Kiwi Farms, Cloudflare: Australian internet law could take site offli…
archived 4 Sep 2022 06:01:33 UTC
A trans software engineer is trying to take Kiwi Farms offline with new Australian internet powers
A former Google engineer has requested Australia's eSafety Commissioner take action against far-right forum Kiwi Farms.CAM WILSON
SEP 02, 2022
A software engineer is trying to take offline the far-right hate website Kiwi Farms using new Australian internet powers, thanks to the online forum’s little-known connections to the country.
Liz Fong-Jones, who is trans, is a former Google engineer who has been targeted and trolled by Kiwi Farms users in the past.
The nearly decade-old US website is notorious for hosting hate content — including the Christchurch mass killer’s footage and other terrorist manifestos — and coordinating harassment, stalking and revealing private information about people (known as “doxxing”).
Kiwi Farms members have relentlessly bullied people who’ve expressed suicidal ideation, often picking on marginalised groups. Multiple suicides have been linked to the forum.
Last month, a major Canadian trans Twitch streamer called Keffals (real name Clara Sorrenti) campaigned to take Kiwi Farms offline after someone used her details revealed on the forum to send a fake email threatening mass violence. Keffals was subsequently arrested and detained before being cleared.
Since then, Keffals has led a #DropKiwiFarms campaign against Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company whose services protect Kiwi Farms from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Cloudflare’s continuing support has played a crucial role in keeping Kiwi Farms online. Earlier this week, the company suggested in a company blog that it wouldn’t pull its services in response to public pressure.
Kiwi Farms’ Australian connections
Fong-Jones has asked Australia’s internet censor, the eSafety Commissioner, to take action against Kiwi Farms — something that’s possible because of its previously undiscovered connections to Australia.Earlier this week, Fong-Jones submitted a complaint to the Office of the eSafety Commissioner that claimed Kiwi Farms hosts terrorist and cyber abuse content.
Under the recently passed Online Safety Act, the eSafety Commissioner can request that companies block abhorrent violent-conduct material (such as the depiction of terrorist acts) and remove adult cyber abuse material — refusing to can result in fines of $550,000.
This typically wouldn’t be a problem for a US-hosted website outside of Australia’s jurisdiction. However, Fong-Jones claims that Kiwi Farms operates using an IP address leased to an Australian shell company by the regional internet address registry the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC). Kiwi Farms is operated by American company 1776 Solutions LLC. This company uses IP space assigned from Australian company Flow Chemical Pty Ltd, which does not appear to use its delegation of addresses for anything else.
Additionally, Cloudflare is also subject to Australian jurisdiction due to its physical presence in the country. Not only does Cloudflare have an arm in Australia, but it also owns physical servers here too.
In layman’s terms, Cloudflare’s DDoS protection operates by keeping local copies of customers’ server information in servers around the world. This means that it is, in effect, hosting the same content as Kiwi Farm’s self-hosting and may be subject to the Online Safety Act provisions too.
Both Cloudflare and a director for Flow Chemical Pty Ltd have been contacted for comment.
Fong-Jones has asked the eSafety Commissioner to request that APNIC withdraw 1776 Solutions’ hosting, taking Kiwi Farms offline around the world, and to order CloudFlare to stop caching Kiwi Farms — or face enforcement actions. Both companies have Australian directors who could be subject to those fines.
Fong-Jones told Crikey that she had received a receipt of her complaint from the office. A spokesperson for the Office of the eSafety Commissioner didn’t confirm or deny that they had received a complain. They told Crikey that they don’t discuss the details of an investigation.
Fong-Jones said she chose to act when she saw what was happening to Keffals.
“Australia has some of the strongest online speech restrictions in the world. I wanted to know why we couldn’t use these tools for some good to prevent violence and harassment and all the things they said their powers could be used for,” she told me in an interview.
“This is a litmus test for those laws.”
Fong-Jones and Keffals are also organising a protest outside of Cloudflare’s Connect conference in Sydney next week.
“It’s time to show the leadership at Cloudflare that this is not going to go away. It’s time to stand up against hate,” she said
Update: The article originally incorrectly stated that the Office of the eSafety Commissioner had confirmed they had received a complaint.
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Australian media confirmed as two faced cunts. This same organisation just went begging for money from the public because Rupert Murdoch's sprog is suing them for defamation. They're claiming this lawsuit is just censorship wrapped as defamation.
"Censorship is only bad when it's against us"
