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CloudFlare & illegal websites
Hi,
one of my friends came up showing me a website where they offer 3,5 TB of ebooks, audiobooks and mp3.
You might think it is normal warez site but the files are distributed over their own servers (direct download, no warez linking) and they SELL the files per download (0 to 10 euro cents each). They hide behind CloudFlare and use a .to domain to hide their whois.
The page is ranked 10,264 in Germany and 317,821 globally and they have more than 60.000 unique visitors per week which is increasing. The bounce rate is at 20.10% with daily page views per visitor of 6.90.
How is that possible? Does CloudFlare ignore that? Does CloudFlare cache every file? And which hosting company would allow projects like that?
I am a bit shocked how easy it seems to do heavy copyright infringement without catching the responsible people and making ridiculous money.
Cheers,
ecircuit.
Comments
https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/
"CloudFlare is a pass-through network provider that automatically caches content for a limited period in order to improve network performance. CloudFlare is not a hosting provider and does not provide hosting services for any website.
We do not have the capability to remove content from the web. If your submission is found to be legitimate, you will be directed to the appropriate provider for your report. Only reports of URLs resolving to CloudFlare IPs will be reviewed and appropriately handled."
@damoncloudflare
Lots of skiddie booters and private trackers hide behind CloudFlare. Nobody at CF actually cares to enforce anything.
Cloudflare do not host content, they are not required to remove it. If you are the owner of any pirated content, you can forward a DMCA to Cloudflare and they will forward it to the host.
Other than that, not much you can do.
And they don't have to, otherwise forced by law.. they can deny a service by there TOS/AUP etc.. but i can imagne that they dont have the manpower to individually check every submitted link
I sent an abuse notification now. Thank you @Dylan
CloudFlare seems to be a well liked proxy service for a lot of fishy websites:
http://www.cloudflare-watch.org/
I am also curious which hosting company serves the project behind CloudFlare wall. Direct downloads, lots of warez, should be a nightmare for every decent datacenter or hoster.
It is not that hard to find a host allowing such content. Websites like uploaded and rapidshare run in countries where it is legal to host and share copyrighted contents (ignores DMCA since it is US only law) Such hosts are often refered as offshore host
Direct downloads means you get the server ip with every download. So you van lookup the ip and do a traceroute and see who hosts it.. there generally an abuse@email adres somewhere
I can understand that some hoster ignore DMCA because it is US law. However every decent datacenter would handle a proper DMCA request as a normal abuse request which every hoster should handle because to host and offer coypright content is illegal nealy everywhere in the world except maybe Iran etc.
@ecircuit: can you share the link pleasemmm
Downloading is not possible without registering and paying money. I don't want to do that.
Isn't that against the board rules? It is an illegal and criminal website. But if I get the ok for educational reasons I will share it.
If a company doesnt have a presents in the usa then they do not to abide by dcma.. they only have to listen to therr own country's law... Some countrys have less then strict copyright laws. And thereby you would submit a copyright claim... But yes allot of dc will act on abuse cause faciliating copyright infridgement would make them liable in allot of counrtys
not true, there are various countries with loopholes in their laws about sharing copyrighted content. many countries like netherlands, france etc. I remember uploaded (widely used file sharing system) installed themselves in a french datacenter of ovh once. The copyrighted holders took the case to court but the court denied the claims
it's "lul.TLD", the TLD is known from OPs first post and I personally think it is not right to sell warez like this..but well, it seems to work.
Summarises it.
What was the case about? If it was just the question that a file sharing system like ul.to is illegal or not in general and if they should be allowed in France then, yes. It sounds very realistic that the court denied the claims because a file sharing system only offers the platform and technology and do not ulpoad the content on it's own.
But if the case was about some illegal files being actually hosted to the public than I am pretty sure that ul.to would loose the case and would not let it come to court. Deleting the files is cheaper than protecting an unkown and unimportan uploader.
The case was about the same issue of copyright. ovh was also asked by public why it was hosting their website and their reply was "ovh neither supports nor denies file sharing and copyright and it's not their job. now that uploaded has purchased the server, we will fulfill the contract"
And a file can be illegal in many ways. Maybe copyrighted files are legal in a country but botnets are not as a general example. So it would really depend on country in which server is being hosted on. And no, deleting a file can not be that simple always, considering the sheer number of individual files and number of requests, and each of them would require a judgement according to the law
As @ecircuit said, what was the case about?
I couldnt name a single European (or EU for that matter) country where hosting copyrighted content and making it publicly available is legal. In the best case you are only required to remove it.
the case was about a file sharing website called uploaded.
Also, i got a fairly old news article, from time when ovh was allowed in france to host wikileaks ( it pisses of governments more than file sharing sites)
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/french-web-host-ovh-allowed-to-continue-hosting-wikileaks
There is nothing per-se illegal about such sites as they only provide storage space. Only when its used for copyrighted content it can become a problem.
CloudFlare doesn't care about it. They even provide service to many kiddie booters and shit like that since it benefits their business.
Cloudflare says they help make sure no copyright hidden or illegal products is being protected CF don't seem to take any notice to complaints, Illegal product being protected by them, and they might act on one DMCA a day or something.
what you say. got only one automatic email response which not seems very promising:
How else would CF make money?
Did you try opening a ticket? They're not going to do much for you, possibly/probably not even removing the DNS, but you will probably be able to get an IP to give you somewhere to get going if someone is truly hosting an open directory of copyrighted stuff.
Surprised they haven't been sued yet, But maybe because their excuse of their not the hosting provider although they allow them to hide behind and run through CF
I sent a normal abuse notification. Will wait for a few days then try the ticket. The IP would be enough so that I can at least get in touch with their datacenter.
You should be able to get the IP. It would be touch and go if it was a grey area like torrents or magnet links (or even file host links) but if they're serving your files from their server through cloud flare you should be able to get some movement.
If they're smart they will just use a frontend so that will probably not help as much.
I don't think the DC would care much as the host has probably gotten a lot of DMCA's thus probably "promising" it will delete stuff.
But yea, why are you doing all of this?
I bet on a Voxility IP.