Posted on 08/05/2019 9:19:44 AM PDT by Red Badger
Security platform Cloudflare ditched 8chan overnight, leaving it vulnerable to attacks. The infamous forum went offline for hours, but some can access it again.
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A massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, left 20 people dead and another 26 injured on Saturday morning. Hours later, authorities found a hate-filled, anti-immigrant screed the alleged 21-year-old gunman posted on 8chan prior to the attack. It's the third time this year that such a manifesto showed up on 8chan before an atrocity. The same thing happened before a massacre at two New Zealand mosques in March and at a California synagogue in April.
As pressure mounts to take action against 8chan, security platform Cloudflare decided Sunday to drop the site, rendering it vulnerable to DDoS and other attacks. As a result, the infamous forum took itself offline for several hours, but some people could access it again Monday morning.
"8chan is among the more than 19 million internet properties that use Cloudflare's service," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a Sunday blog post. "We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time. The rationale is simple: They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit."
The founder of 8chan, Fredrick Brennan, agrees. He told The New York Times on Sunday that the site he created should no longer exist.
"Shut the site down," he said. "Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, 'All right, we have to research if there's an 8chan connection.'"
Brennan started the site in 2013, seeking to create a free-speech forum bereft of any censorship. He resigned from the site in 2016. Since then, it's been controlled by owner Jim Watkins and son Ron Watkins.
"I no longer have anything to do with 8chan -- any 8chan questions post April 2016 I don't know the answers to," Brennan states on his Twitter bio.
Prince told Wired that Cloudflare has been reconsidering its relationship with 8chan for a while.
"8chan has been on our radar for a long time as a problematic user," Prince said. "But we have a responsibility, which is much beyond 'we terminate sites we don't like.' I'm nervous about whether we've made the right decision, and I'm nervous about how this will set precedent in the future."
It's the second time that Cloudflare has made such a decision. In 2106, Cloudflare dropped The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site. That decision followed the death of Heather Heyer, who was run over while protesting at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The man who purposely drove his car into the anti-racism protesters was sentenced in July to life in prison, plus 419 years, on federal hate crime charges.
In 2015, 8chan was blacklisted from Google searches due to the child-pornography content shared on the site. Back in 2014, Brennan told the Daily Dot: "I don't support the content on the [child pornography] boards you mentioned, but it is simply the cost of free speech and being the only active site to not impose more 'laws' than those that were passed in Washington, DC."
Brennan has changed his mind about the "cost of free speech" since then.
"It's not doing the world any good," Brennan told the Times on Sunday of 8chan. "It's a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It's a negative to them, too. They just don't realize it."
Tucows, which controls 8chan's domain name registration, doesn't expect it will disable the site's web address.
"We have no immediate plans other than to keep discussing internally," Graeme Bunton, manager of public policy at Tucows, told the Times.
Ron Watkins, who co-manages 8chan with his father, tweeted Sunday: "All our domains have been removed from cloudflare, so we will be moving to another service asap. Please excuse any downtime as we migrate to the new service."
All our domains have been removed from cloudflare, so we will be moving to another service asap. Please excuse any downtime as we migrate to the new service. — Ron (@CodeMonkeyZ) August 5, 2019
The site administrator said 8chan will move to security firm BitMitigate so it can get back up and running, according to the BBC.
Neither 8chan, its owners, BitMitigate nor Tucows immediately responded to requests for comment.
CNET's Sean Keane contributed to this report.
Originally published Aug. 4 at 7:31 p.m. PT. Update, Aug. 5 at 5:50 a.m.: Notes that 8chan is back for some. Update, 6:22 a.m.: Adds that Tucows doesn't plan to disable 8chan's web address.
This was not about the shootings, either..............
Ping................
The solution somehow is to give up MORE FREEDOM.
Just give us that, and then we’ll make you safe, THEY assure.
Uh-huh.
Yes indeed- 8 chan is used for comm links— and those links are read by these antiFA loons and crazed techies.
We know who posted the 24 hour warning for false flag, and the events had to be coordinated with media. See: Comey’s ridiculous NYTimes commentary on trump and “white supremacy” All happened this last weekend. Not a coincidence.
Then if I was a government agency intent on monitoring these people in an effort to prevent such attacks, I believe I would have a word with the people at cloudflare to back off and keep this source of intel available to those who can use it.
Then again, does the government ever really do anything useful with this sort of information which could have possibly prevented such an attack?
When Arizona nut shooter Loughner shot those people and the Congresswoman, they moved Heaven & Earth to cast him as right-wing:
He wasn’t the tiniest bit political.
The key to our present is our past, and they’re simply running the same playbook.
And there you have it “free speech iz bad!”
And now the press is demanding tucows deplatform 8chan from being found in DNS servers.
We live in a growing totalitarian and thought controlled world.
Dangerous times.
Unless the govt is the source for the kooks manifestos....
They could, but they won’t.
Never let a crisis go to waste........Rahm Emanuel......
I believe the ElPaso manifesto was posted one hour before the shooting began and was reported to the FBI.
Pretty slippery slope when you start thinking about proactive digital online profiling and monitoring. Pretty short slide to “wrong think.”
These mass murderers also post their hate on Facebook & Twitter.
Why aren’t those platforms under fire?
..and the FBI expressing more concern for "conspiracy theorists" than ANTIFA being a domestic terrorist group. This occurred RIGHT BEFORE these shootings.
Because they are all owned by lefty billionaires...........
Anyone who doesn’t at least entertain the possibility that these shootings are Deep State ops then must also believe SETH RICH WAS ROBBED.
8 Chan changes it’s location like the mafia does it’s meeting places...they shut it down and move on to another site.
In San Bernardino - Officials knew who the shooter was even before he stopped firing. In Orlando - the shooter had been on the FBI radar for some time. In Parkland the shooter was well known to officals who expected such a crime.
Later. Rinse. Repeat.
Reditt— now there’s some ultra whacked people.
the “war” involved here against 8 chan is NOT about the “shooter”.. it is about shutting down a secured means of comm, for good or for bad.
It’s the hitlery agenda— control the internet. Only source from.... where? Their crappy propagandists, globalists, Comintern. Nope.
For good or ill, they are there as a tool. A wrench can be used to loosen a specialized fastener.... or it can be used to bludgeon.
The manifesto is also a clue (that it was not written by a white nationalist).
Here is how you tell:
White nationalist sites always focus on the fact that Democrats don’t want open borders for Israel but they do want open borders for the United States.
The manifesto was silent on that simple fact—because the writers did not want any Democratic and/or leftist readers of the manifesto to get called out on their cognitive dissonance.
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