We Need to Talk About Infrastructure - EFF redefines what 'essential Internet infrastructure' is, simps for Clownflare and trashes Kiwi Farms yet again

We Need to Talk About Infrastructure​

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Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral. These services should not make editorial decisions that remove content beyond the scope of the law. This is in part because history shows that any new censorship methods will eventually be abused and that those abuses often end up hurting the least powerful.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is defining what exactly "essential internet infrastructure," is, and to which users. We also need to recognize that this designation can and does change over time. Right now, the "infrastructure" designation is in danger of getting tossed around too easily, resulting in un-nuanced conversations at best and an unjustified cloak of protection, sometimes for anti-competitive business models, at worst.

The term “infrastructure” can encompass a technically nuanced landscape of things – services, standards, protocols, and physical structures – each of which has varying degrees of impact if they’re removed from the proverbial stack. Here’s how EFF thinks about the spectrum of infrastructure with respect to content moderation in late 2022, and how our thinking has changed over time.

Essentially Infra​

Some things are absolutely, essentially, infrastructure. These things often have no meaningful alternative, no inconvenient but otherwise available option. Physical infrastructure is the easiest type to see here, with things like submarine cables and internet exchange points (IXPs). These things make up the tangible backbone of the internet. Parts of the logical layer of the internet also sit on this far side of the spectrum of what is or is not critical infrastructure, including protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP. These components of physical and logical infrastructure share the same essentialness and the same obligation to content neutrality. Without them, the internet in its current form simply could not exist. At least not at this moment.

Pretty much Infra​

Then there's a layer of things that are not necessarily critical internet infrastructure but are essential for most of us to operate businesses and labor online. Because of how the internet functions today, things in this layer have unique chokepoint capabilities. This includes payment processors, certificate authorities, and even app stores. Without access to these things, many online businesses cannot function. Neither can nonprofits and activist groups and many, many others. The unique power that things in this layer have over public equity is too much to deny. Sure, some alternatives technically exist: things like Monero, side-loaded APKs, or root access to a web server for generating your own cert with Certbot. But these are not realistic options to recommend for anyone without significant technical skill or resources. There's no denying that when these “pretty much infra” services choose to police content, those choices can be disproportionately impactful in ways that end users and websites can’t remedy.

Not really Infra, but for some reason we often get stuck saying it is​

Then there’s this whole other layer of things that take place behind the scenes of apps, but still contribute some important service to them. These things don’t have the literal power to keep a platform’s lights on (or turn the lights off), but they provide an undeniable and sometimes important “quality of life.”

CDNs, security services, and analytics plugins are all great examples. If they withdraw service the impact can vary, but on the internet of 2022, someone dropped by one service almost always has easy-to-obtain (even if not as sleek or sophisticated) alternative solutions.

CDNs are an important example to consider: they provide data redundancy and speed of access. Sometimes they’re more vital to an organization, like if a company needs to send a one-gigabyte software update to a billion people ASAP. A web app’s responsiveness is also somewhat dependent on the reliability of a CDN. Streaming is a good example of something whose performance can be more dependent on that kind of reliability. Nonetheless, a CDN doesn’t have the lights on/off quality that other things do and only very rarely is its quality-of-life impact severe enough that it qualifies for the “pretty much infra” category we just covered. Unfortunately, mischaracterizing the infrastructural quality of CDNs is a common mistake, one we’ve even made ourselves.

EFF’s past infrastructure characterizations​

At EFF, we are deeply committed to ensuring that users can trust us to be both careful and correct in all of our advocacy. Our framing of Cloudflare’s decision to cut off service to Kiwi Farms as about “infrastructure,” in a post discussing content interventions more generally, didn’t meet that bar for 2022.

The silver lining is that it prompted us at EFF to reconsider how we approach infrastructure and content moderation decisions and to think about how today’s internet is different than it was just a few years ago. In 2022, could we applaud Cloudflare’s decision to not do business with such ghouls while also strongly supporting the principle that infrastructure needs to be content-neutral? It turns out the answer is yes, and that answer begins with a careful and transparent reconsideration of what we mean when we say “infrastructure.”

Our blog post raised concerns about “infrastructure” content interventions, and pointed to Cloudflare’s decision, among others. Yet what happened as a result of that decision is clear: shortly after Kiwi Farms went offline, they came back on again with the help of a FOSS bot-detection tool. It came at the cost of a slightly slower load time and the occasional CAPTCHA for gatekeeping authentication, but that result clearly put this situation in a “not really infra” category in 2022, even if at some earlier time the loss of Cloudflare’s anti-DDOS service might have been closer to infrastructure.

When a business like Cloudflare isn’t really crucial to keeping a site online, it should not claim “infrastructure” status (or use public utility examples to describe itself). EFF shouldn’t do that either.

Because true censorship – kicking a voice offline with little or no recourse – is what we’re really worried about when we say that infrastructure should be content-neutral. And since we’re worried about steps that will truly kick people off of the Internet, we need to recognize that what service qualifies for that status changes over time, and may even change depending on the resources of the person or entity censored.

Infrastructure matters because it is crucial in protecting expression and speech online. EFF will always stand up to “protect the stack” even if what’s in the stack can and will change over time.
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We Did It, Patrick! We Saved the City!​

 

[evilsponge]

The fact that they need to get on all fours and lick tyranny boots before they respectfully disagree shows you just how vulnerable these gender minorities truly are

 

[Aidan]

The silver lining is that it prompted us at EFF to reconsider how we approach infrastructure and content moderation decisions and to think about how today’s internet is different than it was just a few years ago. In 2022, could we applaud Cloudflare’s decision to not do business with such ghouls while also strongly supporting the principle that infrastructure needs to be content-neutral? It turns out the answer is yes, and that answer begins with a careful and transparent reconsideration of what we mean when we say “infrastructure.”

blah blah blah it's bogus wordplay to try to pretend you're in the right while kowtowing to deranged narcissists who flip shit when something they don't like exists on the internet.

You cannot have it both ways. EFF is clearly stepping away from Electronic Freedom in lieu of Some Electronic Freedom or Selective Electronic Freedom .

edit: I realized I should have improved the point being made but now am not sticking around to fix it, you get the idea. They're increasingly wanting to step away from supporting a free and open internet but want to tiptoe around that fact.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

This organization was taken over by transgenders this is why tranny should be immediately kicked out of every single political advocacy organization that believes in freedom of speech because the f****** narcissists who believe the world revolves around them

 

[Carpe Jugulum]

Pussies.

It’s all or nothing you dumb fucks. You may not like us but if this is successful then eventually they will come and censor everyone who doesn’t toe the line.

 

[KiwiFuzz]

God Hates Fags is still online.

 

[HarblMcDavid]

I wonder what kinds of donations or new hires they got in the last 2 or so months...

 

[Butcher Pete 2]

Find out where your local internet infrastructure is. Because the slave revolt against the WEF’s promised chains will involve destroying it.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Probably the combination of a lot of things really. I just feel like 2016 was this tipping point where everything fell into extreme "All things are political".

It honestly makes me sad for a lot of people, because being constantly angry and "afraid", engaging in such strident thought and language policing, all that really fucks a person up. People joke about "fragility", but to an extent it's true. You learn a level of resilience when you just have to cope with things like people disagreeing with you, or thinking your ideas are dumb, your identity is laughable, or just generally not liking you. You adapt, adjust, or learn not to care about the opinions of random strangers.

That amount of stress is actually horrible for your physical health. It makes your immune system weaker and can slow your metabolism. Since a lot of people eat more when stressed, that means weight gain.

 

[Pee Cola]

Translation: “We thought our post was OK until a brick-faced pus-spewing consent accident enjoyer called us and threatened everyone we know.”

I wonder how many "girl talks" were inflicted upon the female board members of the EFF, along with the wives of the male members.

That being said, it looks like there is at least one troon on the EFF board. See if you can spot them.

I was wondering how long it would take EFF to bend over.

I'm surprised it took the EFF this long to be honest.

 

[Next Task]

This is basically 'cancel culture isn't real unless the person cancelled is never heard from again'. With the same implication, because to never be heard from again only really happens if said person necks themselves.

 

[retard strength]

Pussies.

It’s all or nothing you dumb fucks. You may not like us but if this is successful then eventually they will come and censor everyone who doesn’t toe the line.

Some of their other Deep Thunk pieces are about the increase in internet censorship of abortion access and options. If Cloudflare redirected the pregnancy termination page for Planned Parenthood to a screed about how they do not support it and it is a sin and that they support the rights of the unborn, shit would change on a legislative level that month.

 

[ロボ﹏§¤r﹏h¶rœ]

You cannot have it both ways. EFF is clearly stepping away from Electronic Freedom in lieu of Some Electronic Freedom or Selective Electronic Freedom .

KF provides a speedrun on revealing their true face:

What did I tell y'all about the EFF? So many of you were so naive about them. There you go:

A year before EFF went to the mat to protect Google’s surveillance business from “anti-Gmail” legislation, it mounted an honorable legal and public relations campaign against President George W. Bush’s Patriot Act. EFF properly pointed out that the law was a threat to civil liberties, and it rightly criticized government internet surveillance initiatives launched in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks like the Total Information Awareness program, a predictive policing technology developed at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and later handed over to the National Security Agency, among others. EFF worried that these technologies would allow the government to turn the internet into a surveillance machine and compile dossiers on millions of Americans with unprecedented ease—again, an eminently justified source of worry, as legions of NSA leaks have since demonstrated.

But when it came to Google and private surveillance, EFF took a totally different line. Corporate surveillance and government surveillance were totally distinct issues, according to the organization. But for ordinary net users, the distinctions were not so clear. Google assembled dossiers and built predictive profiles of its users in order to more effectively sell them products. To do that, the company vacuumed up every morsel of data that people left behind on its platforms. The NSA’s various surveillance programs, including Total Information Awareness, did the same, but ostensibly to find and detain America-hating bad guys. The objectives differed, but the data and technology was more or less identical. And anyway, the NSA depended on companies like Google to build services and attract users—to create and run the information infrastructure that the agency could tap for intel.
...
In the public sphere, meanwhile, EFF’s vision won out. Concerns about private surveillance were pushed out of the spotlight, crowded out by utopian proclamations about how companies like Google and Big Data would change the world for the better. Privacy would come to mean “privacy from government surveillance.” And corporations? Corporate intentions were assumed to be good—or, at worst, neutral. Corporations like Google didn’t spy; they “collected data”—they “personalized.”
...
But that’s what EFF is all about: it’s a Silicon Valley corporate front group, no different than the rest. The only thing unique about it is how successful it’s been in positioning itself as a defender of the people—so successful, in fact, that even the people who work for it believe it. The fact that EFF has been able to pull it off of for so long shows the kind of immense power that Silicon Valley wields over our political culture. When we think about technology and the Internet, there’s no left or right. There’s just Google and Facebook.

All EFF’d Up | Yasha Levine

The lords of the internet care very little about user privacy—what they want to preserve, is their own commercial license against government regulation of any kind.

thebaffler.com

 

[Nykysnottrans]

I told y'all not to be naive about the EFF ever agreeing to help KF with anything. They won't.
I told y'all that they are hardcore SJWs.
When they talk about "Net Neutrality", that does not include KF. It just includes them and their fellow SJW cult-members.

Julian Assange ditched all of his EFF lawyers. That should tell you all you need.

I was wondering how long it would take EFF to bend over.

I didn't, I knew this was the position they held all along. I just had a hard time conveying this to everyone else here, because people refuse to concede just how woke SJW and partisan the EFF actually is.

Note that the offending blog post was attributed to Corynne McSherry and Jillian C. York. This? Nobody.

Very interesting they didn't put an author on this thinkpiece while claiming it represents all of EFF's "thinking". Cucks.

They didn't put an author on it because this is truly how they all feel about it. This is their collective stance on the issue of Net Neutrality: you only deserve Net Neutrality if you share the same far-left ideology as the EFF. Otherwise, you're on your own.

KF provides a speedrun on revealing their true face:

And remember, this article from The Baffler is from 2018, it's already 4 years old.

Wonder if he'll talk about EFF ultimately being cucks on his MATI show

He already brought up the EFF on a recent MATI. Now that he's not doing the show, take the time to listen to some old episodes. I just finished listening to the whole 2020 and 2021 MATI seasons and listening to those old podcasts with the benefit of hindsight you can see how this was all on par for the course.

 

[ZazietheBeast]

That didn't take long for an institution that was meant to protect the internet to bend over as well. I blame hedge funders and their troon zealots.

The troons are more or less the biblical locusts as anything involving them falls into ruin. Be it infrastructure or order. They are more or less the footsoldiers of the NWO.

That amount of stress is actually horrible for your physical health. It makes your immune system weaker and can slow your metabolism. Since a lot of people eat more when stressed, that means weight gain.

And in turn makes you big pharma's bitch. Just how they like it.

In Burgerland, stress relief and self-actualization isn't something actively taught.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Wow this is totally different than what they wrote a few months ago and very little has actually happened since then. (except even worse attacks on the farms) I get the feeling someone really screeched at them. Even though their "defense" of the farms was cold and barely one at all, it was clearly not good enough for the moral absolutism of the day. This likely was forced, probably by big backers/charities threatening to drop them.. or it could even be about support for their new net neutrality project. (either of which which would explain why nobody would put their name to it) Troons have those kinds of friends.. willing to waste however much time and effort in order to punish and silence the wrong opinions and people.

 

[Bonesjones]

Here is a basic protip for everyone: if an organization is based in a major metro area, filled with Ivy Leaguers, and random foreigners, they'll never be on your side. They are all just another glow nigger front.

 

[Marvin]

Properly speaking, cloudflare shouldn't be considered infrastructure.

DDoS attacks are crimes. They're attacks on interstate infrastructure and should be pursued as aggressively as any other infrastructure. Pirate radio, robbing trains, postal fraud, all of them will get you seriously fucked up by the feds. This should be no different.

If the EFF wants to make the argument that private DDoS protection is analogous to having private security (ie it's a "nice to have" until the police themselves take over), that's fine. But to argue that honestly, they need to also push harder for more federal enforcement of internet crime laws.

We need to see more people doing (or paying for) DDoS attacks arrested.

I know they just raided those DDoS services recently, which is a good start, but until I see the trannies paying for them in bracelets, I won't be satisfied that DDoS protection isn't essential infrastructure for running a controversial site at scale.

 

[heathercho]

I continue to find it bizarre that the farms are such a boogeyman that EFF feels the need to denounce them regularly, instead of just saying "Shit you don't like still deserves to be on the internet, when it's not illegal". Have some balls, for fucks sake.

KiwiFarms: Laughs at people who do stupid shit on the internet.
Social Media Trannies: *seethes* So I was posting my stretched asshole on the internet the other day and Kiwi Farms laughed at it...
Tech Trannies: Then we mobilise. Your asshole stretching is valid and beautiful. We must bring an end to this discrimination and Nazi-ism.
Also Tech Trannies: ....Right after I post my hot take on pedophilia and update my followers on my own stretched asshole.

The EFF is going to defend that because look at them: They're a blob of jews, diversity hires, ugly women and lowercase, utterly pathetic "men".

 

[LurkTrawl]

How many times is reality going to have to rattle people's braincages before it kicks in that the HNICs of the world, have realized that they were too late in controlling information access via the internet, and are moving accordingly to correct that - and that every big-name org that is supposedly for "the little guy" is controlled opposition at best.

It doesn't help that we now have retards clamoring for internet I.D. systems for the dumbest of fucking reasons, helping this little "correction" along. KF may not be a threat in and of itself as it's a lolcow site, but it's the perfect hard-target to take down as a test run. After all if you can take down the farms, you could take down really any website at this point.

Get used to forums like this being things of the past soon because this isn't going to be slowed down or hindered by literally fucking anything it seems.

 

[Sweeter and Savoury]

I hate to say I told you so but....


To think any organization in current year will stand up against the tidal wave of "social justice" is just plained retarded. They are full of useless lefties who only care a out being seen as "good people" in the eyes of the drooling masses.

A few whiney dickless wonders start crying about "transphobia" and the tear like a wet paper bag.

A famous man once said: You are what you when it counts.

The EFF has shown us what they really are Which is some spineless cucks who only take stand for free speech when it's easy.