Cloudflare is Giving Away Its Security Tools To US Political Campaigns (techcrunch.com) 24
Network security giant Cloudflare said it will provide its security tools and services to U.S. political campaigns for free, as part of its efforts to secure upcoming elections against cyberattacks and election interference. From a report: The company said its new Cloudflare for Campaigns offering will include distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation, load balancing for campaign websites, a website firewall, and anti-bot protections. It's an expansion of the company's security offering for journalists, civil rights activists and humanitarian groups under its Project Galileo, which aims to protect against disruptive cyberattacks. The project later expanded to smaller state and local government sites in 2018, with an aim of protecting servers containing voter registration data and other election infrastructure from attacks. Cloudflare's co-founder and chief executive Matthew Prince said there was a "clear need" to help campaigns secure not only their public facing websites but also their internal data security. The company said it's working with the non-partisan, non-profit organization Defending Digital Campaigns to provide its services to campaigns. Last year the Federal Elections Commission changed the rules to allow political campaigns to receive discounted cybersecurity assistance, which was previously a campaign finance violation.
Thank you (Score:3)
I hope this is being done for the right reason.
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I hope this is being done for the right reason.
Well, the federal government doesn't seem to care all that much about election security other than investigating non-existent voter fraud, so someone has to do it.
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Depend upon to whom you are referring when you use the term: Federal Government. The Federal Government rank and file care very much about election security and have proposals to help. One political party has stymied those, and one particular butt plug won't allow them to be implemented as policy.
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So sorry about Pelosi not passing you funding do the job you should've been doing for about 3 decades now.
A nice dream. (Score:1)
In reality, if it was done for good reasons, that means maximizing profit was not the first goal. Which means either the board will demand firing the ones responsible, or, if they back it, Cloudflare will be killed by its more profit-focused and moral-free competitors.
Because we are where the profit comes from. The more we don't lose, the less profit they make. Our good is their bad.
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In reality, if it was done for good reasons, that means maximizing profit was not the first goal. Which means either the board will demand firing the ones responsible, or, if they back it, Cloudflare will be killed by its more profit-focused and moral-free competitors.
Well, it also works as free advertising for their services, particularly if they can demonstrate that they did in fact detect and prevent some attacks. It's really no different than, say, Mercedes Benz paying millions of dollars to plaster their name on stadiums in Atlanta and New Orleans. It might cost money in the short term but lead to increased profits in the medium to long term.
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In reality, if it was done for good reasons, that means maximizing profit was not the first goal. Which means either the board will demand firing the ones responsible
Here is a link to their S-1A public charter:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519242455/d735023ds1a.htm [sec.gov]
If I may direct your attention to the "Use of Proceeds" section here:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519242455/d735023ds1a.htm#toc735023_7 [sec.gov]
and I quote:
We intend to use the net proceeds we receive from this offering for general corporate purposes, including working capital, operating expenses, and capital expenditures. Additionally, we may use a portion of the
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The reason being advertising and profit - it sure seems to work - a bunch of free advertising in the news now and a bunch of promotional stuff the campaigns should be doing already to the ones that will be making decisions on federal government purchases within 5 years.
Too Bad (Score:3)
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This won't stop some moron on the campaign from configuring their sites with the password as something stupid like [candidate's name]1...
That's why a smart admin makes it [candidate's mistress' name]1. Since you know that's the one thing they will try to keep quiet.
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Campaign contribution? (Score:2)
How will the campaigns report this? What value is being placed on the services? It would be an in-kind contribution. You or I would have problems if we volunteered these services to a campaign.
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How will the campaigns report this? What value is being placed on the services? It would be an in-kind contribution. You or I would have problems if we volunteered these services to a campaign.
From the summary:
Last year the Federal Elections Commission changed the rules to allow political campaigns to receive discounted cybersecurity assistance, which was previously a campaign finance violation.
I would assume part of the stipulations is that these services are offered to all campaigns in a given race, and not just one.
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The number of parties you give to doesn't matter really, plenty of corporations give across the aisle to all candidates, just to hedge their bets.
This is campaign bribery plain and simple, Cloudflare gives free stuff to campaigns which frees up massive amounts of cash within those campaigns and then 5 years from now, these Democrats will implement wide-ranging Internet controls (probably under the guise of Net Neutrality or Internet Equality) which will be provided by none other than, campaign contributor C
Self serving insurance (Score:2)
OK, that was deliberately ambiguous, so I'll get to the point.
This offer is clearly in Cloudflare's own interests, it self serving in their interests to stop the campaigns self serving. It is very likely that most political candidates will never have heard of Cloudflare. This increases their recognition and probably acts to increase their political access.
Dumping (Score:1)
Shouldn't their corporate overlords pay for this? (Score:2)
I mean, after all, "both" parties are staffed with their employees.
In other words (Score:4)
Cloudflare provides their services for free to all political critters. In other words, they're contributing to everybody's campaign under the pretense of helping democracy.
Well played Cloudflare. As for the rest of us normal citizens, we don't get anything for free from them - apart from being tracked to death and served fucking CAPTCHAs when trying to access half of the internet through TOR.
Fuck Cloudflare.
Sounds like a Trojan Horse (Score:1)
Why should anyone trust Cloudflare? (Score:2)
Cloudflare avoids responsibility for illegal content which is shielded by their services by claiming First Amendment freedoms, by claiming they don't "host" any services, and other inane bullshit.
Why the heck should anyone trust a company that says it's protecting the free speech of people who are running phishing web sites claiming to be Bank of America?