter.<p>I&#x27;m not celebrating because I&#x27;m not short sighted. We can all see where this is going.

It&#x27;s an interesting problem - designing a basic forum that can survive DDoS attacks without a centralized protector such as cloudflare.

This, I think, is a useful perspective for all those here talking about free speech:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slate.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;kiwi-farms-cloudlfare-anti-trans-speech.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slate.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;kiwi-farms-cloudlfare-a...</a><p>The point is that if you&#x27;re using your speech to silence people, not by disproving their arguments but through terror and the destruction of their reputation and social network, when you silence people by lying about them, <i>your speech</i> is a threat to free speech.<p>By protecting sites whose purpose is to silence particular individuals through lies and threats you are reducing free speech. This is a case where you have to choose which speech to protect. They are in conflict. And the site you might defend is not the one making a good faith use of the freedom you wish to protect.

Supporting the removal of a problematic site (<i>as though that would do the trick</i>) at the expense of setting a bad president is a profoundly oblique way to go about things.<p>A few years ago people urged CDNs and ISPs to drop the Daily Caller, then it was Parler, and for numerous times it was 4&#x2F;8chan. At what point do we admit that the solution to extremism isn’t in blocking sites where this activity collaborates?<p>This is a cultural problem that can’t be fixed with the hammer of authoritarianism.

Is it too early to say the internet is done for because it&#x27;s looking that way to me. keffals has given the government the recipe to kill off any website they want gone. I&#x27;m hearing that keffals creatures are now attacking TOR to get them to drop kiwi too.<p>This isn&#x27;t going to stop, 4chan is definitely next then every other site that isn&#x27;t mainstream.

I&#x27;m very glad Kiwi Farms is gone.<p>But as a thought experiment, would an IPFS based distributed website survive attacks of this nature?<p>It could be pinned by individual users and gateways and accessed using browser plug-ins.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipfs.tech&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipfs.tech&#x2F;</a>

Here&#x27;s the most disingenuous part for any defender of KF so far. The linked Twitter feed has a post from the KF operator:<p>&quot;For the time being, I am locking the threads of the most prominent members of the hashtag campaigns against us... I&#x27;m tired of hearing about it.&quot;<p>Very &quot;Free Speech&quot; of KF. This is all just public information after all, isn&#x27;t it?

The problem with salem witch trials du jour so fervently pushed by certain groups of people is closing to its demise with every case like this. The advantage of emotionally immature people (regardless of their actual age) having too much time on their hands forcing their narrative and banning any discourse that they don&#x27;t like will eventually cease when the majority of people will realize that they are, well, in a majority, and it&#x27;s time to put stop to this madness.<p>In other news, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz...</a> is up.

Cloudflare or any other privately owned company doesn&#x27;t have an obligation to service everyone. They are not violating their free speech, no matter how long you turn it on every side. Kiwi Farms can host their website on any other platform and get any other service they want. No one is forced to service them.<p>Let&#x27;s not forget that they have been known to publicise private information of people that ended up with them being swatted. They are a big enable of this behaviour. Not only that, but they have been also involved in three suicides at this point. I don&#x27;t think any private company wants to associate themselves with such a client.

De-platforming works.

It’s almost like there are some behaviors we collectively won’t tolerate and if you engage in them people will pull out all the stops to bring you down.<p>Act like an asshole and you end up getting taken down. Who could have guessed?

This really shows again that there is no use in giving in to angry Twitter mobs. There is something not quite right with them and even if they are given what they want, you are still the bad guy because it took too long. It happens again and again and people and institutions still give in.

*They still have a Tor Hidden Service, that&#x27;s it though

I come from a hosting background over 20+ years so I think I have a different perspective that others here. I know cloudflare is a large public company - perhaps it is slightly different for this type of company. As a hosting provider I have in the past been noticed for certain sites with in my network that the general internet is pushing back against hosting. What happens is there is of course bad publicity but also crazy people come out - people threatening employees, getting public information on employees and owners working there, calling and threatening at your house for sites you host - which moves beyond fighting for free speech but over to how much of your personal life you and your employees do you want to disrupt for a website you don&#x27;t agree with and perhaps honestly does nothing to benefit society. So while many people are claiming this is a free speech issue, I can only imagine cloudflare is getting a whole bunch of crazy coming out of the woodwork and threats to their own employees. As a business you need to decide what is worth the safety of your employees and what stands you want to take and cloudflare is deciding kiwi farms is not worth it based on the type of site it is.

I really wish we held large internet platforms to the same standards we do to the phone company or the power company. You shouldn&#x27;t be able to decline service just because you dislike a customer.<p>It&#x27;s getting rather scary that the internet is so centralized these days and anyone who speaks out against the Cathedral loses their ability to speak.

They should consider building their own DDOS protection. I&#x27;ve heard thats pretty simple and something website owners should be expected to do on their own. After all, it&#x27;s not like most website owners rally behind like one or two giant services to mitigate the issue of DDOS against their sites.<p>I for one never voted to have CF and DDoS-Guard as censors of the internet.

Wonder how long it will be before it’s back online or if the owner will throw in the towel.

Stallman is right again…

Where’s the consideration for CFs speech? If management doesn’t want to help serve filth, they shouldn’t be compelled to. They’re a private company. It doesn’t even have to be consistent.

I didn&#x27;t know about this site until yesterday. After reading the thread that got them took down, I know one thing, I will not be letting my children near discord. I mean, if this is how people act in public[0], I hate to imagine what kind of stuff they are doing in a private discord, away from parents prying eyes. There&#x27;s no heroes in this story.<p>[0] Bathtub hormones being sold to minors in bright packaging featuring a cartoon with the speech bubble: &quot;Don&#x27;t look at my giant Girldick&quot; and a warning to &quot;Keep out of reach of parents&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;6DnzT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;6DnzT</a><p>I doubt this person is representative of the trans community, she is probably just the most controversial, and made a name for herself that way. No more heroes, any more.

Works fine for me on Tor.

Freedom of speech doesn&#x27;t mean freedom from consequences. Good to see it.

I am really not surprised. They already bullied someone to death. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Games&#x2F;comments&#x2F;o90ats&#x2F;near_the_emulator_developer_of_bsnes_higan_and&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Games&#x2F;comments&#x2F;o90ats&#x2F;near_the_emul...</a>

APNIC has, apparently, withdrawn the IP addresses and ASN for Kiwi Farms.<p>Fuck with the trans community, get blackholed. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Again? They don’t mess around do they?

If I were ever in a good mood (because censorship bs tends to be common) I&#x27;d laugh at the fact that those who speak so loudly against misinformation (the 3 suicides, the greene swat, the sleeper agent bomb threat) weaponized it to silence an archive of their personal idiocy&#x2F;crimes. It&#x27;s like the usa&#x27;s ministry of truth happened anyway and this is the first step to the end times.

Cloudflare needs to stop terminating weird sites. Here&#x27;s the Daily Stormer, which Cloudflare cut off some time back, and is now back.[1] It&#x27;s not much worse than many other right-wing sites. Neo-Nazis have been around since the 1960s, and they&#x27;ve mostly been a joke. As a kid, I walked past the HQ of the American Nazi Party, a small house in Arlington, VA, with a large &quot;White Man Fight - Smash the Black Revolution Now&quot; sign. Nobody was very upset about it.<p>Some of the militia and gun sites are much scarier. Look at some of the sites referenced at Accelerationism in Wikipedia.[2]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stormer-daily.rw&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stormer-daily.rw&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Accelerationism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Accelerationism</a>

The modern &#x27;Net is demonstrating the ability to interpret abuse as damage and route around it.

Those people are free to go and meet somewhere in private. That is how it used to be done. That approach does not require using services that you do not control. Except for regulated monopoly utilities, most everyone else has the freedom to not be a vendor.

I’m continually surprised that Facebook, Twitter, and the rest dont simply create a web interface for law enforcement that allows them to delete (or more likely make invisible) content they want to censor. Noting in place of the post or tweet or whatever “law enforcement in your jurisdiction has deemed this post illegal and have hidden it for your safety”.<p>There’s a culture war afoot, the government wants to insert itself between the warring parties, there’s no need for executives to place their (their shareholders) company in the way. “Let the dog see the rabbit” as they say. Just harvest the energy in the system and monetise it, if that’s your mission.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;kiwifarms-blocked&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;kiwifarms-blocked&#x2F;</a><p>The cloudflare blog is a better resource on this topic.