On LulzSec, Censorship & CloudFlare
A little plug on cloudflare, an amazing system.
Thursday, June 2, 2011 was an otherwise unremarkable day in our office until we got word that LulzSecurity.com, a site that had quietly registered for CloudFlare earlier the same day, had allegedly published information it obtained from hacking the Sony Pictures’ website.
Within hours of the publication we got notes from concerned individuals asking us to remove LulzSecurity.com’s website. To some extent, these requests were borne out of confusion. CloudFlare is a network provider, most closely akin to an ISP, not a hosting provider. Thousands of websites sign up for CloudFlare every day in order to be, on average, twice as fast and be protected from a number of security threats ranging from comment spam to DDoS attacks. Because of the nature of our service, unlike a hosting provider, if we had removed LulzSecurity.com or any other website from CloudFlare it would not have removed the content from the Internet. As I noted to several reporters who asked me, the only difference would have been the site wouldn’t have loaded as fast.
Category: Submissions
