8Chan & Epik

[MapleDots]

Controversial web forum 8chan has moved its domain name to a new registrar after it was linked to at least one of the two mass shootings that occurred in the US over the weekend.

According to Whois records, it’s just jumped to racist-friendly Epik, having been registered at Tucows since 2003.

The switch appears to have happened in the last few hours. At time of writing, you’re going to get different results depending which Whois server you ping.

Some servers continue to report Tucows as the registrar of record, perhaps using cached data, but Epik’s result looks like this:

http://domainincite.com/24593-after-more-racist-shootings-take-one-guess-which-registrar-8chan-just-switched-to?

 

[Silentptnr]

I guess Tucows will have to comment there:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabel...n-domain-registration-after-el-paso-shooting/

Tucows has been free speech friendly, and I do appreciate the folks there. However, this is the hottest potato i have ever seen in my life.

Agreed

 

[offthehandle]

What cloudflare and godaddy has done in the past is despicable censorship and I am with Rob at Epik with this.

Thanks for clarifying. You might put quotes around and post a link as I didn't see any.

I guess I should have been more clear in my opening post....

None of that was my writing, I was simply quoting the linked article

Instead maybe write: Per the link below, an article in domaincite: quoted- "blah, blah... " that got misinterpreted by myself and probably others.
Peace be with everybody. Glad you stand with free speech.

 

[offthehandle]

I guess Tucows will have to comment there:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabel...n-domain-registration-after-el-paso-shooting/

Tucows has been free speech friendly, and I do appreciate the folks there. However, this is the hottest potato i have ever seen in my life.

"Both companies are owned by Robert Monster, who is perhaps best-known for helping the white supremacist social media site Gab get back online after it was kicked off GoDaddy."

Rob, Sorry to hear you get slammed once again, and nobody else wants to step up at all. It seems to me there must be a few other independent registrars who are simply silent for fear of loss of business.

What trash talk even at Forbes, the world is getting really hyper idiotic.

 

[Internet.Domains]

My heart goes out to the victims.

Unfortunately, the knee jerk reaction to de-platform the platform has now created a more complicated matter for law enforcement. The largest leads for law enforcement are now stopped cold. Law enforcement agencies are now unable to comb through the mountains of evidence that would be exposing other threats.

The responses and ongoing communications that would be on 8chan at this time would be exposing the terrorists. There would be no larger source of valuable information to law enforcement, for prevention, than to monitor where the terrorists congregate.

 

[WhoaDomain.com]

Google no longer allows you to right-click to obtain a link to an image from their results like that. You're linking to the search result page instead, so our servers aren't able to embed links to the images.



It was inevitable. Just please keep it civil and on-topic; this isn't a place to debate political views except as they pertain to the domaining industry. As always, if something crosses the line, please report it. We're not manually reviewing each post.

Got it. Thanks.

 

[WhoaDomain.com]

Oh! That's why.

yea but I don't know if he has stunted growth or is he actually a kid? he does live in my Philippines which is cool. but he no longer owns 8chan from the looks of it?
?

 

[TestCase]

yea but I don't know if he has stunted growth or is he actually a kid? he does live in my Philippines which is cool. but he no longer owns 8chan from the looks of it?
?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrick_Brennan

 

[CJ6]

Just because someone believes in free speech doesn't mean they are racist.

 

[TestCase]

Noone here has mentioned the roll of firearms in these tragedies.

How many people have to be killed before we realize that these weapons must be carefully permitted to only qualified individuals...

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this.

Why should million's of law abiding gun owners have their rights diluted even further due to an extremely small percentage of wingnuts and criminals choosing to use a firearm as their weapon of choice?

What about all the deaths, injury, damage and sadness caused by the use of alcohol or by cell phones while driving? Oh yeah, we "need" those...

When someone intentionally kills another person or persons with their car, do you blame the car or do you blame the driver? What if they use a knife? Or a hammer? Or a bat? Or...

...The penalties for misuse must be severe...

I'm going to disagree here as well...

We already have TONS of laws on the books, many with severe penalties, yet some how that still doesn't prevent criminals and wingnuts from using guns in their crimes. Many (most???) criminals using guns end up with reduced charges, get off with minimal penalties or do minimum jail time and come out ready to pick up where they left off.

You live in LA, right? How many news story are there every week about criminals that have long rap sheets that commit even worse crimes (using a gun) than what got them busted last time? Stripping law abiding people of their rights or adding more laws to the books only creates a more lucrative black market for the criminals - and results in additional crime/harm to society. (Look at how well the "The War On Drugs" has worked...)

As to the argument that "we're only trying to make things safer, we're not trying to take away your guns", have you listened to what the current crop of Democrat presidential contenders have to say about gun ownership?

Each time a new gun law passes we're told that it is going to make a difference in gun crimes. But some how it doesn't make quite enough of a difference and we have to pass some more. The term for this is "creep",

creep noun (GROWTH)
the gradual growth or increase of something in a way that was not expected or wanted

creep verb (MOVE CAREFULLY)
to move quietly and carefully, usually in order to avoid being noticed

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/creep

...I really don't subscribe to the negative impact of television and internet media, although I do believe that some desensitization occurs...

Maybe it's just me, and I mean this seriously as I haven't looked at the data, but it seems mass shootings/killings have increased considerably since the advent of the internet, the ready access to 24/7 news, the anonymity that allows people to express their worst side without repercussion, self indulgent social media (maybe it should be labeled "self-aggrandizing media ©") and the focus on celebrities that display no moral compass and promote nothing but excess and the seven deadly sins.

For most of the previous 70-80 years, politicians, athletes, celebrities, etc used to (at least superficially) promote higher standards and social civility. Now it's Me, Me, Me! Take, take, take... People aren't willing to be concerned at all about anyone but themselves - unless it helps their agenda.

It seems coping skills are also now optional. Everyone gets butt hurt about everything in life and needs to find a way to escape from reality, feel superior, find a way take it out on someone else or just plain exact revenge.

Add to this that critical thinking seems to be going (gone???) by the wayside...

You throw all these things together and we now have the perfect storm! [/rant]

There are some mentally ill people out there. Always has been and always will be.

I hope something can be done to prevent these kinds of killing sprees.

I don't blame Epik with trying to be neutral. Let web hosts be web hosts, law enforcement be law enforcement.

We can agree on these!

 

[Silentptnr]

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this.

Why should million's of law abiding gun owners have their rights diluted even further due to an extremely small percentage of wingnuts and criminals choosing to use a firearm as their weapon of choice?

What about all the deaths, injury, damage and sadness caused by the use of alcohol or by cell phones while driving? Oh yeah, we "need" those...


I'm going to disagree here as well...

We already have TONS of laws on the books, many with severe penalties, yet some how that still doesn't prevent criminals and wingnuts from using guns in their crimes. Many (most???) criminals using guns end up with reduced charges, get off with minimal penalties or do minimum jail time and come out ready to pick up where they left off.

You live in LA, right? How many news story are there every week about criminals that have long rap sheets that commit even worse crimes (using a guns) than what got them busted last time? Stripping law abiding people of their rights or adding more laws to the books only creates a more lucrative black market for the criminals - and results in additional crime/harm to society. (Look at how well the "The War On Drugs" has worked...)

As to the argument that "we're only trying to make things safer, we're not trying to take away your guns", have you listened to what the current crop of Democrat presidential contenders have to say about gun ownership?

Each time a new gun law passes we're told that it is going to make a difference in gun crimes. But some how it doesn't make quite enough of a difference and we have to pass some more. The term for this is "creep",



Maybe it's just me, and I mean this seriously as I haven't looked at the data, but it seems mass shootings/killings have increased considerably since the advent of the internet, the ready access to 24/7 news, the anonymity that allows people to express their worst side without repercussion, self indulgent social media (maybe it should be labeled "self-aggrandizing media") and the focus on celebrities that display no moral compass and promote nothing but excess and the seven deadly sins.

For most of the previous 70-80 years, politicians, athletes, celebrities, etc used to (at least superficially) promote higher standards and social civility. Now it's Me, Me, Me! Take, take, take... People aren't willing to be concerned at all about anyone but themselves - unless it helps their agenda.

It seems coping skills are also now optional. Everyone gets butt hurt about everything in life and needs to find a way to escape from reality, feel superior, find a way take it out on someone else or just plain exact revenge.

Add to this that critical thinking seems to be going (gone???) by the wayside... And you throw all these things together and we have the perfect storm! [/rant]

We can agree on these!

If I had to bet, I'd bet one day firearms will be a thing of the past. I can't see a future where men, women and children are armed or walk around wearing bullet proof vests.

 

[TestCase]

If I had to bet, I'd bet one day firearms will be a thing of the past. I can't see a future where men, women and children are armed and wear bullet proof vests.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/

Hmmm... You might want to stop driving. And don't ever leave your bed. And for God sake, stop breathing...

But seriously, if you were to subtract out suicides - about 2/3 of gun fatalities - the odds of dying by guns would decrease significantly.

 

[Bernard Wright]

I hope the preponderance of these overblown threads will eventually wane.

All concerned should be comforted by the fact that they may conduct themselves in accordance with their God-given rights, and Epik will refrain from acting as the sole judge, jury, and executioner, even when faced with political and peer pressure. It takes guts to let your enemies speak their minds. It also takes compassion. Rob has shown that he possesses these traits in droves.

Let criminals meet their fates in a court of law. Anything less in barbarism.

 

[offthehandle]

(Look at how well the "The War On Drugs" has worked...), Now it's Me, Me, Me! Take, take, take...

Exactly.



Me, Me, Me- yep. The Entitled.

 

[frank-germany]

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/

Hmmm... You might want to stop driving. And don't ever leave your bed. And for God sake, stop breathing...

But seriously, if you were to subtract out suicides - about 2/3 of gun fatalities - the odds of dying by guns would decrease significantly.

as far as I know
the USA is the country
with the most injuries from firearms

in countries like germany
there are signifiantly less
crimes where guns are involved
where those firearms are banned

I know you won't agree
so don't tell me....

 

[Mister Funsky]

If I had to bet, I'd bet one day firearms will be a thing of the past.

I would take that bet.

They will only be eliminated if/when a 'minority report' type of technology is developed and deployed to protect us against each other.

 

[TestCase]

...

I know you won't agree
so don't tell me....

Huh! I wasn't aware you were my overlord. Thanks for the update but I'm just going suffer the consequences and continue being an independent thinker - i.e. just being me!

Now back to the topic at hand...

There are MANY factors involved with this issue. But don't let that stop you from believing in your simple solution. Did you know that the percentage of people who are legal gun owners in the US has actually gone down at the same time that mass shootings has gone up? With your simple solution, shouldn't mass shootings have gone down? Again, criminals and crazies don't abide by laws.

Maybe Germany should ban beer and all other alcoholic beverages. That would then completely stop Germany's high rate of alcoholism and save thousands of lives.

https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alcohol/by-country/

Now, prohibition didn't work out very well here in the US, but I'm sure Germany's perfect society will accept it as the easiest and simplest solution to the problem. After all, isn't it about saving lives?!?!?. By the way, is the right to alcohol consumption embedded in Germany's Constitution?

 

[Bernard Wright]

Folks may feel free to discuss gun laws in the Gun Laws thread I created a while back.

https://www.namepros.com/threads/gun-laws.1136656/

 

[frank-germany]

Huh! I wasn't aware you were my overlord. Thanks for the update but I'm just going suffer the consequences and continue being an independent thinker - i.e. just being me!

Now back to the topic at hand...

There are MANY factors involved with this issue. But don't let that stop you from believing in your simple solution. Did you know that the percentage of people who are legal gun owners in the US has actually gone down at the same time that mass shootings has gone up? With your simple solution, shouldn't mass shootings have gone down? Again, criminals and crazies don't abide by laws.

Maybe Germany should ban beer and all other alcoholic beverages. That would then completely stop Germany's high rate of alcoholism and save thousands of lives.

https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alcohol/by-country/

Now, prohibition didn't work out very well here in the US, but I'm sure Germany's perfect society will accept it as the easiest and simplest solution to the problem. After all, isn't it about saving lives?!?!?. By the way, is the right to alcohol consumption embedded in Germany's Constitution?

interesting statistics
thank you

the mere fact that I might be able to kill you with my empty hands
doesn't mean that fire weapons should be allowed

it is obvious to most people in the world,
that when you are allowed to carry guns around
that sooner or later somebody will use it

most people carry empty hands w/o any danger to the public

guns are special

 

[carob]

I wanted to know what Cloudflare have to say. It's here:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

The only relevance of the First Amendment in this case and others is that it allows us to choose who we do and do not do business with; it does not obligate us to do business with everyone.Instead our concern has centered around another much more universal idea: the Rule of Law.

The unresolved question is how should the law deal with platforms that ignore or actively thwart the Rule of Law? That's closer to the situation we have seen with the Daily Stormer and 8chan. They are lawless platforms. In cases like these, where platforms have been designed to be lawless and unmoderated, and where the platforms have demonstrated their ability to cause real harm, the law may need additional remedies.

 

[TCK]

Looks like Epik negotiated to get bit mitigate back online at Voxility. However, 8chan and daily stormer are still offline. Maybe part of a compromise.

 

[Chris Hydrick]

@Rob Monster -- Have you seen this article yet?

https://arstechnica.com/information...n-is-all-the-way-down-its-dns-its-always-dns/

The article appears to make some serious technical based claims...

Alex Stamos, cybersecurity expert at Stanford University and former CSO of Facebook, observed that BitMitigate seemed itself to be almost entirely made of equipment and network infrastructure leased from a company called Voxility. This public and pointed observation prompted Voxility to fire BitMitigate and Epik, leaving both 8chan and The Daily Stormer dead in the water.

In the screenshot gallery, you can see I've piped the whois results through grep for OrgName. This isn't strictly necessary, but whois by itself returns pages of information; grep allows us to only look at the lines containing keyword OrgName—which is the organization responsible for managing the subnet of IP addresses they're each in. This nets us one IP address at Linode, another at Amazon Web Services, and the third at OVH, a large European cloud provider. (We can also find that Epik's website itself is running on a Web server hosted at NatCoWeb, a New Jersey-based hosting provider.)

We can also take a look at the whois information for the netblock containing 8ch.net's DNS servers and The Daily Stormer's Web server. Epik's now-disconnected netblock is in Switzerland, so we need to query RIPE's infrastructure rather than ARIN's, and the format is a little different—but we can see that it's registered to Robert Monster, the CEO of Epik and BitMitigate. (There is a contact address and phone number for Monster listed in Sammamish, Washington. We tried calling but received no answer; the number went to a generic voicemail with no configured greeting.)

What this all boils down to is that Epik itself only seems "up" because Epik—unlike 8chan and The Daily Stormer—isn't hosted on Epik at all.

 

[branding]

@Rob Monster -- Have you seen this article yet? They mention you by name, and say they attempted to reach you by phone, but no answer, and the number went to a generic voicemail with no configured greeting.

https://arstechnica.com/information...n-is-all-the-way-down-its-dns-its-always-dns/

The article appears to make some serious technical based claims...

Solid article. Good choice by Epik to separate their own infrastructure from bitmitigate/clients. Fine example of how things should be done.

 

[Chris Hydrick]

Solid article. Good choice by Epik to separate their own infrastructure from bitmitigate/clients. Fine example of how things should be done.

I'm not technically skilled enough to make an educated opinion on this; hence why I left it at technical claims. Hopefully somebody who is knowledgeable on the subject can chime in more in depth.

But yes, I do agree it is a very solidly written article. In the sense the author wrote out the steps he took to compile information, and sourced throughout. This, in essence, gives more context for a healthy exchange should the author have misinterpreted any of his findings, Rob can correct the issue and cite where or why that is not the case, all the while Rob has a baseline understanding as to why the writer might have taken that position. Hoping to only keep it a technical based conversation, rather than motive based.

 

[Paul]

@Rob Monster -- Have you seen this article yet? They mention you by name, and say they attempted to reach you by phone, but no answer, and the number went to a generic voicemail with no configured greeting.

https://arstechnica.com/information...n-is-all-the-way-down-its-dns-its-always-dns/

The article appears to make some serious technical based claims...

These opinions are my own and do not represent the opinions of NamePros. I do not have authority to represent NamePros on this matter. Edit/Additional disclaimer for more technical readers: Yes, I understand I've greatly simplified the technical points here. If your response to reading this is, "But BitMitigate doesn't even utilize anycast or have their own ASN!"--then this post isn't for you.

I would caution against using this as an opportunity to criticize BitMitigate from a technical standpoint. Developing your own infrastructure for a CDN is exorbitantly expensive; as far as I'm aware, no such public CDN exists. Cloudflare, perhaps the most popular public CDN at the moment, works much the same way: space is leased at various datacenters throughout the world. As a CDN grows, more points-of-presence are added, and with that comes more resilience to incidents such as this. A young, small CDN will typically be at the mercy of one or two providers. It's difficult to relay to someone unfamiliar with the technical side of the internet exactly what this means.

The danger here is that expecting a new CDN to be as resilient as a large, established CDN makes it difficult for new CDNs to enter the market. This stifles competition. Of course, if your priority is uptime, a new, small CDN is usually not an ideal choice, but that goes for any such CDN, not just BitMitigate.

A more relevant point here is that a single provider is not enough even for a small CDN; the risks are just too great. BitMitigate's response should include diversifying their infrastructure. This does not mean they would actually "own" their infrastructure; they would simply be utilizing a greater number of providers.

My understanding is that Epik acquired BitMitigate along with BitMitigate's existing infrastructure. Therefore, this point is incorrect:

...What this all boils down to is that Epik itself only seems "up" because Epik—unlike 8chan and The Daily Stormer—isn't hosted on Epik at all.

Unless something has changed, Epik's infrastructure is distinct from BitMitigate's. To say that Epik isn't hosted on Epik would be incorrect. "Hosting with Epik" does not mean "hosting with BitMitigate"--they are separate.

 

[biggie]

Hi

some of the views and opinions expressed in this thread, are a real eye opener.

these are some of the same people who post names for sale and maybe make offers on your names

from one side of the center, to the other, both so passionate in how they feel.

whose truth, is really true.... and could you understand it better, if you walked in their shoes?

imo...