Bullshit. When you do business in a country, you are bound by their laws.

Open your fucking eyes -- every nation on this fucking planet is insisting on that except the god damned united jackboots of 'murika.

Sad to say, but my Ubuntu 14.04.2 box crashes on X-Server issues at least once a week, while my Windows 7 laptop only gets rebooted for the monthly Tuesday updates. That didn't used to be the case, but times, they have changed.

Gee, I didn't know you had to own something in order to test drive it in order to decide whether you like it, or to hear from friends and relatives about their experience with their devices.

Shame on me. Not spending thousands upon thousands of dollars buying each and every device so I can test it out personally.

:P :P :P

Heh. Actually, I hate all smart phones equally. I have absolutely no desire for a digital leash and tracking system. If I'm not home, leave a message. Rather than looking up restaurants on a phone, I decide where I'm going to eat before I leave the house and (shock of shocks!) look up directions on how to get there before I start travelling.

For someone who has no computer at home, I can understand the appeal of combining phone/internet/music player/camera rather than buying separate devices, but if you've already got those devices, there isn't much benefit to a "smart" phone.

Gee, even if you pay a complement to Apple about their marketing campaign you get modded down by the fanbois... :P :P :P *LMAO*

Android has always been the superior technology. Why else do you think it has more global market share than Apple could ever dream about?

Apple's products are fanboi toys that put style over substance, brand recognition over quality, and which rely on artificially inflated prices to maintain the illusion of being "better quality."

There is nothing about any Apple product I have ever seen that justifies the price. It's just one big, grand fleecing of a gullible public by the best marketing campaign known to mankind.

As a citizen of the world and not the US, it disturbs me greatly that US companies insist on providing services that are illegal to other countries without performing the due-diligence of geo-blocking nations that have deemed those services illegal, forcing them to sweep up multiple domains through crude IP blocking approaches.

If you wouldn't be allowed to run a business/service from within a nation, why should you be allowed to do so by simply hosting it somewhere else? Your "service" is an illegal immigrant working without proper paperwork or meeting visa requirements, or even the basic tenets of legality in the customer nation.

But, hey, why should I expect an American to understand that they DO NOT RULE THE WORLD!?!?!?!

WTF are you on about?

CloudFlare should be blocking access to the services based on the querying IP range, the same way that other sites perform GeoBlocking. It is the responsiblity of ANY company to comply with the law where they are servicing a customer base. Just because CloudFlare isn't a UK company doesn't mean it isn't to subject to UK law when servicing clients from that part of the world.

And if the service in question is deemed illegal, they have to be dropped or blocked. Seeing as CloudFlare appears too god damned lazy to bother with geo-blocking, they should be dropping the customer providing the service.

Period.

Only the fucking Americans think their law applies to the whole world.

Oh, I know Facebook bought them out. Which leaves me wondering *why* someone would try to "pump" the stock.

I mean, seriously, what's the point of crying out "it could still happen!" when everyone is saying it's unlikely at best?

*shrug* Maybe the analyst is a hard-core gamer with a bad case of wishful thinking.

Kind of like the "Duke Nuke'em Forever" fans were. :P

They could always provide server-side blocking so that the ISPs in the restricting country (UK in this case) couldn't access the blocked service.

The only reason broad and far-reaching service blocks are happening is that CloudFlare refuses to co-operate with the UK on the issue, forcing them to do the blocking at the ISP level.

Or are you saying that one should be free to provide illegal services to a nation over their own objections purely for one's own profit and convenience?

Cloud providers are not at the sole behest of the hosting nation's laws -- they have to consider where the customers of those services are as well. ONLY AMERICANS THINK OTHERWISE.

Do you really believe that if North Korea were to lose access to the internet CloudFlare would be wringing their hands about "all" the customers that couldn't access other services they host?

Whenever some "analyst" says something like a release "isn't impossible", the only reason I can think of for saying such a think is a "pump and dump" stock scheme. :(

If CloudFlare is so concerned about it's other customers, it would have just disconnected the proxy's services and applied to have the blockade removed, not "threatened" to disconnect the proxy.

Any reputable cloud provider would disconnect any of their customers deemed to be hosting illegal content.

But no, they're going to strand their other customers rather than strike down the one customer that is actually causing the problem in order to score "political points" about ISP responsibility.

Feh. Whether you feel that "piracy" is wrong or not, it's clear that if the legal system is mandating the blockade of one of your customer's services, you should be getting rid of that customer, not whinging about how the blockade is affecting your other users.

Even Israel never claimed there were rockets being fired from the UN schools. They alleged that the property was being used to store munitions, but that's a far cry from being used to launch attacks.