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Allegation: Tier 1 Censorship (Cogent dropping routes due to Kiwifarms)?
These just surfaced.
@Kiwifarms: I believe it is a blackhole. It is likely Cogent is announcing the subnets and dropping connections to the singular IP, which would be illegal if they do not have authorization to announce those subnets. I think they did this before with HostSlick.
Disregarding the fact if kiwi is hate speech place or not, and if it should remain or not, let's instead focus on the alleged censorship efforts of the Tier 1 provider.
Can anyone who is competent enough confirm this from routing?
Can someone tag Joshua to explain those claims? I remember he was registered in here at previous threads.
What does this mean for the internet? Is this collapse of the Internet highway known as Cogent in real time? or is this something that has always been done and just not reported before?
Comments
@Arkas Please, moderate everything that is not related to the technical censorship / cogent and it's resellers.
Let's not talk about gender issues here or specific people and their motives here. Only the technical side of this incident.
(If you got time and will xD)
ugh who cares anymore. the whole kiwifarms saga is fucking annoying at this point
Regardless of what Kiwifarms does (do's and don't), he is right. I don't like the site actually, but what's wrong is wrong.
This shouldn't be possible or done ever to anyone.
If ISP has a ground, they can go get a court order and banish them, no issues. But being judge, jury and executioner themselves is playing with fire.
If this doesn't concern you yet, then you might be of type, that only realise things have gone out of hand when your house has half burnt down.
i voice no opinion on what cogent did. i voice no opinion on whether kf belongs on clearnet or not
my only opinion is the fact that its annoying to keep having kf threads on let
we are going in circles, its fucking annoying
Why? LET is one of the most active forum. Quite decent maintained, deals with ASN routing, Hosting and ISP.
This seems a good fit to me.
Let me ask you this, did you vote for your government before blasting at them for incompetency for anything?
Now, I of-course don't know you personally, but that's the case with most people.
real
also just to throw it out there, the debate about kf is just the age old free speech being protected isnt mutually exclusive of hate speech being illegal. in the united states freedom of speech is protected by the country's constitution but no one seems to ever wonder why saying and i quote, exclusively for purposes of demonstratio, "i am going to kill the president of the united states" is illegal by u.s. law. (hint: it's because that isn't an opinion, in much the same way that saying you want to "kill all trans people" is also not an opinion - these are both very direct statements of intent).
We've been waiting over a month now for Cogent to light up a port for us in KC.
Now seeking alternatives, haven't committed fully to sticking with our plans to use them and haven't fully committed to shit-canning them either. Not sure why companies bend the knee to people who aren't even potential customers. It's like Popeyes changing some internal policy over the request of vegans. (Assumption being this is led mainly by Twitch streamers and other personalities that don't self-host anything)
You know what is online right now, and without public outrage? Hamas websites. The KKK. Literal neo-nazis. ISIS. Some vile, awful, horrible content. Most of which is behind Cloudflare and or routes that go over every other major ISP without service interruption.
The internet sucks.
hurr durr 1st amendment rights hurr durr
screw kiwifarms.
Edit: want to give a reply with a little bit more substance:
what is happening right now at cogent (and all the other carriers dropping kf like dead flies) is a consequence of a little thing capitalists pretty much invented called "voting with your dollar". this phrase comes up time and time again when people complain about the lack of regulation large corporations are subject to, where people are told to "vote with their dollar" (i.e. do boycotting) for companies that do respect their values and interests.
cogent is merely avoiding the public relations disaster that would happen if people picked up on the fact that they are providing connectivity to one of the internet's most hateful forums to ever exist.
also, for what it's worth and for those crying "bReACh oF tHE FirST aMEnDMeNt", companies in the united states are not obliged to honour your first amendment rights in the same way the government is. private companies absolutely can and will boot you off if they do not like what you have to say. this is by design. it's called the free market, something that the right-wing bootlickers that regular kf will happily tell you they stand for and love (until it doesn't suit them of course).
TL;DR: cogent is saving themselves money by losing, at most, perhaps a couple thousand dollars from dropping downstreams providing connectivity to kf. this is nothing compared to the millions they'd be paying if people found out (and got upset) about their indirect support of kf and had to start doing damage control. why they choose to do this is merely part of some risk management strategy they've got going on. it's capitalists doing capitalism, if you don't like it then perhaps it's time to start voting differently ?
Did you already place the order? Are you with Cogent directly or FDCServers? Our orders with Cogent have also taken a really long time, but after it was delivered, it was smooth sailing from there.
Evidence proven in court and official statement from T1 provider posted? I guess no? Than it is bullshit.
why kiwifarms still exist? they should hide themselves behind tor forever!
If that turns out to be true, I will factor in "uses Cogent?" into my buying decisions. As a fat Minus.
I absolutely don't care about kiwifarms, I'm totally neutral on that; people are - or at least should be - free to go or not go there.
What I do care a lot about though is to keep the internet free of any kind of dictatorship, no matter whether governments, regimes, or corporations.
If Cogent feels free to abuse their power, we should feel free to boycott that company as best we can.
Let's keep the discussion on Tier 1 censorship and it's long term effects.
Nobody really cares about kiwifarms, there has been too many topics as stated before. What we want to know is, is this censorship or not? Can it be confirmed or not? If it is censorship, is it justified for Cogent to do this? What does it imply for future?
I'm personally against Tier 1 ISP acting against single website. I would agree with them dropping the entire provider if they don't want them hosting something under cogent network. If they do this, why can't they just drop routes globally to all pirate sites by same logic? there are very clear targets this could be applied for immediately.
As for the site in question: I'm neutral to the fact if it should be on internet or not, but i'm well aware how negative/naughty/evil/bad the place is.
Argument for: Some place people can complain about their bad feelings, so they won't go mad with guns in real life location. It also keeps all the annoying discussion away from general forums. Also allows authorities to monitor and react more easily if they comply with legal requests in some special cases.
Argument against: It can radicalize already deranged people into worse acts due to concentrated amount of hate. (i.e. the New Zealand case, which lead into the Sri Lankan Hotels case.)
But we can all agree that its arguably a bad forum with mostly if not completely negative content. Is it bad for it to exist or is it a neccessary evil is not really the point of this topic.
Ask yourself, why does the government have to take your rights into consideration, but a company does not? Saying that an ISP who is not owned by the government can enact censorship just because they are a company doesn't take away from the fact that the internet is and has been an essential service for a long time, and should be in the same category. Do you make this same argument for countries whose postal service, water, electricity, etc are privately owned?
You haven't actually argued that it is right for Cogent to do what they are doing. You have argued that despite the fact that what they did is wrong, they can do whatever they want because they are a company. And the point of this thread is not to discuss whether Cogent can do what they want, but rather debate whether their actions are wrong. So, I'm glad we're on the same page there.
@Arkas and others, just nuke the thread if it goes overboard xD
More information:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/cogents-ceo-is-directly-involved-in-trying-to-censor-the-kiwi-farms.174372/
https://archive.ph/0gYTv
KF claims appear to be factual, their mevspace ipv4 is indeed nullrouted by Cognet.
appears to be directed at one /32.
Whats a " Leaks of Public Interest " ?
@JoshuaMoon
In my opinion, you are also annoying. To borrow a rule from KF, "If you have nothing to say, don't say it."
What are you even trying to say? To quote Doxbin, "It is impossible for some php code to harass somebody."
When someone's, for example, Discord chats get leaked, revealing that they are a pedophile, the leaked Discord chats become a matter of public interest.
Is it wrong? Presumably Cogent is their upstream, or they wouldn't be able to exert this much influence on their customers. TBH, I don't see how this instance is any different to the previous times their upstreams shut them down.
Here's my take on why it is right: If you are morally opposed to a certain activity, you (as a person or a company) be able to explain that to clients and take the stance that if they support that activity you will no longer keep them as a client. Nobody should be forced to be complicit in an activity they find morally repulsive.
Here's my take on why it's wrong: as a customer engaging in activities that are considered legal, you should be able to procure services for legal activities on the same basis as anyone else. The obvious example of this being upheld in law was in the UK when the cake shop run by Christians refused to make a gay celebration cake. Even that seems like it's not been fully settled, as when I googled it to provide a link, I found this: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/jan/06/gay-cake-row-man-loses-seven-year-battle-against-belfast-bakery . Another example is the controversy when Coutts decided to drop Nigel Farage as a banking customer because his reputation was negatively impacting them, although ironically in this case it backfired on them because they then broke the specific law requiring banks to treat equally regardless of political views and prior to the news breaking, few people even knew he was their customer.
Despite both those two opposing positions, there is the simple fact that you alluded to - in a capitalist environment, companies are generally free to not engage with any customer who is bad for business, unless there is specific regulation in place. And that makes sense - every activity a company makes should be on the basis primarily on whether it will help or hinder them to achieve their objectives, whether to maximise profit, maintain integrity (however they define it) or for whatever political outcomes they are aligned to. There are many examples of companies who refuse to engage with military customers, or who chose not to work with specific clients because they themselves do, refuse customer who promote anti-green ethics, or simply those who reject customers simply because they know the income that client will generate isn't worth the additional workload it will bring.
The central issue we're arguing is neutrality for service providers, and while normally it'd be a pretty clear case that they'd be obliged to keep providing service as that is protected, it's also true that the platform is full of hate speech, owners who refuse to moderate it, arguably an implicit support for doxxing to inciting physical harm and confrontation of others, so it's easy to make the counter case that the platform exists to support hate-speech and so they shouldn't be compelled to support something that breaks the law.
Ultimately, we all have our own opinions about what is right or wrong in this case, but in truth it's up to lawmakers to decide whether freedom of speech is more important than curtailing hate speech.
What people fail to realize at the moment is, this thing is at par, if not more dangerous compared to Net neutrality.
For people who don't know, you can browse (let's say google and let) at same/similar speed because neither of them can be prioritized for delivery. Now, imagine let served at a dial-up speed (or your fav xvideos) taking 5 minute to load a page, and Facebook loading instant.
Some exaggeration but truth nonetheless. That's net neutrality.
Only in this case, now you can't access the website entirely, at a whim of a ISP.
I always do