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Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users

(torrentfreak.com)
234 points gloxkiqcza | 1 comments | 15 Jul 25 14:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.229s | source
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sunshine-o ◴[15 Jul 25 15:47 UTC] No.44572385[source]▶
I came to the realisation recently that the free Internet only happened (in the West) because:

- The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what was this Internet thing about.

- The US Intelligence community understood it was a powerful tool to operate abroad.

- Nobody dared derailing the only engine of growth and progress in many economies

It obviously got out of control and is very abnormal in fact if you consider how power really works.

As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks.

Anyway we are one major cyber disaster away for our the state to switch from a blacklist to whitelist paradigm. A safer and better Internet for everyone.

We will probably still have ways to access the "Free" Internet. It is gonna be fun, slower and might get you in serious troubles.

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xtracto ◴[15 Jul 25 17:56 UTC] No.44573980[source]▶
The thing is, the Internet was supposed to be P2P initially (in Spanish it had the motto "La red de redes" (the network of networks, meaning that it was supposed to connect several LANs together).

But as soon as you had ISPs started, centralization came. Now, most countries will have at most 5 major ISPs, and in reality geographical availability within countries make 1 or 2 available.

Then, originally people had their own websites (I was there!) in their own servers. But Geocities started the centralization trend. And then CDNs, and then MySpace/Facebook and all that.

The only way we are going to get the "freedom" network as it was before is through mesh-networks or similar technologies. Which maybe so far are very slow and cumbersome, but they will have to evolve. I know it is not very fashionable here in HN, but the only see that capable of happening is implementing some kind of "incentive mechanism" that incenvitives people to let data pass through their node in the mesh network; aaaand cryptocurrencies offer an possible solution for that.

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1. rstuart4133 ◴[15 Jul 25 21:16 UTC] No.44575906[source]▶
> The thing is, the Internet was supposed to be P2P initially (in Spanish it had the motto "La red de redes" (the network of networks, meaning that it was supposed to connect several LANs together).T

The Internet is just a commercialised ARPANet. ARPANet was designed to survive bombs taking out a fair percentage of it's nodes. The Internet still has that robust resistance to damage. You can see it in action when anchors cut ocean cables - barely anyone notices. And as the old saying goes, the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

However, the commercial enterprises built on top of the internet love centralisation. CloudFlare is an interesting case in point. They have been champions of an uncensored internet for as long as I can remember, which is one of the reasons they grew to their current size. That growth was always going to compromise that core principle, because once a significant amount of traffic passed through them they would become an attractive target for groups wanting to inflict their views of what's proper viewing for the rest of the world.

But while CloudFlare can't exist without the internet, the internet will continue on without CloudFlare. So while the self appointed gatekeepers have indeed blocked the large hole in the sponge that is CloudFlare, underneath the sponge is still a sponge. Information people find interesting will just take other routes.

Or to put it another way, if they think they have stopped or even appreciably slowed down teenage boys from accessing porn, they are kidding themselves.