Twitter/X migrated to Cloudflare, bypassing Brazilian block twitter/X migrated to Cloudflare, rendering the block imposed by the Brazilian judiciary ineffective. will Cloudflare block twitter on brazil? |
Twitter/X migrated to Cloudflare, bypassing Brazilian block twitter/X migrated to Cloudflare, rendering the block imposed by the Brazilian judiciary ineffective. will Cloudflare block twitter on brazil? |
https://noticias.uol.com.br/colunas/andreza-matais/2024/09/1...
For instance in the UK the government can stop local media from publishing news that is considered libellous or defamatory, or may unjustly influence court cases, but they can't stop citizens from accessing that information if it is published in a news outlet outside the country.
No one is questioning why the Brazilian judiciary should have that power. It seems rather excessive and an infringement of Brazilians rights, though that is not surprising when we live in a era when governments have taking upon themselves to decide what their citizens rights are, when human rights are supposed to be intrinsic, ie those that all fauna on the planet do.
Actually, millions of people are, and senators are seeking this judge's impeachment.
That's the point, they don't. There's nothing in the law for him to back his decisions. But we just hope for our senate to take action.
Shutting down Twitter to stop them implies the Brazilian judiciary doesn't have the ability to sanction them under Brazilian law.
Sure, it makes technically harder to block.. But governments don't rely only technical solutions for problems..
China, like Brazil is doing, would order Cloudflare to block Twitter and they would have to choose either comply and help China block it, like they are doing in Brazil, or challenge and not comply and face the consequences and likely a full block..
Having Cloudflare fully blocked in both countries would be terrible for business as they have many other customers so it is economically best to comply and potentially loose one customer then challenge the order and loose the entire market..
Blocking Cloudflare itself wouldn't make any sense as our country systems themselves would get hurt and I don't think Cloudflare will deny such order.
Elsewhere I've seen only the t.co domain link shortening/forwarding... which could be a small worker app running there, not the main app.
From what I can see some locations in Brazil route to CF, but not all. And only from x.com, not twitter.com
The far better solution is just to ignore stuff you don't agree with, go outside, and move on with life.
In the end of the day, people just care if their political agenda is being met, it doesn't matter if it throws the country into a dictatorship.
X is the first and only company willing to prioritize values over revenue in this case.
On a side note, the contents an international corporation publishes can violate the law of a country even when they are not posted by citizens of that country. When they do so, and don't take down the content, they will be shut down. It works like that in every country, including the US. It pains me having to point that out since it's so obvious.
For instance before the internet a Saudi dissident based in the UK used to send faxes to phones in Saudi Arabia that were critical of the Govt. I don't think the Saudi govt blocked access to phone calls from the UK on account of that.
If Brazilian enterprises are not allowed by law to trade with Twitter that does not amount to shutting it down. All you've done is block the usage of a service by most law abiding citizens which many of them probably rely on for all or a part of their living.
Twitter is operating under US law and Brazilian law only applies to their Brazilian subsidiary. If their Brazilian subsidiary has been has closed down because their parent company is not complying with Brazilian law then Brazilians are free to deal directly with the parent company under US law and jurisdiction.
Which is a pretty stretch from an older law, that was made to companies operating "phisically", opening offices, having workers and etc.
Twitter closed their offices in Brazil, so they don't need to do it anymore.
If we take the interpretation this judge is using with Twitter to everything, 99% of the internet will need to be blocked in Brazil.
The money X Corp is paying them cannot be THAT great to justify losing all brazilian costumers and Cloudflare doesn't seem like a very ideology-driven company.
Lets remember that Twitter is not their only customer..
So if twitter has problem with some country justice it is their problem to solve, not a problem to be shared with every other Cloudflare customer..
Also, i doubt that they are making more money from Twitter then every other customer in Brazil added together..
cloudflare offers a lot of self-service tools, which can and do allow customers that cloudflare doesn't want to service to use it until someone finds out (my favorite example is that, briefly, the foreign ministry of Iran briefly managed to register and activate properties on the service)
registering while only directing brazilian clients to cloudflare would be difficult using the standard method (setting your domain's nameservers to the cloudflare servers), but cloudflare's CNAME setup option only requires a TXT record. it's possible x.com did that by just paying for a business plan and never interacting with cloudflare staff
doing so for the _root_ record is a bit dicier, but as x.com operates its own nameservers they're probably able to handle the not-quite compliant fuckery necessary to CNAME the root: https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/zone-setups/partial-se...
Considering the initial order of the Brazilian judiciary regarding VPN, this is almost certainly what Twitter hopes to achieve here.
they will probably get notified to block twitter in Brazil and will likely comply.
Tying your service to vital internet infrastructure can work. It doesn't even have to be a particularly ironclad solution. In 2018, the powers that be in Russia decided it's cheaper to flood Telegram with their own propaganda, rather than block it.
I wish... That sort of massive economic damage is exactly what this country deserves. It's gotten to the point I'm hoping Trump wins and sanctions this place for stealing millions from american companies via arbitrary fines.