Potential downtime this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept)

[denise]

Beginning this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept), users may experience short periods of site slowdowns or difficulty accessing the site. If you do have access issues, they shouldn't last long for you in particular, but the length of time where access issues are possible should last for about a week or so. We wanted to warn you in advance. You may not notice anything, or the site may be down, slow, or unreachable for you for brief periods. The exact length of downtime, and the total potential downtime window, will depend on your internet provider's settings.

This downtime is necessary to move our domain nameservice, our content delivery network (CDN) services, and our denial-of-service protection services away from Cloudflare, our current provider of those services. We've been discussing migrating away from Cloudflare recently due to their refusal to deny services to sites that endanger people's offline security and incite and target people for offline harassment and physical violence. That conversation became more urgent yesterday when, in a blog post about the campaign to encourage Cloudflare to behave more responsibly regarding the types of sites they enable to remain on the internet, Cloudflare's CEO revealed that they regret past enforcement actions where they closed the accounts of sites containing child sexual abuse material and sites that advocate for white supremacist terrorism.

We do not believe we can ethically continue to retain the services of a company that could write that blog post. As those of you who've been with us for a while know, our guiding principles involve supporting our users' expression to the maximum extent possible, and we reaffirm our commitment to protecting as much of your content that's unpopular but legal under US law as we can. However, we also believe it's more vital, not less, for a company with such free-speech maximalist views to have clear, concrete, and well-enforced policies regarding content that does cross their lines, including refusing to provide services to sites that actively incite and manufacture threats to people's physical safety, contain child sex abuse material, or advocate or instruct people how to conduct terrorism. That Cloudflare refuses to refuse services to those types of sites, and has expressed regret about the instances in the past where they have refused services to those types of sites, means we feel we can no longer ethically retain their services.

Things may be slightly bumpy for a bit as we make the transition and work to find the best replacements for the services we've been relying on Cloudflare to provide. We're very sorry for any slowdowns or downtime that may happen over the next week and a half or so, and we hope you'll bear with us as we make the move.

[EDIT: Because there are many of you and one of me, please check the comments before replying to see whether your issue has been addressed! Also, in accordance with the official DW community comment guidelines, please refrain from personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters: all of those will be screened.]

[EDIT 7:12pm EDT: Because the temperature of many comments is frustratingly high, people don't seem to be reading previous replies before commenting as requested, and some people are just spoiling for a fight, I'm screening all comments to this entry by default while I can't be directly in front of the computer for the remainder of the day. We'll unscreen comments intermittently for the rest of the night as we have time, and I'll systematically unscreen all good-faith comments that don't contain personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters when I return.]

[Edit 9/2 6:05pm EDT: having left comment screening on overnight, and seeing the percentage of abusive, bad-faith, or detached-from-reality comments, comment screening will remain on for this entry indefinitely. I'll keep an eye on it for another day or two and unscreen what needs to be unscreened, but probably not longer after that.]

Comments

[the_jubjub_bird]

I hope you wouldn't adopt the practices of Facebook and Twitter who deny free speech to their users?

[sarajayechan]

You're missing the point.

This isn't about free speech, it's about protecting users from actively harmful content like human trafficking and doxxing. As in, things that happen to real human beings and should not be happening to real human beings.

[sab123]

There is no difference. Censorship harms the real human beings. "Human trafficking and doxxing" doesn't.

[sicktosock]

'doxxing doesnt harm anyone' is a pretty hilarious thing to say when the current kiwifarms blowup was started by someone getting swatted due to being doxxed. people can and have been killed by police due to being swatted. that seems like harm to me.

[assholic]

I'm more offended that they actually had the cajones to lump 'human trafficking' in with doxxing like they're the same thing or that neither do any harm at any point ever.

I mean, there was an Oklahoma congresswoman that was doxxed by the police and her neighbor was raped by someone that got the wrong person. doxxing can do infinite harm to someone. so can human trafficking. Censorship? Please. The worst censorship ever did to me is give me a FB ban for hate speech for calling myself a white trash bitch and mentioning a character in a series shooting someone in the series. My life was not changed. I wasn't raped for it or sold to some gross jackass.

Some people really need to think before they attempt to communicate.

[andrusi]

...what do you think "human trafficking" means?

[sheron]

Free speech means they don't go to jail for saying it. It doesn't mean that we have to listen.

Here, for you in xkcd format: https://xkcd.com/1357/

[grazie]

Cloudflare is hosting sites that call in bomb threats to children's hospitals and dox trans streamers, Brant.

[denise]

"Free speech" is the wrong framing! "Free speech" is about the government suppressing or punishing you for what you say, and we aren't the government. Any online site that accepts user-generated content (which is the fancy term for "the stuff y'all post" as opposed to "the stuff the site itself posts") has to set forth content policies that govern what their users can post, because without those policies (and active enforcement of them) a site will be unusable in days, if not hours, because it will be overrun with spam, child sex abuse material, and a thousand other categories of things that make a service impossible to use and create legal liability. Like every other site out there, we have content policies that govern what people are and aren't allowed to post, and we will (and do) remove content that's reported to us that violates those policies.

We do our best to draw those content policies as leniently as possible, and we do allow material that other sites might not -- one of the benefits of being entirely user-supported is that we don't have to worry about restricting user content only to things that advertisers find acceptable, for instance. But like every other site on the internet, we do have content policies, and we do enforce them through various means, from requiring removal of a single post or comment all the way to closing a person's account and not letting them create a new one. For us not to do so would be irresponsible, and it's that very irresponsibility that has led us to conclude we can no longer do business with Cloudflare. A service that says they regret denying service to a site containing child sex abuse material is a service we cannot continue to patronize.

[guinevak]

You're astoundingly patient and I salute you.

[lethe1]

I find it incredible that DW users would challenge your stance on this!

[dewline]

Incredible and horrific.

[shockvaluecola]

my dude, even if you had a point about facebook and twitter (you don't, they're private companies who are allowed to have content policies), SWATting and child sexual abuse material are not free speech.