8chan struggles to stay up after Cloudflare quit servicing it; 8chan appears to have switched domain registrars to Epik, now hobbled by one of its own vendors
"It's DNS. It's always DNS." Matt Binder / Mashable : Inside the fight to keep 8chan offline Oscar Gonzalez / CNET : 8chan owner says El Paso shooter didn't post manifesto Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica : Dumped by Cloudflare, 8chan gets back online—then gets kicked off again Uzair Amir / HackRead : 8chan down after Cloudflare & hosting firms boots it off Drew Harwell / Washington Post : 8chan vowed to fight on, saying its ‘heartbeat is strong.’ Then a tech firm knocked it offline. Charlesarthur / The Overspill : Start Up No.1,126: Europe heated by climate crisis, the games company that wasn't, VR market shrinks … Paul Roberts / The Seattle Times : ‘A slippery slope’: Eastside web firm waffles on hosting online forum linked to El Paso shooter Reuters : After shootings, tech companies pressured to pull plug on 8chan Firstpost Tech : 8chan goes offline following El Paso shooting as service providers drop support Kari Paul / The Guardian : 8chan: far-right site linked to shootings resurfaces - and is kicked offline again Abby Ohlheiser / Washington Post : Will taking down 8chan stop the worst people on the Internet? Alexandra S. Levine / Politico : How to solve a problem like 8chan Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch : 8chan's new internet host was kicked off its own host just hours later CNBC : Here's how websites like 8chan get ‘taken down’ USA Today : ‘Enough is enough’: Cloudflare terminates 8chan, an online meeting place for ‘extremist hate’ Michael Tsai : Cloudflare and Voxility Ban 8Chan Rebecca Aydin / Business Insider : The controversial company now protecting 8chan from online attacks also services an infamous neo-Nazi site Joe Rice-Jones / KnowTechie : Cloudflare is no longer sheltering 8chan behind its firewalls Alyssa Newcomb / Fortune : Why Hate Site 8chan Is So Hard to Knock Offline Sasha Ingber / NPR : ‘Uniquely Lawless’: Security Firm Drops 8chan Website Following El Paso Shooting Christine Fisher / Engadget : The internet is racing to cut ties with 8chan after another deadly shooting Ben Makuch / VICE : The Far Right's Internet Protector Goes Down After Taking In 8chan Axios : What to do about 8chan, the net's atrocity megaphone Tweets: Matthew Prince / @eastdakota : We just sent notice we are terminating service for 8chan. There comes a time when enough is enough. But this isn't the end. We need to have a broader conversation about addressing the root causes of hate online. https://blog.cloudflare.com/ ... Alex Stamos / @alexstamos : UPDATE: Looks like @voxility just cut off all of Bitmitigate's prefix at their edge routers, shutting down not only their customers but Epik's corporate systems. Fredrick Brennan / @hw_beat_that : Thank you so much @CloudFlare. Finally this nightmare might have an end. I just want to go back to making my fonts in peace and not have to worry about getting phone calls from CNN/New York Times every time a mass shooting happens. They could have prevented this and chose not to. Sarah Jeong / @sarahjeong : The reason why deplatforming over violent ideologies is troubling is because of a lack of due process; but there is no due process because the institutions that should provide it are currently captured by those sympathetic to the same ideologies https://twitter.com/... Donie O'Sullivan / @donie : 8chan in search of ways to stay online. Once @voxility learned they were being used they cut them off this morning. Here's what Voxility told me. pic.twitter.com/b8X3xQVCPa Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : Update: I talked to Cloudflare CEO @eastdakota, who said he is undecided about whether or not to allow 8chan to continue using its DDOS protection service (which effectively allows the site to stay online) https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... @pinboard : I see lots of people dunking on @cloudflare today without addressing the actual argument they make for keeping 8chan—that law enforcement asks them to keep such sites, because this gives them more visibility into them. Whatever you think of the argument, ignoring it is dishonest. https://twitter.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : @eastdakota New: Tucows, 8chan's domain name registrar, which said last night that it had “no immediate plans” to boot the site, tells me it is no longer providing services to 8chan. @recode : Now that Cloudflare has taken action against 8chan, calls for action have shifted to its other service providers. Including Amazon, which has sold audiobook content owned by 8chan's owner Jim Watkins. https://www.vox.com/... Alex Stamos / @alexstamos : Daily Stormer keeps on changing nameservers, but a little while ago they were resolving to an IP address that belongs to Anonymize, Inc. Who owns Anonymize? You guessed it, Epik and Mr. Monster. This looks to be an IP hosted in Switzerland with transit provided by @RETNnet. https://twitter.com/... Nathaniel Popper / @nathanielpopper : After getting booted off the traditional internet, 8chan was still up and running on the dark web on Monday, though in a very slow, intermittent fashion. Even the dark web relies on old-fashioned internet infrastructure. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Ryan Broderick / @broderick : Andrew Torba, founder of Gab, told me yesterday: “Gab recently became open source and decentralized. Anyone can now set up their own Gab Social server with their own rules. We can't stop them. We can't ban them. More are popping up each and everyday.” https://twitter.com/... Kate Conger / @kateconger : When Cloudflare kicked the Daily Stormer off in 2017, I broke the news. Really did not expect to write essentially the same story over again in 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/... Article I / @ampersine : Cloudflare fired 8chan, 8chan moved to a new service (BitMitigate) which has also been hosting Daily Stormer. BitMitigate's provider promptly cut *them* off, and now both 8chan *and* Daily Stormer are down. Epic schadenfreude. Fuck Nazis. https://arstechnica.com/... Alex Stamos / @alexstamos : Epik's CEO @RobMonster has not yet commented directly on whether they will return service to 8chan or Daily Stormer, and comment from him has been hard to find today. https://domainnamewire.com/... Judd Legum / @juddlegum : 3. How does 8chan stay in business? The man who operates 8chan, Jim Watkins, monetizes the site, in part, through @amazon Amazon is aware of it & has done nothing How many more people have to die before major corporations stop sending Watkins cash? https://popular.info/... Tom / @attentive : Getting Cloudflare to ditch 8chan drove them to competitor Bitmitigate. But getting Voxility to ditch Bitmitigate affected not just 8chan, but collaborators Gab, Epik etc. And sets a precedent for further infrastructure divestment. https://arstechnica.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : @eastdakota There's a big, interesting debate here about which layers of the internet should be responsible for banning extreme content. Everyone (mostly) agrees ISPs like Comcast shouldn't. Everyone (mostly) agrees social networks like Facebook should. Cloudflare is somewhere in the middle. William Turton / @williamturton : New: Voxility says it didn't know about Epik/Bitmitigate's connection to 8chan until its marketing team saw @alexstamos's tweet this morning. “None of the checks we did disclosed anything...we didn't make the connection when we started working with them.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... Nicholas Thompson / @nxthompson : “It solves the problem for us, but it doesn't solve the problem for the Internet. It doesn't address the core causes of why hate festers online.” Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, talks to @wired about why he dropped 8chan after the massacres. https://www.wired.com/... Julia Carrie Wong / @juliacarriew : @Cloudflare @eastdakota Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that his decision is not about free speech or making money. Instead, he says keeping 8chan within Cloudflare's network facilitates monitoring of the site and cooperation with law enforcement. https://www.theguardian.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Dustin Volz / @dnvolz : Cloudflare took the same step two years ago, banning the Daily Stormer after Charlottesville. Then, like now, the company agonized over the decision. “Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever.” https://twitter.com/... Daniel Sugarman / @daniel_sugarman : 8chan creator: “thought 4chan had become too restrictive & wanted to create a place where all free speech, no matter how toxic, would be allowed.” Also 8chan creator: *oh no 8chan has turned into a haven for Nazis, HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN* https://www.nytimes.com/... @pinboard : @Cloudflare Let me be a little less oblique. There are many people who work at @cloudflare besides the CEO. If you can persuade that group to take 8chan down, they will do it, and the CEO can't gainsay it. So engaging that group on terms other than “your company is evil” has some potential Matt Pearce / @mattdpearce : Cloudfare is not going to drop its support of 8chan despite this being the third time an attacker has posted a manifesto to the site, @juliacarriew reports. (Without Cloudflare, vigilantes would probably DDoS 8chan into oblivion.) https://www.theguardian.com/ ... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : @eastdakota Matthew is a thoughtful CEO (he wrote this after banning the Daily Stormer post-Charlottesville: https://t.co/...) and his is not the normal free speech argument. He's arguing, basically, that an evil site law enforcement can monitor is better than one it can't. Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : As several commenters have noted, Cloudflare is heading toward an IPO later this year. Not a great look to public investors if you're defending the go-to site for extremist shooter manifestos. Dave Lee / @daveleebbc : 8chan admin says site is moving to a different security firm, @bitmitigate, based in Washington state. Company's bio says it has a “proven commitment to liberty”. Have approached for comment. https://twitter.com/... Tom Warren / @tomwarren : sites like 8ch are incredibly valuable to service providers like Cloudflare as they're attacked so frequently that you can improve pattern recognition for all customers. I'm sure 8ch will struggle short term and another provider will pick it up for its own gain https://twitter.com/...