zlacker

>>stargr+(OP)
This link and the two answers within demonstrate something important, broader than the DNS related issue at hand.

Both make implicit assumptions. One assumes the worst of Cloudflare and thinks “what’s the worst reason Cloudflare could have for doing this. How do they profit off this?” And the other assumes that Cloudflare has good intentions.

Neither answer is technically wrong. Both flow logically from their initial assumptions. But it shows how different our conclusions can be depending on where our initial biases lie. For the person who believes the first answer and says “prove to me that Cloudflare isn’t doing something nefarious”, it’s not possible. The analysis is correct and can’t be challenged unless the initial assumption is challenged. And for people who strongly believe that Cloudflare has bad intentions, nothing can be done to change their mind.

In this example it’s Cloudflare but it applies to any person or organisation that we feel strongly about.

>>nindal+K6
The second one is not an assumption, it's Cloudflare's official position. For a person who is against Cloudflare, I feel like this would only serve to reinforce the confirmation bias as there's seemingly no person except a Cloudflare employee willing to step up and defend the action.

So, yes, good observation.

>>chesch+F8
Arguably, no one except a Cloudflare employee could know the reason why they took this decision. A random person speculating “maybe they did this for privacy reasons” doesn’t strike me as better than Cloudflare saying “we did this for privacy reasons”.

And while the second answer is a statement, not an analysis the rest of what I said holds. You will only accept their statement as the truth if you assume good intent of them.

>>nindal+k9
>A random person speculating “maybe they did this for privacy reasons” doesn’t strike me as better than Cloudflare saying “we did this for privacy reasons”.

you are saying the accessor function getX() which returns a value of X but you don't trust it, you think it's giving you crap, should not be treated any differently depending on whether the getX() function even has access to X or has absolutely no such access. (For example if the value of x isn't even on the same network partition as the getX() function you don't trust.)

You're saying if you don't trust it, it doesn't matter if the function itself even has access to X or doesn't.

In one sense that might be true, but in another sense that seems silly. If getX itself has access to X, you can try to determine whether it is giving it to you. if getX doesn't have any access to X, then it doesn't really matter what it's doing, its process is irrelevant.

so to me there's a huge material difference. We can try to judge the process by which getX() returned Cloudflare's motivations. What steps did it perform to return that value? What's the code? etc.

huge difference. that knowledge is somewhere in the company.

>>thrwwa+Dd
To summarise, your position is that what Cloudflare says is more trustworthy because they know the truth.

You do not really address the fact that they are not required to say the truth, or that when the truth is harmful for their public image they are directly incentivised to not speak the truth. The only way you do address this is by saying that this is something that needs investigating. I would posit that the grandparent has done this already, and come to the sensible conclusion: There is less reason to trust someone incentivised to lie than there is to trust someone who knows nothing.

Aside from that trust, we have to evaluate the validity of statements. Given prior knowledge, for Cloudflare in the bad case the likelihood of a valid statement approaches zero. For the random yelling things as they pop into their mind, it is completely unknown.

>>krageo+wg
My position is only that there's a difference. In some sense we could treat it as though it's just garbage, but it's worth investigating. For example if it was written by an outside PR person who has no access to the people who made the decision, that also changes things.

It's not so pure. For example an outsider here on HN who says "A close relative of mine works at cloudflare on the team that made this decision, and he confided in me..." -- then again you have to somehow judge if this is true or not, but it is worth treating it differently from someone writing "I don't have any insider information and this is pure speculation, but maybe..."

I mean it just doesn't make sense to treat these cases as exactly the same. I wanted to give another example. say you don't trust the gps coordinates you're being given when you make an API call on a device.

would it make sense to treat it exactly the same as making the API call on a device that doesn't even have a gps module, such as a microcontroller without gps or wifi/cellular access or anything that can be a proxy for gps?

if there's a physical module and you don't trust the output, at least you can investigate. it doesn't make sense to treat it exactly the same as if the information isn't even on the same device.

it depends on the details of the process that's giving you the output you don't trust. What's the process by which getX returns its output? What's the process by which Cloudflare employees make statements about their motivations (which they do have access to)?

These are questions we can investigate. if we find that the statements are written by a PR agency who hasn't even stepped in their building and has no contact with the teams they're lying on behalf of, that's a possible result too. but it's worth looking into.