Hits Ground Hard Along With Its New Host
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a blogpost yesterday that 8chan will probably find a new security service provider and will get back online in no time.
While 8chan did find a provider called BitMitigate, it was for the worse. Turns out, BitMitigate was renting services from a larger service provider called Voxility. When Alex Stamos, former Facebook CSO, pointed out this fact to Voxility on Twitter — the company promised to block BitMitigate’s content.
In case you were wondering, it looks like the new host of 8chan and Daily Stormer will effectively be @voxility. It looks like Epik/Bitmitigate owns very little of their own hardware and instead rents Voxility's servers and AS.https://t.co/K3NXyVYcUThttps://t.co/zC0csJpQZp pic.twitter.com/pml4bL0kUU
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) August 5, 2019
Cloudflare’s decision came after federal authorities discovered that the main suspect in El Paso’s shooting posted a 2,300-word manifesto onto 8chan before going on a killing spree. On Saturday, 20 people were killed when a 21-year-old man started firing at an El Paso Walmart in Texas.
As of now, 8chan is offline and their Twitter account is the only place remaining on the Internet about the website. Interestingly, The Daily Stormer was also caught in the crossfire.
BitMitigate, Epik and The Daily Stormer Banned
After being kicked out of Cloudflare back in 2017 on account of supporting white supremacy and holocaust denials, The Daily Stormer was quick to find another hosting server, you guessed it right, BitMitigate.
BitMitigate founder Nicholas Lim explained supporting The Daily Stromer in a blog post —
“BitMitigate has decided to continue offering DDoS protection to The Daily Stormer despite our extremely contrasting beliefs in regards to the content that they produce…The question isn’t whether or not the content at The Daily Stormer should exist, but rather whether or not it is the responsibility of technology companies to be consistent in defending the right to freedom of expression enshrined within our constitution.”
A few days later, Lim sold BitMitigate to Epik, which is another hosting service. Epik is no different in terms of views on free speech. Back in 2018, Epik gave room to Gab, a social network that is laced with people termed anti-Semitic, hate speech supporters and more. Gab faced large scrutiny in 2018 when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting suspect was discovered to be a user of Gab.
Only a few weeks ago, Voxility discovered that Epik was hosting the Daily Stormer on Voxility-owned IPs. They immediately asked Epik to remove The Daily Stormer as it was not part of the agreement.
According to Voxility’s VP of business development, Maria Sirbu via Techcrunch, once a server leaves with Voxilily hardware, the company has no way to access it.
It seems like Voxilily doesn’t want to leave loose ends anymore. Epik and BitMitigate have both been banned from Voxility servers. Oddly enough, the ban also took down The Daily Stormer even though they shouldn’t be a part of Voxility hardware.
“We realized that there is no way we were going somewhere good with this customer — we don’t want to have any association with 8chan, or hate speech,” said Sirbu.
Also Read: Microsoft Releases Windows Terminal v0.3 With Draggable UI
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