JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
- 63,590
- 16,756
- 2,220
So 8chan was shut down by Big Tech Bullies, the real kind of bullies that decide whther your opinion is to be tolerated or not.
8chan did not make the cut, but is a good thing that some people have this power to decide who is ore is not worthy of Freedom of Speech? Is the NRA next?
A defiant 8chan vowed to fight on, saying its “heartbeat is strong.” Then a tech firm knocked it offline
8chan did not make the cut, but is a good thing that some people have this power to decide who is ore is not worthy of Freedom of Speech? Is the NRA next?
A defiant 8chan vowed to fight on, saying its “heartbeat is strong.” Then a tech firm knocked it offline
Abandoned by its key partner Cloudflare for its “lawlessness” in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting, 8chan briefly disappeared from the Web early Monday before reappearing with the help of a sympathetic ally: BitMitigate, whose cybersecurity services also helped keep the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer online after Cloudflare dropped it in 2017.
But by Monday afternoon, both 8chan and the Daily Stormer plunged into darkness when Voxility, a tech firm that has leased servers to BitMitigate, announced that it would no longer provide those services. The site for Vancouver-based BitMitigate was also dropped offline.
It’s “totally against our policy,” Maria Sirbu, a Voxility executive, told The Washington Post. “As soon as we were notified ... we proceeded with (completely) removing" the company from their network.
She said Voxility was making a “firm stand” and urged that many other Internet authorities should take more action in “keeping the Internet a safer place.”
Shortly after noon, Ron Watkins, 8chan’s administrator, said that the site was down and that it looked like its content-delivery network, provided by BitMitigate, was “under attack.” Minutes later, he said that BitMitigate had instead been “deplatformed for hosting 8chan.”
The war drew attention to the role played by the Internet’s hidden infrastructure in deciding what ideas and content can circulate online. Most of the key players in Monday’s fight are unknown to consumers, but they run some of the critical elements supporting the modern Web.
BitMitigate is owned by another company, Epik, a firm based outside Redmond, Wash., that bought the service earlier this year. Epik, a hosting and domain-name firm that gained notoriety after backing the far-right site Gab, has loudly criticized what it calls “digital censorship” and “organized efforts to de-platform and incapacitate practitioners of lawful free speech.”
Epik chief Rob Monster wrote Monday that the company had not solicited 8chan’s business but was now helping manage some of the site’s technical needs and was further evaluating whether to offer it other services, including a defense against cyberattacks."We enter into a slippery slope when we start to limit speech that makes us uncomfortable," Monster wrote.
The services provided by Cloudflare and BitMitigate form a key element of the Internet’s hidden backbone, helping sites boost their speed and stay online. They also help guard against vigilante strikes such as distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, in which hackers flood a site with traffic to knock it offline.
For 8chan, a site that has attracted no small number of online enemies through its years of promoting racist, sexist and offensive content, those services have helped ensure its survival. The site is largely independent from the other advertising, hosting and technical giants that help form the infrastructure of other websites, and who can sometimes exert pressure on objectionable clients.
BitMitigate’s rules offer wide leniency to its clients: “We leave law enforcement to the experts and will not stop service to any of our clients unless by final court order,” the company says in its terms of service. The site has held itself up as a bastion of free-speech protections for sites too objectionable for others to support. BitMitigate is a “non-discriminatory” provider of “bulletproof DDoS protection with a proven commitment to liberty,” the company says on its Twitter account.
But online data show that BitMitigate has only a fraction of the server capacity of Cloudflare. Its dependence on renting from providers such as Voxility to help stay afloat, tech experts said, makes it vulnerable to pushback from other companies that may disagree with its indirect support of extremist speech.
But who watches the watchers?But by Monday afternoon, both 8chan and the Daily Stormer plunged into darkness when Voxility, a tech firm that has leased servers to BitMitigate, announced that it would no longer provide those services. The site for Vancouver-based BitMitigate was also dropped offline.
It’s “totally against our policy,” Maria Sirbu, a Voxility executive, told The Washington Post. “As soon as we were notified ... we proceeded with (completely) removing" the company from their network.
She said Voxility was making a “firm stand” and urged that many other Internet authorities should take more action in “keeping the Internet a safer place.”
Shortly after noon, Ron Watkins, 8chan’s administrator, said that the site was down and that it looked like its content-delivery network, provided by BitMitigate, was “under attack.” Minutes later, he said that BitMitigate had instead been “deplatformed for hosting 8chan.”
The war drew attention to the role played by the Internet’s hidden infrastructure in deciding what ideas and content can circulate online. Most of the key players in Monday’s fight are unknown to consumers, but they run some of the critical elements supporting the modern Web.
BitMitigate is owned by another company, Epik, a firm based outside Redmond, Wash., that bought the service earlier this year. Epik, a hosting and domain-name firm that gained notoriety after backing the far-right site Gab, has loudly criticized what it calls “digital censorship” and “organized efforts to de-platform and incapacitate practitioners of lawful free speech.”
Epik chief Rob Monster wrote Monday that the company had not solicited 8chan’s business but was now helping manage some of the site’s technical needs and was further evaluating whether to offer it other services, including a defense against cyberattacks."We enter into a slippery slope when we start to limit speech that makes us uncomfortable," Monster wrote.
The services provided by Cloudflare and BitMitigate form a key element of the Internet’s hidden backbone, helping sites boost their speed and stay online. They also help guard against vigilante strikes such as distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, in which hackers flood a site with traffic to knock it offline.
For 8chan, a site that has attracted no small number of online enemies through its years of promoting racist, sexist and offensive content, those services have helped ensure its survival. The site is largely independent from the other advertising, hosting and technical giants that help form the infrastructure of other websites, and who can sometimes exert pressure on objectionable clients.
BitMitigate’s rules offer wide leniency to its clients: “We leave law enforcement to the experts and will not stop service to any of our clients unless by final court order,” the company says in its terms of service. The site has held itself up as a bastion of free-speech protections for sites too objectionable for others to support. BitMitigate is a “non-discriminatory” provider of “bulletproof DDoS protection with a proven commitment to liberty,” the company says on its Twitter account.
But online data show that BitMitigate has only a fraction of the server capacity of Cloudflare. Its dependence on renting from providers such as Voxility to help stay afloat, tech experts said, makes it vulnerable to pushback from other companies that may disagree with its indirect support of extremist speech.
