> methinks you may be shocked by how many sites are paying extortion money to CF.
It is unlikely I'd be surprised, I get greeted by their "Access Denied" pages often enough. According to demo.fedilist.com, we're just short of 28k instances (27,911) and about 20% of those are behind Cloudfed. (I just stopped clicking boats forever. Their boats are automated now but they still don't like to let me past. Fine with me.)
> its gotta be one of the most useful things I've ever read.
I stopped somewhere in the part where they start defining things and skimmed a while. It's kind of a lengthy screed, accomplishes something of questionable utility that definitely will not work on my machine, and with a goal that this thing will not achieve. (Of course the author does not think Bytedance/Reddit/Netflix are worth including on the list; I could speculate as to why.) So I start to smell "aimless bloviating activist" and then the TODO says they plan at some point to turn it into a bash script, which kind of sealed it. They picked the wrong target, the wrong criteria, an unachievable goal of stopping someone from owning too many IP addresses. (Seriously, is the problem that some people have too many IP addresses? How many IP addresses did Cambridge Analytica have? That MBA dickhead from MIT Sloan that scraped fedi to make censorship easier, he's got like a /29 or something, almost nothing.) I think this kind of thing does more harm than good: there's actual, productive stuff people can do but the grandiose, demonstrably useless wheel-spinning actually gets in the way. Like, it's a fun hack, no need to dress it up with a manifesto that actually hurts the alleged goal. It's performance art, but frustratingly close to something real.
(If it's a friend of yours that wrote it, maybe leave off the mean parts and tell him that he can stop scraping whois and just use https://ftp.ripe.net/pub/stats/ripencc/nro-stats/latest/ and that since IPv6 is 128-bit and a lot of ISPs hand out /64s, the limit of 2^24 is exceeded by most SIM cards.)
If CloudFlare hates Tor and I don't run their challenge JS or they just don't like my UA string, then yes, it totally blocks CloudFlare. This is why, on instances where media proxy is disabled (e.g., FSE), I can't see some people's avatars/attachments.
> I prefer to be informed that a site is CF so you can avoid using it at all.
Cloudfed handles that for me.
> A handy add-on for Tor Browser
Oh, I just use Firefox/Seamonkey/mothra and send all the HTTP traffic through Tor; I don't run their browser. iptables trumps plugins anyway, then it extends to any device on the network. Come hop on my wifi, there are no ads, Facebook doesn't work.
> The only extensions out there for it seem to just be ones that improve the editing experience!
Every time I updated vim, I had to disable more stuff that was awful, and every major release created a new and terrible way to disable stuff, like the order files were loaded was completely indecypherable so I had to strace it, then they changed that and there's a syntax-after step and you have to tell it that a thing was already loaded in order to make it not load because whoever writes the *official* ones couldn't manage to ensure they only got loaded once, so I had to add `let loaded_matchparen = 1` to ~/.vimrc and then later had to move it to some kind of before script.
> because he failed to register his website with the US Copyright office and pay them the $6 extortion for safe harbor.
The USC is pretty readable on Cornell: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 . 512(c)(2) "Designated agent" is fairly clear that it applies only to subsection (c) of section 512. 512(c) relates to "storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider", 512(n) is explicit about the scope of qualifications applying only to their respective subsections ("Subsections (a), (b), (c), and (d) describe separate and distinct functions for purposes of applying this section. Whether a service provider qualifies for the limitation on liability in any one of those subsections shall be based solely on the criteria in that subsection, and shall not affect a determination of whether that service provider qualifies for the limitations on liability under any other such subsection."), and links are covered under subsection 512(d) ("information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link"). That is, I don't think that the designated agent clause is relevant in the case under discussion, so I will have to disagree with your speculation that Moon would have to register. KF didn't host any of the content under discussion.
Kiwi Farms aside, I am not certain how 512(c) might apply to fedi. You might be correct about this part. Safe harbor's just one of a large number of defenses against a copyright claim, though. Overall, I am not too worried about that. Even without safe harbor, they'd still have to send a C&D and try to work things out.
> but only if people foolishly treat it as a black box and use the output without understanding every little thing it did
Yeah, nobody would do that. Nobody would run a curlbash, we haven't had years of actively discouraging understanding code by people that tell you to eval the output of their bullshit $PATH-mangler and then write "2.3 Neckbeard Configuration", which starts with "Skip this section unless you must know what every line in your shell profile is doing."¹ It's not like people have been actively discouraged from reading code or going near confusing, scary things like memory addresses for decades until all we have is 30-year-old JavaScript kiddies with neck tattoos and stuffed animals on their desks that never read a research paper and don't know how to write an interrupt handler. :terrymad:
I fully expect to have to debug their complete horseshit codebases and then in 40 years when, like, twelve guys on earth know how to look at a C program without crying, we'll all captured by FEMA and forced to maintain infrastructure while being fed amphetamines and our brainscans will be fed to the supercomputer that makes all the decisions so that we can be summarily executed for crimes like misgendering some JavaScript++ programmer's² fictive headmates.
² JavaScript++ is just a reskin of Scratch only nobody knows how it works and it runs on a machine that emulates an x86-64 that boots into Ubuntu LLLLTS and runs the Docker container that runs the only known copy of JavaScript++.
Alt of a @p@freespeechextremist.com , if you even believe that.If I'm posting here, it's usually because FSE is down.I am working on Revolver: https://liberapay.com/Revolver .