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White supremacist chatroom Stormfront taken offline

The Daily Stormer was back yesterday afternoon on a Catalan domain name.

The .cat domain is intended for the promotion of the Catalan language and culture and it is a requirement that domain holders publish a website in Catalan within six months of registering. So far the Stormer has managed one article supposedly in Catalan expressing support for the independence movement.

The domain registry was raided by the police just over a week ago for failing to comply with a court order requiring them to take down sites relating to the referendum being held today. It will be interesting to see how welcoming they feel about the arrival of the Stormer.
 
puntCAT the Catalan domain registry booted the Daily Stormer today.

The Daily Stormer just lost its new .cat domain - The Outline
When a user asked puntCAT about the website on September 30, a representative for the foundation said “our team is already doing procedure for the immediate suspension of the domain for lack of contents, to put in danger the integrity and the good name of the register .cat, the language and the Catalan culture,” according to an email shared with The Outline. This morning, dailystormer.cat went offline.
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(The article contains a brief discussion of the various alt right attitudes to Catalan independence).

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Anglin claims they will have a new domain within hours...
 
Sadly the complete closure to all but sustaining supporters was of short duration. Read only access has been restored for everyone else for the public parts of the board.
 
The Pittsburgh synanogue murders, which Robert Bowers, the man arrested, appeared to announce on Gab in the last of a number of antisemitic posts there, have led to Gab being booted off payment service providers Paypal and Stripe, their hosting company Joyent and their domain registrar GoDaddy


Gab.com goes offline after Pittsburgh synagogue shooting - Reuters

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Gab had attempted to get ahead of the shitstorm by proactively offering to co-operate with law enforcement and issuing a press statement denouncing violence and claiming that they had "nothing but love for all people and freedom".

GIGsnIi.jpg

A stance somewhat undermined by the fact that users were responding to the shootings with posts such as

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and

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As the examples of the Daily Stormer and Stormfront show it's not easy to kill sites. Gab however is a larger operation which hopes to make a return on its activities and is thus more dependent on its service providers. Anyhow cue lots of free-speech-under-attack outrage

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This is very sad news if you were hoping to buy one of these :
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Medium have also booted them off. They had a page there which aside from touting for investors said
Hosting providers, payment processors, mobile App distribution models, and other critical infrastructure must be replaced and disrupted. That is what we seek to accomplish.
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Looks like job done then :D

Gab have told Reuters they expect to be back by the weekend.
 
Opinion piece in the Washington post discussing Gabs' business model.

Extremism has become a business. Just look at Gab. - The Washington Post

The article quotes from Gab's annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. (At this link as a PDF). Such reports are obliged to set out risk factors for investors. In this March filing these included :
Our future success depends on the efforts of key personnel and consultants, especially our founders, Andrew Torba and Ekrem Büyükkaya. The loss of services of any key personnel may have an adverse effect on us.
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Well Ekrem Büyükkaya quit on Sunday. Their former Chief Operating Officer, Utsav Sanduja, had already quit in June after he and his wife were threatened by Gab users. His position appeared to become untenable after he threatened to report one user to the police. (Four months later Gab is "proudly working with the DOJ and FBI to bring justice to an alleged terrorist").

Another risk factor the filing listed was
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Among Gab's goals for 2018 were initial steps to make itself independent of "Big Tech", but having as yet made no progress towards this it is currently scrambling to find new service providers. In a twitter post yesterday afternoon it claimed to have found new hosting but was still "reviewing" alternative domain registrars and payment processors.

The SEC filing also makes clear the fragility of Gabs financial situation.
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Offsetting this it raised $1,070,000 in 2017 by selling 995,641 shares in common stock at $1.10 per share. It did this by "equity crowdfunding" through StartEngine, one of the Kickstarter style platforms which have started up since the passing of the JOBS act in 2012, which deregulated securities regulations in order to facilitate the funding of small businesses.
A more traditional purveyor of inflammatory content might rely on wealthy like-minded patrons for private capital, as Breitbart did. Private companies need not disclose their funders, their finances or their downside risks. Torba instead chose to sell shares to the public — a projected $10 million worth of blockchain-enabled cryptoshares, dubbed “Gab tokens.” (Washington Post)
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An article from August last year here goes into the background of this kind of crowdfunding and Gabs successful 2017 fundraising effort.

I now have equity in an alt-right Twitter clone | The Outline

This year Gab has been engaged in a second equity crowdfunding drive through StartEngine but that appears to have run into trouble following the Pittsburgh murders. Yesterday CBS news reported :
On the website StartEngine.com, Gab is soliciting investments of at least $252 for "$4/share of Class B Non-Voting Common Stock deliverable in token form (the 'GAB Tokens')." A cached image of the page shows the fundraising drive, which began on Sept. 19, had at least $1,068,484.87 from 1,279 investors as of Saturday night.
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(...)
Since then, the number of investors on Gab's page has steadily decreased. As of Tuesday afternoon, Gab had $1,036,620.87 in investments on the site, from 1,240 people.
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(...)
On Friday, the day before the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, StartEngine posted on the page that Gab had met its fundraising goal of $1,070,000, meaning it would have access to the newly-raised funds. It is not clear if the sudden drop in investments below that threshold will affect Gab's access to the money.
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Further funds were invested after that CBS story was posted online - by last night the total was back up to $1,069,485.10. But still short of that initial threshold and

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As the CBS story states it's unclear if that means the exercise has been successful under StartEngine's rules and Gab can access that money.

Either way it suggests that even if Gab succeeds in getting back online it faces an uphill struggle to stay there unless it can find an investor with deep pockets or a very large crowd of true believers with more money than sense.
 
Seems more appropriate to talk about 8chans woes here than the mass shootings thread. After the boards role in providing a launch pad for the El Paso shooters "manifesto" 8chan was booted off by Cloudflare which gave them protection from DDOS attacks.

I speculated on the mass shooting thread that they would find alternative service providers and they did. With Epik, the Seattle based "free speech" internet services provider, which provides domain registration for sites including Gab, and owns Cloudflare alternative Bitmitigate which supplies DDOS protection for the Daily Stormer amonst others.

"Unfortunately" Bitmitigate's DDOS mitigation services were dependent on infrastructure supplied by Voxility who pulled the plug on Epik when alerted to 8chans presence. This took out not just the sites using BItmitigate's services including the Stormer, but Epik's own web presence. (I've no idea what "Voxility (...) cut off all of Bitmitigate's prefix at their edge routers" means, but I guess it demonstrates who the real Edgelords are).
"This is not the first time we needed to take actions against content hosted by them," Voxility executive Maria Sirbu said in an email to Business Insider. "We are against hate speech and we hope that more and more telco companies take actions in keeping the internet a safer place."
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8chan is already down again after Cloudflare, Voxility jump ship - Business Insider

Epik attempted to find adequate alternative providers without success and gave up on supplying Bitmitigate's services to 8chan. Without DDOS protection it was promptly knocked offline again. Epik's Rob Monster :

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With 8chan gone Epik reestablished services for its other customers but not with Voxility
Maria Sirbu, Voxility’s vice president of business development, told GeekWire Tuesday that “we are not negotiating with Epik and we will not reinstall services for them under no circumstances.”
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"We are still operating an internal investigation to make sure they do not end up taking services from other networks relying on Voxility infrastructure,” she said. “So far we didn’t find any connections between the new networks helping them and Voxility.”
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Epik reverses course: Seattle-area web services company will not host 8chan following shooting – GeekWire

Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer offered some doubtless very "sincere" sympathy and advice for Epik and 8chan
I have to say, I’m sorry for 8chan, but at the same time, I don’t really know what Epik was supposed to do.

8chan subscribed to their service right in the middle of the biggest internet backlash since Charlottesville, right as the Eye of Sauron was on them at full blast, and you can’t expect a small company like Epik to simply go down with you on principle.

And before you call me a hypocrite for having put my own problems on small companies when I was deplatformed like 8chan currently is being deplatformed back in 2017, there are some distinct differences:

  • Firstly, in 2017, we didn’t know about chain-banning. Now we do know about chain-banning. This is where you get banned and try to move services and every service you move to bans you and cites their justification for banning you as the fact that previous people have banned you.
  • Secondly, Bitmitigate has already had their BGP peers pulled as a result of serving 8chan. So this is not simply not wanting to deal with being called bigots, this is the very real fact that their company cannot continue to exist if they host 8chan.
So while I’m obviously very sympathetic to 8chan, both as a supporter of ultimate free speech and as someone who has been through what they are going through right now, I don’t blame Bitmitigate for making this decision. They did not have any choice.

What 8chan owner Jim “Gentleman Jim” Watkins should have done is wait a week – or even just a few days – before trying to move to Bitmitigate. Once the outrage machine dies down, there are still naggy people, but they can’t drum-up mass support for these types of insane new types of deplatforming demands (this was the first time BGP peers were pulled, and yes, it was obviously illegal, but it just doesn’t matter – we have no justice system anymore).

Basically, the outrage over this particular shooting in El Paso can’t be sustained long-term, because the fact that the second shooter that day, the one in Dayton, is a leftist is now in the mainstream media, and people are speculating over the fact that it appears that the second shooting was a response to the first, because the Dayton shooter was following the El Paso shooting live.

So it’s going to be gone by the weekend.

Anglin is probably correct in suggesting
What 8chan owner Jim “Gentleman Jim” Watkins should have done is wait a week – or even just a few days – before trying to move to Bitmitigate.
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The companies pulling services are indeed primarily feeling "empowered" to act only because of the high visibility and notoriety 8chan has acquired since the El Paso murders. Which will not last at its present level of intensity.

In an interesting article with more background the BBC asks
8chan: Where are users going now? - BBC News

It seems far too early to assume 8chan is gone but if it survives it will clearly take a significant hit in usage, not just from it's current difficulties, but probably also from users becoming concerned about significantly increased scrutiny of what The Register has described as LinkedIn-for-paedophiles and jumping ship.
 
Lurdan said:
The Pittsburgh synanogue murders, which Robert Bowers, the man arrested, appeared to announce on Gab in the last of a number of antisemitic posts there, have led to Gab being booted off payment service providers Paypal and Stripe, their hosting company Joyent and their domain registrar GoDaddy


Gab.com goes offline after Pittsburgh synagogue shooting - Reuters

RjerIFl.jpg


Gab had attempted to get ahead of the shitstorm by proactively offering to co-operate with law enforcement and issuing a press statement denouncing violence and claiming that they had "nothing but love for all people and freedom".

GIGsnIi.jpg

A stance somewhat undermined by the fact that users were responding to the shootings with posts such as

SDlLQMx.png


and

rgPRAXD.png




As the examples of the Daily Stormer and Stormfront show it's not easy to kill sites. Gab however is a larger operation which hopes to make a return on its activities and is thus more dependent on its service providers. Anyhow cue lots of free-speech-under-attack outrage

PfqOtwU.jpg
Click to expand...
Why the random anime tank?
 
Have never seen Gab. Is it literally a twitter rip off with retweets or is that screen grab above from Gab the company on Twitter
 
Proper Tidy said:
Have never seen Gab. Is it literally a twitter rip off with retweets or is that screen grab above from Gab the company on Twitter
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yeah Gab is not unlike a very small scale twitter I guess but it has private chat functions as well and there aren't the same post size restrictions.

Not sure which screen shot you mean - in the post dylandefined quoted the first was one of the temporary web pages they put up when they were briefly knocked offline. The second and third are from Gab itself and the last is from their official twitter account. I think - it was a while ago.
 
Lurdan said:
yeah Gab is not unlike a very small scale twitter I guess but it has private chat functions as well and there aren't the same post size restrictions.

Not sure which screen shot you mean - in the post dylandefined quoted the first was one of the temporary web pages they put up when they were briefly knocked offline. The second and third are from Gab itself and the last is from their official twitter account. I think - it was a while ago.
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Ah yeah I meant the third, which is the gab twitter account
 
Meanwhile, stormfront has back up for two years, on the clearnet and on its original .org tld (although Google doesn't index it).
 
Maybe of interest:

Members of violent white supremacist website exposed in massive data dump

Private data for Iron March, a notorious website for violent white supremacists, has been published online in a stunning leak that exposes a trove of detailed information on as many as 1,000 or more members. The 1GB SQL database appears to contain the entirety of the site's information, including user names, private messages, public posts, registered email addresses, and IP addresses.

The leak was posted on the Internet Archive on Wednesday by an anonymous individual using the handle antifa-data. A list of domains used in email registrations shows two from US universities. Private messages show some members discussing life in the US Marines, Navy, Army, and military reserves.

____

Massive White Supremacist Message Board Leak: How to Access and Interpret the Data - bellingcat
 
kenny g said:
If only they had tasered him, handcuffed and waited for the wagon it would have been so much more 21st Century.
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I don't usually speak for other posters, but I have to think that hash tag wasn't thinking that should be the other option. It's a false choice. You don't have to do the above and you don't have to taser him either. We can do better on all fronts with how law enforcement is done.
 
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