Cloudflare Stops Supporting Neo-Nazi Site The Daily Stormer (arstechnica.com)

Timothy B. Lee reports via Ars Technica: All week, the infamous hate site Daily Stormer has been battling to stay online in the face of a concerted social media campaign to shut it down. The site lost its "dailystormer.com" domain on Monday after first GoDaddy and then Google Domains blacklisted it from their domain registration services. The site re-appeared online on Wednesday morning at a new domain name, dailystormer.ru. But within hours, the site had gone offline again after it was dropped by Cloudflare, an intermediary that defends customers against denial-of-service attacks. Daily Stormer's Andrew Anglin reported Cloudflare's decision to drop the site in a post on the social media site Gab. His post was first spotted by journalist Matthew Sheffield.

Comments

While these guys are nutters..

[thesupraman]

Sadly we can chalk up another 'win' to groupthink, oppression of minorities, and censorship.

Really, isn't the best way to fight such complete stupidity to keep it in the open?
Isn't censoring such people just making them feel more targeted, and therefore strengthening their solidarity?

All this has done is give a bunch of disenfranchised idiots more reason to hate..

Shine a light on them, don't chase them away to skulk in the dark, where they will do what they will do without anyone watching.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[Ol Olsoc]

Sadly we can chalk up another 'win' to groupthink, oppression of minorities, and censorship.

Really, isn't the best way to fight such complete stupidity to keep it in the open?

Explain. This is not keeping people from putting their Blood and Soil and the Holocaust was a liberal Jewish hoax and Lets go here because there are some liberals gathering" websites on the internet, it is telling them that "we" aren't going to host it.

The Brave young Aryans are completely free to sign up with any service that will have them. Or even better, start one of their own, where they can spread their messages without having to worry about Liberals. In fact, they can deny those liberals access to their servers then, an obvious win.

Isn't censoring such people just making them feel more targeted, and therefore strengthening their solidarity?

First, it isn't censorship, and second, many of the people in these organizations are drawn to them because they feel disenfranchised, or have a deep seated need for hatred.

All this has done is give a bunch of disenfranchised idiots more reason to hate..

Shine a light on them, don't chase them away to skulk in the dark, where they will do what they will do without anyone watching.

Sounds like a demand for support of any group that feels marginalized. Sometimes groups are marginalized for a reason. Both of these groups have committed some serious crimes, either on a semi local level for the White Supremacists, or on a global scale, such as Nazis. And people who provide services for other people are allowed to deny service to others, except in certain narrowly defined circumstances. Good luck in the real world trying to convince most of America that they have to support either of those groups. You have a President who supports them - what more could you ask for?

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[werepants]

There's "censorship", and then there's "you're an asshole, and association with you will hurt my reputation, so I won't do business with you".

It's not like an ISP is proactively blocking people who want to read this site's content, or the government is forcing people to abandon him. The free market is acting.

So much for common carrier status

[WolfWalker545]

I suspect these companies have failed to adequately discuss their moves with their lawyers, by taking actions based on viewpoint, they potentially forfeit their ability to claim legal protections as common carriers.

Re:Huh?

[Motherfucking Shit]

They put up a blog post explaining their decision a little while ago.

I take some umbrage at Cloudflare's rationale. Their position regarding this site, as well as various other sites, seems to be "we're just a proxy." The issue with that defense is that by proxying for a site, the Cloudflare service hides and obfuscates whatever provider is actually hosting the content. This is a) by design, and b) necessary in order to make the DDoS protection effective. That doesn't make it any less problematic.

Cloudflare wants to pass the buck somewhere else in the "infrastructure stack," as they call it, and I don't necessarily disagree that what amounts to a glorified transit provider is the wrong place to be implementing blocks. But given the very nature of Cloudflare's service, how does one figure out where else to complain? When a site is using Cloudflare, all roads dead end in Cloudflare's network. The site's name servers are in the cloudflare.com domain. The site's A records are inside Cloudflare IP space. Cloudflare is the primary visible service provider in these scenarios, whether they host any content or not.

Case in point, I've watched this story play out with some interest over the past couple of days. I still have no idea where Daily Stormer's content was actually being hosted. It almost certainly would have violated the AUP/TOS of that hosting provider, and they probably would have terminated the site directly. But with Cloudflare in the way, no one knows who to complain to.

When your business model is being a black-box opaque front for all comers, don't be surprised when the world directs its anger at you.

Re:Nazi

[Pfhorrest]

So those college kids proudly waving around the flag of the people who tortured you, chanting the slogans of the people who tortured you, and espousing the ideology of the people who tortured you, doesn't bother you? They're not "real Nazis" despite adopting all the symbols of the real Nazis and standing for what real Nazis stood for? Why, because this generation of them haven't tortured you yet?