I'm Italian, and as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist, I find hard to empathize with Cloudflare, especially after this tweet.
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats" he makes towards Italy.
> In addition, we are considering the following actions:
> ...
> discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.
> Removing all servers from Italian cities
This is my favorite by far. Does he think that this will start a popular uprising? My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand. I hope this ends up as being a push for independent European cloud.
Another italian here; while this whole situation is bad and piracy shield is definitely not the solution, having the cloudflare CEO that threatens to remove free-tier service makes me wonder. They offer a free pill, just to be the "powerful" guys that threaten people when they are paying some million euros.
Well done my friend. :-) I'm already moving websites off cloudflare. bye!
P.S: I believe piracy shield is a s*t idea naturally.
> He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.
It can be both. I run many open source websites behind cloudflare.
It's the same as github. All the free hosting and free CIs and free issues/discussion forums, and free code review for open source repos (90% of all open source projects?) happens to be a a loss leader as well.
Both are still a huge free contribution to the world. They don't have to do it. They could just have zero free anything.
What market share would they have without offering the free tier?
Much lower than what they have now, and that would make for a more decentralised and resilient internet
> and that would make for a more decentralised and resilient internet
The only people that say that haven't run a site on the open internet in the last decade plus. It's such an ignorant takes it's hard to take anything you say seriously.
I’m not advocating for having no protections at all. Without Cloudflare giving away protection for free it’s entirely possible that we would have multiple smaller provider offering protection at a fair price so maybe only a smaller fraction of the internet goes offline next time Cloudflare pushes a bad configuration
Im sorry but your epistemics are very wrong. Providing a free service with no strings attached to nearly every website in the world adds a ton of value, possibly more than Cloudflare’s market cap. And the fact that a free product can lead to profits, when other companies make the choice to pay more, does not remove that worldly contribution.
Cloudflare is clearly in the right. Global censorship from an unaccountable cabal is a moral wrong. There's no sense in which Italy somehow 'wins' here, because even if they win, they lose.
Presumably AGCOM are accountable to the Italian government and therefore ultimately the Italian people. Or do you just mean 'unaccountable' in the sense that Americans should be able to do whatever they please, wherever they please, and they don't appreciate being hindered by trivial things like other country's laws.
I am very pro-piracy, but calling to Trumpist elite reads like he thinks that European instututions have no right to censor Internet, because they are European, while controlling the Internet is an exlusive American right.
I really think Europe should adopt a Chinese approach to copyright, but I don't expect US to like it at all - they started it all after all with DMCA etc.
> In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand.
This isn't international law though. It's an authoritarian move by the Italian government. "Technically" and "legally", you're correct that Cloudflare is wrong for not building infrastructure to help Italy censor the web from Italians, but sometimes you should break the law if you disagree with it strongly enough.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I find it interesting that no where in your comment did you try to justify the behaviour other than to say "it's the law". But that is the problem. Why is it the law? Do you think the law is justified?
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
Completely agree with you there. Seems like a pretty stupid move to be honest. If I were CEO of Cloudflare I'd probably just shut my mouth and censor the internet.
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
While that is true, the datacenters hosting those servers are going to lose a massive amount of monthly income by not having those servers colocated anymore.
And just out of curiosity, how many small/medium websites would have the in house know-how to switch to a different CDN? Cloudflare fronts your site, giving you an 'automatic' CDN, where most others require changes to your site to work with.
> I suspect they'll follow the law and do what the court says
Which, to me, seems like a clearly worse outcome? I hate the feudal masters more than most on HN, if that somehow matters for the credibility of my own opinion.
The free offerings are not a loss-leader in the conventional sense of anticipating future upsell. They are a traffic generator used to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product, the enterprise DDoS protection, with the criticality of traffic interchange expenses being evident in the vehemence with which Cloudflare discuss peering matters, such as via the astroturf’d “bandwidth alliance” grouping they sponsor.
In which vein, anyone familiar with The Peering Playbook will recognise the kind of annoying hardball Prince thinks he is playing, but I doubt it works on nation states.
>In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand
International law??
Italian law you mean.
Why should 1.1.1.1 block a site because some Italian wanted it blocked? Sod off.
Also I am Swedish, so EU here too. Sick of this whiny victim attitude.
Note the "general line". You know, bombing boats in international waters, abducting awful dictators and "running" the country sidelining the opposition, threatening to take over an autonomous territory of Denmark, meddling with German and British politics and generally behaving very much like fascists and a wannabe dictator.
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing.
It's a very unhinged, very Trumpy response. The repeated use of "cabal" and hyperbole is, as you say, embarrassing.
It's useful to know this is the official voice, tone, and attitude of CloudFlare. Now I know not to recommend it to my company. The owners would not be happy to do business with an organization that has its politics and alignment so close to the surface.
My conspiracy theory is that the EU is actively trying to create their own cloud through regulation after seeing the economic success from china's internet companies after the great firewall.
Unfortunately, the EU is not nearly coordinated for such a thing. And even if they were, regulation is not what will make it happen. EU is in a crisis of financial (VISA, AmEx) and software services (AWS, MS, Google) being almost entirely provided by USA. They are not going to dig themselves out of the hole by regulation.
For contrast, USA is (largely) dependent on China, Korea, and Taiwan for chips. But they decided to attack the problem by investing several hundred billion dollars to develop their domestic microchip manufacturing infrastructure [1]. This appears to be paying dividends already as TSMC is already producing chips in Arizona, and estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030.
It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.
This is called "digital sovereignty", and it has been a major topic for OpenInfra foundation and other open source cloud foundations. Open source, and open cloud software, is the way to ensure your data can stay inside your own borders and be governed by your local laws. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvz2PcHq0yY is one example of folks talking about this, but realistically you can find talks from OpenStack/OpenInfra going back 4/5 years on this topic.
That's definitely happening. The US does this through massive government spending on American solutions. The EU is only starting to go that route as well.
A group of people who were elected by nobody, should, without any accountability or due process, be able to ban any website they don't like from the internet? And not just for Italians but globally?
Even if you think this is a great thing for Italians (I have no idea why anyone would think that), you expect the whole world to surrender to this absurd demand? Categorical imperative???
Piracy Shield only works within Italy. No provider has ever been expected to take down sites globally in response to a Piracy Shield trigger, or has ever done so.
Also read the start of the comment. See this?
> as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist
unfortunately this preamble doesn’t add the weight you assume it should. what has being italian got to do with having an opinion on this? this and all the other “italian here” takes below. fwiw unless eastdakota is being intentionally malicious, he, with the cloudflare legal team, understands the situation and its implications for cloudflare better than any random italian.
Cloudflare is talking about Italian law and Italian policy and making comments about his actions they will take in Italy with Italian users specifically.
“Italian here” as in “I am not a random person with no skin in the game / I live in the country and presumably am more well informed on the policy he is talking about.
If there was a post about a law in nyc, I think it would be helpful to hear takes from New Yorkers.
I also didn't enjoy the bit where, after saying the EU was against what Italy is doing, then blames the whole continent of Europe for this policy...and then inflicting it on the UK, which despite brexit, is still in Europe
The PKM I've been using lately, SiYuan, does exactly that, and I think their business model isn't bad: the client is fully FOSS, there are some client-side paid features with a one-time subscription (WebDAV/S3 sync "bring your own server") and some server-side paid features with a more expensive recurring subscription (cloud space provided by them).
I don't particularly like client-side paid features, but:
- The client is fully FOSS, you can just patch the license check out. In fact, there are some forks on GitHub that do just that and provide binaries, and the authors don't seem to care, they even acknowledged them on Twitter (https://x.com/b3logos/status/1928366043094724937).
- There are plugins to sync without a paid plan
This works out quite well for them: if you choose a fork or a sync plugin, you don't get the same support that paying users do, so many users still end up buying a license. But you don't need to, which makes the whole thing not user-hostile.
I have bought a one-time license myself, and I'm very happy that I'm supporting the development of a FOSS project.
Fyne is an interesting library, and although I'm sure it can do a good job on the desktop, last time I tried it I was disappointed by how "meh" it works on mobile (Android in my case).
It does run, but I feel like it's more of a prototyping tool, or a tool for building internal apps.
It's kinda slow, graphically inconsistent with the rest of Android, and it has little to no support for features like foreground services, the camera, and more.
I really hope they can improve, but with limited resources and funding, and such a wide scope, I'm not sure if they will ever be ready for more complex projects.
In any case, best of luck to the devs!
How is that a good thing? Are we, as a society, forgetting the value of diversification, or just ignoring it because convenience is good? Do you really want to be just one wrongful ban away from being completely offline?
Just an fyi for everyone: while Tangled is built partly on top of ATProto, it differs from its component architecture widely, as the tasks that should be done by the AppView are offloaded to "knots", self-hostable servers specific to Tangled that do most of the Git heavy lifting.
It violates the "user data stays on the PDS" principle, as repo data stay on knots, not in PDSes. As far as I know, no other ATProto application has a similiar architecture.
So, a marketing video made by a random guy and uploaded to TikTok, which was then removed from TikTok as they found it to be in violation with their policies, is somehow TikTok's fault?
Don't you think they would have kept the video up if they really had a "mission to sow dissent in free western countries"?
Do you have any source that can prove this kind of video exists not because people like dark humor, but because of a deeper conspiracy?
Have you considered Anubis? I know it's harder to install, but personally, I think the point of Mastodon is trying to avoid centralization where possible, and CloudFlare is one of the corporations that are keeping the internet centralized.
I honestly can't wrap my head around what some users do just to have the "stock" experience.
In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth.
Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?
Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?
I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.
> In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well.
UBlock: Solved by using YouTube Premium
SponsorBlock: Solved by not watching low-quality channels with sponsors. Also YouTube has started rolling out their own version of SponsorBlock to skip these segments.
No Translation: Yeah, this is a pain in stock YouTube
DeArrow: Why would I want clickbait thumbnails and titles fixed? Those are perfect indicators of a low quality video to not click.
> Same goes for Windows
Sure does. People who want a nice experience get a Mac, which is somewhat equivalent to paying for YouTube Premium.
> GrayJay
Can't install it on a Roku or on Apple TV. YouTube Premium is still the best option for TV watching.
What's your argument here? That if you don't pay you shouldn't get a decent user experience, and paying solves every issue so we might as well give into the enshittification?
The SponsorBlock and DeArrow argument only works some times: clickbait and sponsors can be an indicator of poor quality (see Linus Tech Tips), but they aren't always: even Tom Scott video thumbnails and titles used to get DeArrowed, and I bet no one here would argue that Tom Scott used to push low quality content.
It's normal to pay for products and services which you use and which gives you value. But I also know that hackers have time to argue for at least 13 hours per day why they shouldn't have to pay.
YouTube offers the option to not pay, and instead have horrible interruptions with ads. Maybe in the future they will stop this nonsense and put everything behind a paywall, who knows?
But for normal people wanting to watch YouTube on their TV, there's really no option besides Premium. And it's really an incredible bargain compared to the value you get from it.
> clickbait and sponsors can be an indicator of poor quality (see Linus Tech Tips), but they aren't always
Agree. But I'd rather see a clickbait thumbnail from one of my subscribed channels than be fooled by a cleaned up thumbnail from a clickbait channel.
In recent news from the "land of the free": a Norwegian tourist was detained by ICE and denied entry at Newark Airport for having a funny picture of JD Vance on his phone.
You can claim what you want about freedom of speech being guaranteed in the USA, but the reality shows that it only applies for some people.
First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats" he makes towards Italy.
> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.
> Removing all servers from Italian cities
This is my favorite by far. Does he think that this will start a popular uprising? My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.
In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand. I hope this ends up as being a push for independent European cloud.