Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.

  • randomname@scribe.disroot.org
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    1 day ago

    No matter what your opinion is on that matter, Cloudflare is a curse rather than a merit imo.

    As we know, Cloudflare’s roots go back to 2004 when Matthew Prince and Cloudflare co-founder Lee Holloway were working on a computer industry project they called Honey Pot. They wanted to close-down the project already, but then, as the BBC reported in 2016,

    [Mr. Prince] got an unexpected phone call from the US Department of Homeland Security asking him about the information he had gathered on attacks.

    Mr Prince recalls: "They said ‘do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is? Is there any way you would sell us that data?’.

    "I added up the cost of running it, multiplied it by ten, and said ‘how about $20,000 (£15,000)?’.

    “It felt like a lot of money. That cheque showed up so fast.”

    Mr Prince, who has a degree in computer science, adds: “I was telling the story to Michelle Zatlyn, one of my classmates, and she said, ‘if they’ll pay for it, other people will pay for it’.” …

    In 2017, Cloudflare also provided services to neo-Nazi sites like The Daily Stormer, including giving them personal information on people who complain about their content.

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