Patent trolls are the worst. These companies buy up patents, never intending to use them for anything constructive. The patent portfolio are used only to sue companies for patent infringement. The claims are often spurious, but many companies settle rather than spend the money and time to fight them. — Read the rest

Kiwi Farms, the web forum centered around harassing people—especially trans people—will no longer benefit from the web services of Cloudflare, which today gave it the boot. After being implicated in multiple suicides and with ongoing campaigns of hate and abuse hitting the news, the "worst site in the world" must now find other ways to stay online. — Read the rest

A federal judge ruled Thursday that hosting and security provider Cloudflare is not liable for copyright infringement by websites that use its services. Jon Brodkin:

Cloudflare was sued in November 2018 by Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs, two wedding dress manufacturers and sellers that alleged Cloudflare was guilty of contributory copyright infringement because it didn't terminate services for websites that infringed on the dressmakers' copyrighted designs.

In 2016, Cloudflare was targeted by a notorious patent troll called Blackbird Technologies; rather than capitulate, the company set up a fund called "Project Jengo" to pay bounties to researchers who documented prior art that could be used to invalidate the patent in question — and all of Blackbird's patents, and began to file to have additional patents invalidated based on that crowdsourced research.

Yesterday, I wrote about the way that tech-sector concentration was making it nearly impossible for Russia to block the encrypted messaging service Telegram: because Telegram can serve its traffic through giant cloud providers like Amazon, Russia can only block Telegram by blocking everyone else who uses Amazon.

Cloudflare, a company with a history of resisting surveillance and censorship orders (albeit imperfectly and sometimes with undesirable consequences) has announced a new DNS service, hosted at the easy-to-remember address of 1.1.1.1, which accepts connections under the still-novel DNS-over-HTTPS protocol, and which has privacy designed in, with all logs written only to RAM (never to disk) and flushed every 24 hours.

Cloudflare has terminated service to Sci-Hub, the site that provides paywall-free access to virtually all scholarly work, citing Aaron Swartz as inspiration — Cloudflare previously serviced the sci-hub.la, sci-hub.tv, and sci-hub.tw domains, but in response to an injunction obtained by the American Chemical Society, they will no longer provide that service. — Read the rest

As Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai tries to kill Net Neutrality under cover of Thanksgiving, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has tweeted that he is looking into ways that he can legally take up Josh Constantine's challenge to give Pai "14.4k dial-up speeds for killing net neutrality." — Read the rest

On its meteoric path to insolvency, Elon "Leon" Musk's personal social platform mistakenly finds itself online in Brazil.

Xitter says it switched cloud caching providers, and somehow, this has circumvented the seemingly DNS-based method Brazilian ISPs are using to block the Xitter under government orders. — Read the rest

Pavel Durov, the CEO of private messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France this weekend and charged under various spectacular crimes—terrorism, pedophilia, fraud, etc.—on the rationale that the company's failure to police and moderate users amounts to complicity in crimes involving use of the platform. — Read the rest

The modern world relies on random numbers. We need them for secure communication, password protection, weather forecasting, scientific research, traffic management, quality control, and even to select winners for affordable housing. But it's not easy to produce reliably random numbers. In fact, as reported in this BBC article, "The search for the random numbers that run our lives," "you can never prove that something is truly random, only that it is indistinguishable from random, based on your best analysis." — Read the rest

When movies and TV shows call for computer code to be shown on-screen, sometimes the film-makers bother to make it look realistic. In doing so, fascination lurks. In Behind the Screens, John Graham-Cumming takes a gloriously in-depth look at specific examples and what the code does. — Read the rest

Musk considering success at business to be a dick-measuring contest explains a lot.

Twitter replacement Threads has surged to nearly 100 million users in its first week of replacing Twitter. Unsurprisingly, the world was looking for any reasonable solution that didn't involve Musk, even if it meant tipping our hats to Meta. — Read the rest

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As a web developer or entrepreneur, every business in today's world can't properly function without an online presence. — Read the rest

Troy Hunt, creator of the useful Have I Been Pwned site, wanted to exact revenge on spammers who waste his time, so he created a form that wastes their time. When a spammer emails him, he replies by saying:

This is exciting and might empower a cutting-edge partnership!

The world is temporarily a better place with Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Oculus VR, and Instagram being inaccessible right now. Twitter, unfortunately, is still operating, but at least people are posting some funny memes about it!

The Verge's explanation for why the sites aren't working is as clear as mud:

While it's unclear exactly why the platforms are unreachable for so many people, their DNS records show that, like last week's Slack outage, the problem is apparently DNS (it's always DNS).

The RIAA, the recording industry's legal arm, has obtained subpoenas targeting 41 websites that make it easy to download videos from YouTube. Among those targeted are Y2Mate.com, which offers a wealth of download options and formats, and notube.net, a minimalist alternative. — Read the rest

Firefox announced today that DNS over HTTPS will be on by default in new versions of its browser, adding an extra layer of security for people browsing the information superhighway.

I'm 100% in favor of pro-competitive regulation of Big Tech, and that is because I'm 100% in favor of pro-competitive regulation of all our hyper-concentrated, monopolistic industries.

ISPs in the UK are required to censor a wide swathe of content: what began as a strictly limited, opt-in ban on depictions of the sexual abuse of children has been steadily expanded to a mandatory ban on "extreme" pornography, "terrorist content," copyright and trademark infringement, and then there's the on-again/off-again ban on all porn sites unless they keep a record of the identity of each user and the porn they request. — Read the rest