Cloudflare family-friendly DNS service flubs first filtering foray: Vital LGBTQ, sex-ed sites blocked 'by mistake' Cloudflare, known for free speech advocacy, rolled out a self-styled family-friendly variation of its DNS service to block adult content – and ended up denying access to LGBTQ websites and sex education resources. Introduced on Wednesday, the service is called 1.1.1.1 for Families. It can be used by home internet users to …
I wish that there had been more information around about this stuff when I was growing up. All I got when I was sent to see a shrink was 'They will grow out of it'. I didn't and it wasn't until I met a great councillor while at Uni that I started to get my mind sorted out.
So many of my trans friends from those days are no longer with us and often through no fault of their own. I volunteer with a well known support organisation. It is mentally hard talking to people close to taking their own life because of the bigotry (mostly refusal to even try to understand) within their families and social groups.
Understandable AC, but how much effort must the REST of the world make in order to satisfy the apparent needs of the trans community? How come "live and let live" is NOT the solution? You cannot change others, but you CAN change yourself. By being as unoffensive as possible you will greatly help your cause, because people will see you as an example of a trans person and say "I know someone..." and be less likely to be prejudiced, bigoted, offensive, etc. towards trans-people in general.
[this applies to religions, too - if members of a particular religion, let's say Westboro Baptists, show the world that they're no longer hating specific groups of people (a very un-christian thing I might add, captain obvious says) but instead are doing good things without compromising their religion, people would be more tolerant and even accepting of them]. OK they're probably not ready to do a gay or trans wedding, but still... and as far as I'm concerned, bigotry is a form of avarice which is ALSO a sin. So if they reject people for ONE type of sin, they should reject themselves for the OTHER kind, too.
ok captain obvious isn't helping now, so no need to thank him. heh.
Which is possibly fine for a smallish group, but the bigger the group the more likely factions will be created, and you'll always have a few knobheads, who are more visually prominent then the rest of the group.
That said, I disagree. People can be knobs and hate someone for being different or making them feel uneasy, nothing to do with the individual or their identity.
"Trans children from conservative SOME religious families may need help from outside sources"
I'd agree with the fixed version. Overgeneralizations about conservatism aren't helping [just as overgeneralizations about gay and trans people aren't helping].
Being 'different' is something you have to deal with all of your life (learn and master martial arts at a young age, and be confident - I suggest THAT for ANYONE).
Being a genius in a world of 'normals', believe it or not, can be JUST as frustrating... maybe even WORSE! (Flowers for Algernon - Charlie was "different" and socially isolated at both ends of the intelligence spectrum, but at least when he was mentally disabled, he was happy).
"So what's wrong with keeping children away from trans-activist sites? Or any other body dysmorphia activist sites such as pro-anorexia sites?"
Being transgender is not body dysmorphia. About 30 years ago, the health insurance system in Germany had to decide about who pays for treating transgender people, and how to do it. And their result was quite clear: 1. It is a medical problem. 2. There is nothing wrong with the mind, what's wrong is the body. 3. Therefore, people have the right to have the correct medical treatment and to have it paid for by their health insurance, and the correct medical treatment is gender reassignment.
With anorexia, the anorexia itself is a medical problem. And it is a problem of the mind, not the body. Therefore, pro-anorexia sites do NOT help the patient but cause them harm.
"2. There is nothing wrong with the mind, what's wrong is the body. "
Citation very much needed. Until someone finds an _actual_ cure then the case remains open - just because a judge decided one way doesn't make it so. But even if it is a physical 'fault' then psychotherapy would still appear to be extremely useful.
I figured it was an opinion anyway, but it WOULD be interesting to see some science.
I'll put some science in here regarding male homosexual sheep, who were born with part of their brains "female sized" - a part responsible for aromatase metabolism with respect to testosterone, as I recall. These sheep had clear developmental differences in their brains, which was directly linked to their behavior (homosexuality). That being said, it's most likely a propensity and not a guarantee, but even so, becomes an actual medical issue of possible "female brain in a male body". And that's what I think the "what's wrong is the body" statement is really referring to.
So ^^^ there is some science. Does it help?
Indeed. Is the body functional? Where does sexual attraction take place, if not in the mind?
The strict materialists will say the mind is just a representation of a physical state of the body, but in that case, the universe is just a big physics machine and (as Dawkins will tell you) love and free will are illusions, in which case, nothing matters as the mind is not conceptually more important than the arrangement of atoms in a rock.
I've had an interest in body dysmorphia for a while (eventually I'll get around to writing my paper on how laws will need to change in order for voluntary cyborgs to be created). I genuinely do not see how the law can allow elective body-altering surgery on the grounds of a person feeling that they are the wrong sex, yet not for feeling that they have the wrong arm or leg*. The difference between how people with gender dysphoria and those with anorexia are treated is also a significant bafflement - one is encouraged, the other is subjected to horrifying treatment**.
I don't care whether someone wants to have their body altered, but I do care that the law and medical treatment are inconsistent.
*People do feel this, and either commit suicide or do their own surgery - I have nursed people who removed limbs by train, shotgun and ligature.
**I refused to take part in force-feeding anorexic patients - it is barbaric.
So 99% of humans have been Nazis for thousands, even millions of years then? Doubt it.
Each to their own, I have no issues with people who live their lives however they want, but don't force it on others and leave it for people to reach adulthood to decide how they want to lead their lives.
"So what's wrong with keeping children away from trans-activist sites? Or any other body dysmorphia activist sites such as pro-anorexia sites?"
Holy shit! I never thought I'd see a real life one of you! It's like if I saw a panda up close and the first thing it did was spout slurs that made me want to extinct it!
if it's a voluntary service that PARENTS want, I agree with giving it to them. Generally, however, I think it's better to deal with it like this: warn your kid about the internet, trolls, pedos, child exploiters, whatever, and just say "there is a LOT of stuff on the internet you really don't want to see, really disgusting shock sites, bizarre human behavior, sick and disgusting things like pictures of somebody's crap, and the kinds of things you really don't want to fill your mind with. There's not enough brain bleach etc. etc. etc.".
Then you kinda monitor what's going on, but keep the channels open. Seriously, if you treat a kid as being responsible, and give him the knowledge and parental availability for making rational decisions on his own, chances are he WILL make rational decisions on his own at an age where you still have a LOT of influence, and that's likely to last the rest of his life.
Either that, or shelter your kid like a "preacher's kid" might be and watch ALL HELL break loose when he turns 18 and discovers porn, sex, drugs, bizzare human behaviors, and so on (kinda like what OFTEN happens to PKs in college or in the military).
(ironically chosen icon)
What's wrong with it is that it's trying to address reality by covering it with cardboard. You can either have people with the condition attach to a preexisting culture which has evolved to be at least moderately compatible, or you can have them grow up not knowing what their own deal is, become severely alienated from your civilization, and join up with someone who wants to tear it down.
The way you avoid having "trans culture" "gay culture" et al. while also avoiding having a shadow population of deeply embittered, alienated young men and women is to have the government kill them at least as soon as they're able to oppose you. Insofar as we are not Aztecs, I think a society built on killing teenagers is unsustainable.
I feel sorry for children who have questions and fears, and are forbidden from finding resources themselves that could help them understand who they really are.
Anyway, that's beside the point. The filter is supposed to block malware and porn, not human-rights campaigners. That's presumably the mistake Cloudflare's referring to.
C.
No, it's not advertised as a porn block (at least on their website). It's advertised to block "adult content", you assumed that meant porn. However, everyone has different ideas of what is "adult content", and it's really a spectrum anyway - you don't want your 5 year old watching a 15-rated movie by accident, but you'd probably have no problem with your 15 or 16 year old watching it.
The fundamental problem is that Cloudflare haven't documented what they consider to be "adult content" (at least not anywhere I could find). They need to come up with a formal policy of what it takes to be "adult content", publish that, and have a way to report problems.
Similarly, they need a definition of "malware". A web site using drive-by attacks to infect you just by looking at it is clearly malware. Unless it is a documented Proof-of-Concept as part of disclosing or discussing or testing for a vulnerability, and the payload is harmless. But tools like the VNC remote desktop tool have been classed as "malware" in the past, just because a lot of malware uses them and they're a small open source project that can be ignored when they complain about being misclassified.
They also need to clarify in those policies what happens if a domain contains *some* "adult content", e.g. if a news site publishes one risqué image does the whole domain get blocked? What about chat sites like Reddit, that has a lot of forums that would be interesting to children (e.g. computer game discussions), but also has a lot of explicit adult forums?
If they publish their policies, parents can make an informed choice whether to use them or not.
And there is a large difference in what is considered "adult content" between the USA and Europe. A bare breast or some mild expletives are considered "adult content" in the USA, while nearly nobody in Europe even raises an eyebrow. On the other hand, nobody in the USA blinks at blood, gore and mayhem galore at all, while Europe considers that "adult content".
"you don't want your 5 year old watching a 15-rated movie by accident, but you'd probably have no problem with your 15 or 16 year old watching it."
5 year olds wouldn't WANT to watch something targeted at adults or even teenagers, as a general rule. At least, none of the 5 year olds I've ever seen... (they'd wanna see disney stuff, over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and ...)
as for 15 or 16 year olds, if you've already taught them to make reasonable decisions on such things, let them watch what they want. Chances are they won't choose to watch the pr0n and offensive stuff... [because they won't be rebelling - heh]. But that takes some up-front trust-building and early education, and treating them as if they're responsible already [the pygmalion effect - yeah].
Human rights? Since when is internet-based sex-ed for children a vital human right? I certainly never had such a thing growing up. I was oppressed! Oh wait, no I wasn't.
Unless there is some magic new operation which can actually turn a man into a woman and back again, trans is all about amputations and cosmetic surgery. This is not something we should be punting to hormonally unbalanced minors or kids playing dress-up.
I would also suggest that there are very few parents who want their children to be LGBT. I haven't heard many stories about parents telling their kids they don't want any grandchildren. Maybe I move in bigoted circles. Obviously there are some - the world is a big place, but those that do want one are unlikely to be requesting a DNS filter, imo.
Activists are outraged. News at 11.
Ideally you'd decide the filter yourself instead of trusting someone else with it. As that is obviously too much work it would be nice if you could have a menu where you disable certain buckets.
For instance, I would not block nudity but I would block violence, religion and pro-suicide sites.
That solves the values problem, though it doesn't solve the problem that someone has had to decide site X or Y goes into a certain bucket which involves their judgement, not yours.
>> For instance, I would not block nudity but I would block violence, religion and pro-suicide sites.
OpenDNS allows this, it has various categories. However, you might not always agree on how a given site is categorized. For instance, it often classifies anything with nudity as porn, even though nudity has its own category (in my "family values", nudity by itself is not objectionable, it all depends on what the nude is doing).
"there were some categories that were included in Adult Themes by one provider that we missed when we did our review."
So which provider was it? What other sites does it classify as inappropriate for children? If it's blocking LGBTQ, is it also blocking child abuse and reproductive health? How about other right-wing bugaboos like climate change or Islam? And who else uses this provider?
Why does the American definition of family friendly always mean far right? As if normal people don't have families.
I am far more worried about my children seeing violence than sex. They can see naked people all day as far as I care, rather unclothed people than people being shot, strangled, raped, decapitated or hanged. This is the same cesspit of values where Facebook got its policies from where it's fine to post videos of women being decapitated as long as you don't see their nipple during the murder.
Because a child watches 1500 murders before he'sTwelve years old and we wonder why we've created
A Jason generation that learns to laugh
Rather than to abhor the horror
Are there family friendly filters that block violence instead of naked people?
This post has been deleted by its author
They're not censoring the bloody Internet. People are *choosing* to use their DNS filtering service. There's a big difference. It can be removed just as easily as it was put in place. It's a filtering service, it filtered stuff. Others providers like openDNS are available and you can even choose to not block specific sites if you want to.
Presumably it also does it for free?
Fully customisable commercial web filters such as Forcepoint cost considerably more than most families would be willing to pay.
Frankly, sadly, changing a home router's DHCP server to hand out a different DNS server address is going to be well beyond what most parents are capable of. That's if the router even allows that kind of config change. And mobile devices operating on a cellular data connection, or devices that might operate from WiFi outside the home are another problem.
I suspect a significant chunk of parents have no idea how to go about restricting what their kids can access. Especially given the amount of material that they might want to block that sits on multi-interest platforms like Twitter - which apparently has a ton of porn on it, but also loads of musicians, actors etc. that kids would want to get content from.
"Presumably it also does it for free?"
Yes, it is free.
"Frankly, sadly, changing a home router's DHCP server to hand out a different DNS server address is going to be well beyond what most parents are capable of."
If you've not got the technical smarts to put it in place yourself then you're not going to be 'censored' involuntarily are you. Censoring is a strong word and this is most certainly not what Cloudflare are doing.
"I suspect a significant chunk of parents have no idea how to go about restricting what their kids can access."
I suspect a significant chunk of parents don't care what their kids access and never will. There's plenty of advice and ways to filter the Internet for kids if you are so inclined to do so and they're not particularly technical. Companies have made it their business to provide specifically this for decades now. In this article we are talking about DNS filtering which can be done at the OS level if needs be which can be done following a step by step guide. I suspect most people will choose an easier software route if they're not capable.
Fully customisable commercial web filters such as Forcepoint cost considerably more than most families would be willing to pay.
Yes.
However, as of quite a lot of years ago, you could use OpenDNS for web filtering quite nicely at zero cost for home use.
Just set it as the DNS servers used by the network gateway, and anything connecting via DHCP gets the traffic pushed through it. I then talked the parents through setting the filtering through the website, which frankly then had better filtering options that things like websense have today.
Judging by the kids pleading to be allowed to disabled it over many years i'd say it was reasonably effective.
Yes, it is.
Censor: Verb
(transitive) To review in order to remove objectionable content from correspondence or public media, either by legal criteria or with discretionary powers.
(transitive) To remove objectionable content.
Their changes are a censorship technique, just a small one that's voluntary. By using their technique, you agree to their definitions of what is acceptable and what isn't. That doesn't mean they're censoring by force or they're violating someone's rights, but anyone who uses the service grants them the right to decide what they think is objectionable. This is a tricky thing to get right, and there's always some site that, if they blocked it, would annoy you. As I'm not intending to use their filter list, it doesn't much matter to me what they do, but it is worthy of discussion when a place starts to make decisions about what they think is acceptable or not in case you disagree with them and might want to modify your behavior accordingly.
Perhaps Cloudflare's first mistake was getting involved in a business which they've so vocally been against in the past. Namely, censorship. Yes, this is just DNS and it's optional, but at the end of the day they are still providing a service which selectively blocks websites based on a third-party list.
If they want to be truly anti-censorship, they should leave this up to other providers. Otherwise they're trying to have a strong neutral opinion on a topic that they're providing a service for, which is rather counter-intuitive. It's difficult to claim one thing and then offer a service which would be mostly of interest to people who disagree with you. Slight conflict of interest there.
"Cultural Marxism is destroying western societies.
At the end of the day 99.999% of humans are XX or XY. Simples biological fact innit."
Cultural marxism is not a thing.
Please provide verifiable evidence to back up your second statement.
Ignorance is destroying western societies.
Lack of education innit.
I think you'll find words are a social construct and we can define anything we want. ;)
But to the point: "Cultural Marxism" could probably be described as the application of group-struggle theory to non-classical Marxist classes (i.e. not capitalist/proletariat), generally, gender, race and sexual orientation. It is usually considered virtuous that we should help the "oppressed" (minority) groups in an attempt to level the playing field between them and the majority groups. All differences in success are attributed to oppression based on these (often legally) protected classes. Intersections of these classes create even smaller minority groups which are considered to increase the oppression applied. There is generally a perceived oppression pyramid: gender (males oppress females); race (low melatonin people oppress high melatonin people); sexual behaviour (oppressors->oppressed heterosexuals-> male homosexuals->female homosexuals->trans (bisexuals are named but rarely discussed).
The Marxist aspect comes from the idea that everyone is the same and we must make the outcomes for everyone equal, rather than having neutral processes. This ends us back at having gender and race-based discrimination policies. Which builds tribalism rather than meritocracy and leads to large amounts of effort being expended on getting people to do things they don't want to do. The cultural aspect is the policing of outcomes for these classes, generally in the news media, twitter, but also from possible financial pressure, such as loss of credit card processing facilities or perhaps the burying of youtube content so no-one can find your presentations.
It is an attempt to build an ideologically-driven utopia and like all such attempts, tends to be destructive.
To wit, Cloudflare is in trouble because the failed to to provide LGBT sexual behaviour instruction access to children on the internet, despite it being a very, very unlikely that any of their actual customers want this. They will spend time and effort building something no-one wants to buy because of some third-party on the internet who wants to demonstrate to their friends that they have rooted out some imaginary evil.
I'd be inclined to stay off twitter and let them scream into the void.
Wikipedia states that rates of Klinefelter syndrome (i.e. XXY) are at about 2/1000 male births, which is 1/1000 of all humans; therefore even *if* that were the only chromosomal exoticism, I suppose your statement should be ammended to read "99.9%" of humans.
Surely it's obvious that any content filtering system lends itself to bigots and zealots employed by the operator, who will naturally use the system to exclude all sources of information with which they disagree. Since these systems have minimal oversight, the quis custodiet issue will arise for them again and again.
It's good to know that in these trying times, Cloudflare is pleased to serve malware droppers, carder sites, and C&C servers for malware...but draws the line at sex ed sites.
I once had a Twitter exchange with a guy calling himself the head of Cloudflare security. I asked what his policy was on serving kiddy porn. He said something along the lines of "report it to the FBI, not us. It's not our problem. We don't censor." But, you know, a sex ed site? That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish!
My guess is that KP is not out in public much - it will get shut down pronto.
In this case, however, parents are the customers and the content being served is being actively pushed to children, even in schools, from the earliest years. It is out in the open and might be something some parents want to block. You know, the parents... the customers... who pay them money. I'd guess the carder sites are also blocked under the plan, but those guys are much harder to keep up with than Mermaids.
Anyway, DNS security is a tool which will fade from usefulness as DNS/HTTPS/TLS gains a hold. It basically requires broken security. The more it is subverted for "good" or "evil", the faster the old protocols will be dropped.
And I agree with the security guy from Cloudflare. Buy a security layer to go over basic DNS if you want, but we should not be breaking the basic protocols. If you find KP on the internet, report it to the FBI, not some DNS provider.
Let me go through recent spams for phishing, fake store, fake drug, and counterfeit product sites hosted on CloudFlare and run them through 1.1.13:
www.getyourdesignerdealtoday.com - OK
www.wellcustom.com - OK
easysolarsaving.com - OK
bestcompany.com - OK
secure.getinstahard.com - OK
nerveshieldplus.com - OK
fitgens.com - OK
www.hiluxurybags.site - **Blocked**
www.cardiganjackets.com - OK
muama.com - OK
getenence.com - OK
completestrength-cbd-tincture.com - OK
www.ugwns.com - OK
I stand by my original opinion that CloudFlare is doing this to protect their business against other blacklist providers.
Because random websites on the internet have a greater investment in your welfare than your parents?
If the parents are not chill with what you're doing on the internet, that is tough. DNS providers should not be subverting parental control and that internet connection is not a human right.
If you want non-parental help, at least go to someone you know. There's a lot of organisations driven by ideology rather than personal concern. How is a child supposed to know the difference? Why would a DNS provider be trusted to vet the quality of sex-ed suppliers?
Looking around, and reading some of the comments here, it is clear that kids, and adults, don't find out much if left to their own devices.
Questions for the audience: How important is it for a non-LGBTQ+ person to learn about these issues? If they have to battle for the information, how many will make effort? What sort of a society does that produce?
Once the child is not a child, they are supposed to pay for their own consequences.
And what are the long term consequences of not being able to get LGBT sex-ed for the under-18's?
How big is this problem, that you want "society" (government?) to intervene in families in order to provide ideological instruction?
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