We've been discussing 8chan getting kicked off Cloudflare, with a fair amount of the conversation about whether it's pointless for Cloudflare to kick them off, and whether Cloudflare should be...
We've been discussing 8chan getting kicked off Cloudflare, with a fair amount of the conversation about whether it's pointless for Cloudflare to kick them off, and whether Cloudflare should be getting involved in situations like this at all.
I think it might be a bit of an underappreciated aspect that Cloudflare effectively hides the actual provider of hosting services for sites that use it. If a site is fully behind Cloudflare (and didn't make any mistakes), it's impossible to figure out who's actually hosting the site. Because of that, people can't report the abusive site to its actual host or any other upstream providers. All they can do is complain to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare almost always won't take any action. There's been criticism about this problem in the past, often related to Cloudflare protecting malware, phishing, DDoS-for-hire sites, etc.
So once 8chan was pulled out from behind the Cloudflare curtain, suddenly it became possible to figure out who's services they're actually hosted on, and complaints to those providers are having an effect.
I just hope they won't hop to a Cloudflare alternative. Short of 8chan being shut down altogether, our best hope is it moves to tor, which presents a small barrier to entry.
I just hope they won't hop to a Cloudflare alternative. Short of 8chan being shut down altogether, our best hope is it moves to tor, which presents a small barrier to entry.
They did. They moved to Bitmitigate. Then Bitmitigate's provider (Voxility) kicked Bitmitigate (technically, Bitmitigate's parent company) off their network. So as of now, 8chan is down and the...
I just hope they won't hop to a Cloudflare alternative.
They did. They moved to Bitmitigate. Then Bitmitigate's provider (Voxility) kicked Bitmitigate (technically, Bitmitigate's parent company) off their network.
So as of now, 8chan is down and the site providing DDOS protection (Bitmitigate) to 8chan is also down.
I'm really not understanding how the same discussions on Reddit & HackerNews respectively have been able to garner 3000+ and 800+ comments respectively. To me this is a clear cut case of the 1st...
I'm really not understanding how the same discussions on Reddit & HackerNews respectively have been able to garner 3000+ and 800+ comments respectively. To me this is a clear cut case of the 1st amendment and companies are legally exercising their rights to choose what they want to support. Nothing new or controversial there.
because reddit and hackernews are both full of crypto-libertarian and techno-libertarian types, and conversely many of those people also are probably only a step or two to the left of just being...
because reddit and hackernews are both full of crypto-libertarian and techno-libertarian types, and conversely many of those people also are probably only a step or two to the left of just being actual 4chan or 8chan posters themselves.
HackerNews and Reddit are cesspits when it comes to issues touching their so-called "free speech". They will rant and rave about "compelled speech" when it involves cakes* or Jordan Peterson†, but...
HackerNews and Reddit are cesspits when it comes to issues touching their so-called "free speech". They will rant and rave about "compelled speech" when it involves cakes* or Jordan Peterson†, but scream about censorship as soon as a subreddit is quarantined.
Some of them do have a slightly better argument. They believe that internet providers, and presumably companies like Reddit & co, provide a service that should be considered a public utility.
Whatever their arguments, though, they always fall back to "censorship", unjust because over "just a difference of opinions", and then start thinking heavy thoughts, trying to solve problems like "who decides what's bad?" and "isn't badness relative?", before shaking themselves out of their stupor to go "first they came..."
Whether because they are reactionaries, or just contrarians, they don't like being told that there are lines that they should not step over, and they are not shy about letting others know.
* One or more bakeries refused service to gay people on religious grounds. They defended themselves against discrimination by claiming that their cakes are a work of art - a way for the artist to express themselves - and that thus refusing service falls under freedom of speech. † Jordan Peterson famously used the term "compelled speech" to refer to Canadian bill C16, which only expanded the already existing protections to include gender identity and expression. Neither he nor his lobsters like that idea, so they gather under the banner of "compelled speech!" to avoid using the right names and pronouns for trans people.
Public utilities wouldn't be required to respect these nutjob's rights though - public utilities, services, and venues can and do refuse service to people who abuse them to harass or harm other...
Public utilities wouldn't be required to respect these nutjob's rights though - public utilities, services, and venues can and do refuse service to people who abuse them to harass or harm other members of the public. A park is not required to let you in if you harass or intimidate other park goers, and my public university is not required to give a platform or to financially support groups that use said platform to intimidate or threaten other individuals. I'm certain that 8chan has long crossed the point where any public utility hosting provider would refuse service to them, because they'd be using said access for the purpose of harassing and intimidating other members of the hosting provider.
Imagine if racists, white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and other scum would be refused access to things like the power grid, running water and plumbing. I think that's a very dangerous precedent, if...
Public utilities wouldn't be required to respect these nutjob's rights though - public utilities, services, and venues can and do refuse service to people who abuse them to harass or harm other members of the public.
Imagine if racists, white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and other scum would be refused access to things like the power grid, running water and plumbing. I think that's a very dangerous precedent, if you want to to classify Cloudflare and other commercial internet services as public utilities. At a certain point, you either need to lock people up in prisons because they went too far, or you need to actually allow them to exist in society. That implies access to the basic infrastructure of society.
Fortunately I don't think you can quite classify such services as "public utilities". But if that's how you want to frame the argument, think about what the phrase actually means and what you're implying.
I would support locking up more people who run cesspools of internet hate that encourage people to commit violence. But I do not support making them second-rate citizens, without access to the basics of society, without actually punishing them within the framework of the law.
Yes, they would, because they are not talking about parks and other public venues. They are talking about roads, the power grid, phone lines, water outlets and sewer access, and access to those...
Public utilities wouldn't be required to respect these nutjob's rights though
Yes, they would, because they are not talking about parks and other public venues. They are talking about roads, the power grid, phone lines, water outlets and sewer access, and access to those can't be denied - not even to Nazis or other hardened criminals.
Of course, while Internet access is very important - almost necessary to participate to society - that's not the same thing as unregulated usage, and unregulated access to third-party systems. That is, even if we decide that everyone should have an Internet connection, that would still not give them the right to have their speech be hosted wherever they please.
In any case, it's not a good argument, just slightly better than no argument - than "censorship bad! fatpeoplehate did nothing wrong!" - and, above all, a distraction. Free speech absolutism is indefensible, and I think they know it. They are just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
I honestly don't understand this hypocritical argument. The government they themselves support and their puppet in the FCC has declared that ISPs and internet services are not public utility and...
I honestly don't understand this hypocritical argument. The government they themselves support and their puppet in the FCC has declared that ISPs and internet services are not public utility and promptly allowed them to sell customer data or create "fast lanes" in their services. So if those things aren't, what leg are they standing on debating that Cloudflare is?
That's a very reasonable stance to hold, so long as even if the cultural climate was inverted and it was far-left sites getting booted off the web you would still hold the same position. To be...
That's a very reasonable stance to hold, so long as even if the cultural climate was inverted and it was far-left sites getting booted off the web you would still hold the same position. To be clear, I do believe that this argument is a very strong one, but it's ideologically both quite libertarian and quite capitalist. It always strikes me that a substantial subset of the people who employ this line of argumentation are fairly diametrically opposed to both libertarianism and capitalism. This leads me to the undeniable conclusion that they are simply employing the argument out of convenience, rather than principle - because they know that in the modern climate, far-right sites will be shunned far more than left-wing sites by hosting and infrastructure providers. While I won't be shedding a tear by any means for 8chan dropping off the web, I do think it is dishonest to smugly cloak oneself in the first amendment when it suits without being committed to its principle as well as its effect.
I think much of that is used to point out the irony of what a libertarian or laissez faire capitalist wants. They want no internet regulation from governments, until the government is wanted to...
I think much of that is used to point out the irony of what a libertarian or laissez faire capitalist wants. They want no internet regulation from governments, until the government is wanted to protect their ability to organize.
It's quite ironic, especially, when the same ones who cried out against NN rules, and for deregulation of internet service providers now want regulation of internet service providers and want a neutral network.
Sure, and they shouldn't be legally allowed to do that, because they're hosting people openly calling for murder. And, in practice, they can't do that, because they would be perpetually DDoSed....
Sure, and they shouldn't be legally allowed to do that, because they're hosting people openly calling for murder. And, in practice, they can't do that, because they would be perpetually DDoSed.
See, I think 8chan shouldn't exist, but that shouldn't be left in the hands of a handful of companies. Leaving the responsibility to them has resulted in 8chan existing for much longer that it should.
The US needs better regulation of free speech, and the world needs a competitive and open internet which doesn't depend on the will of their current overlords to effectively work.
The hacker known as 8chan is reportedly "on an epic sperg out" following the site going dark due to his mom reportedly blowing a fuse. Sources close to 8chan allege the local mother was making...
8chan can buy their own servers and host it out of their mom's basement.
The hacker known as 8chan is reportedly "on an epic sperg out" following the site going dark due to his mom reportedly blowing a fuse. Sources close to 8chan allege the local mother was making tendies for the notorious internet pot-stirrer.
You may be right, but that will probably be too late. However, 8chan or not, it's bound to happen. And I can't really defend 8chan, it's not really possible to do that without defending outright...
You may be right, but that will probably be too late. However, 8chan or not, it's bound to happen. And I can't really defend 8chan, it's not really possible to do that without defending outright murder. So I don't know, I just know I'm very worried.
Edit: it's not that I don't want this to happen to 8chan. It's that I don't want this situation to be possible. But I realize it's possible regardless of what they do to 8chan, so even if 8chan was finally once again tolerated, that would mean nothing at all, the perspectives for the internet would be just as grim. I have nothing to say in favor of 8chan.
Is it? That sounds a lot like a slippery slope to me and that's a pretty wobbly base on which to build an argument. Are you really worried that society collectively telling Nazis to get fucked...
However, 8chan or not, it's bound to happen.
Is it? That sounds a lot like a slippery slope to me and that's a pretty wobbly base on which to build an argument.
Are you really worried that society collectively telling Nazis to get fucked will lead to anything more than that? Many countries outside the US have anti-hate-speech laws and they seem to be doing OK so far. Germany, for example, has been quite enthusiastically anti-Nazi for several generations now but they're managing to not go full-totalitarian about things.
It's not about any slippery slope. It's that, regardless if they actually do it or not, a handful of big companies have the power to decide what stays online and what doesn't, regardless of its...
It's not about any slippery slope. It's that, regardless if they actually do it or not, a handful of big companies have the power to decide what stays online and what doesn't, regardless of its legality. I don't care what happens to 8chan, but I do care about an internet governed not by law but by a very small number of corporations. And what I mean is that, regardless if those companies shut 8chan down or not, they have the power to shut down almost anything. I have a problem with that, not with 8chan disappearing.
The answer wouldn't be to force those companies to accept hosting anything while it's legal. The answer would be to break up those companies and change the laws to make new oligopolies impossible.
And yes, in a more competitive environment, probably there would be some company which hosts any kind of legal content, because there's a demand for that. Make open calls to murder illegal, then, as it should be. But don't let that responsibility fall into the hands of an oligopoly.
I don't know if I have explained myself well, as you can tell English isn't my first language. So my TL;DR would be that I have no problem with 8chan getting shut down, but that shouldn't depend on the will of a handful of companies. Among other things, because they could decide as well for it to stay up, as it has been until now. Both 8chan surviving so long and getting shut down by the will of a couple of companies is an expression of the same problem.
I'm not sure there are a handful of companies who can shut down anything. The internet is very resistant to that kind of thing by it's very design. Sure, there are a few very big cloud hosting...
I'm not sure there are a handful of companies who can shut down anything. The internet is very resistant to that kind of thing by it's very design. Sure, there are a few very big cloud hosting companies like Cloudflare and Akamai and AWS and so on and if you piss them off life gets a little more difficult - but there's an awful lot of smaller companies as well.
8chan have so far discovered a few companies who won't host their crap. There's plenty more people with a server and some bandwidth out there. Lots of shitty places find hosting. Stormfront is still online (hosted by Cloudflare ffs).
I suppose the big backbone providers could decide not to transit certain traffic (I'm not certain that's physically possible but it might be) but even then there are always other routes.
You've apparently misunderstood @chembliss throughout this conversation. They're basically saying that we need legal framework for deplatforming where the decision is not up to private for-profit...
You've apparently misunderstood @chembliss throughout this conversation. They're basically saying that we need legal framework for deplatforming where the decision is not up to private for-profit entities but instead the government(s) in whose jurisdiction the platform companies operate.
IDK of an example today, but it is not hard to imagine that if we had today's internet 30 years ago how anything that supported anything that's not cisgender & heterosexual would run the risk of silence via deplatforming. Or anti-war efforts, or socialist stuff.
And that it is yet to happen or whether it is likely to happen or not from what we can deduce today is irrelevant: that it might happen is dangerous enough. Also, if it is protected/obliged by law, proper deplatforming would be vastly encouraged and more companies would do it sooner, with legal ways to request and police it instead of mere mob pressure which is the only effective way we have at hand today.
Well, in that case, my apologies for misreading you, @chembliss The problem, of course, is that you only need one country who decides not to have such laws and then all the controversial places go...
Well, in that case, my apologies for misreading you, @chembliss
The problem, of course, is that you only need one country who decides not to have such laws and then all the controversial places go there for hosting. Or there's a number of distributed/anonymised hosting systems. To take a fairly extreme example, images of child sexual abuse are illegal everywhere, yet it's still on the internet.
I don't know how you'd go about solving that. Nation-level domain/IP blocking can go some distance - in the UK quite a number of pirate sites are unavailable to most internet users but it's astonishingly easy to walk past the filters if you want to. If anything it might even make that content more attractive, that "the man" doesn't want you to see it.
No need to apologize! Written conversations + English not as my native language + controversial topics = occasional misunderstandings. And yes, CP is still on the internet, but it surely takes...
No need to apologize! Written conversations + English not as my native language + controversial topics = occasional misunderstandings.
And yes, CP is still on the internet, but it surely takes quite a bit more risk to get to it than if it were on the clearnet. And that's irrespective of if the clearnet is governed by companies or by law, it's a whole different issue. You can still access to illegal content, but you're risking the consequences, in the same way that you can still break the law in many other ways. But it's not up to a corporation to regulate that.
And, while it is a different issue, it's also worth appreciating the role of pseodonymous networks and anonymizing technology which isn't only negative. Citizens in many authoritarian countries currently rely upon them, and maybe one day not so far away we will, too.
The answer is to roll your own server on your own IP. There's nothing preventing anyone from doing so, and that takes it completely out of the hands of any/all of these companies.
The answer is to roll your own server on your own IP. There's nothing preventing anyone from doing so, and that takes it completely out of the hands of any/all of these companies.
If it's a content controversial enough (I'm not talking about straight up criminal as in 8chan) that those companies reject it, you are guaranteed that the site would be in a permanent situation...
There's nothing preventing anyone from doing so
If it's a content controversial enough (I'm not talking about straight up criminal as in 8chan) that those companies reject it, you are guaranteed that the site would be in a permanent situation of DDoS, if not worse. Also, if major DNS providers decided to drop your domain, you would be left into a very marginal place.
Of course you can always do something, you can set up a Time hidden service or move to I2P. But the point is that a handful of companies shouldn't have the ability to decide who effectively stays online, accesible and visible to everyone, and who doesn't, even if there will always be some way in which you could stay online.
If 8chan really wants hosting, I have a hunch they can get plenty of it for cheap in Russia, without even the slightest chance it'll be taken down. Plenty of countries still out there that don't...
If 8chan really wants hosting, I have a hunch they can get plenty of it for cheap in Russia, without even the slightest chance it'll be taken down. Plenty of countries still out there that don't care who you are or what you host, illegal or reprehensible, they don't mind.
Yes, I agree. However, I wasn't talking about 8chan. Russia would happily host 8chan, but maybe not other kind of content, if they too find it damaging to their interests.
Yes, I agree. However, I wasn't talking about 8chan. Russia would happily host 8chan, but maybe not other kind of content, if they too find it damaging to their interests.
8chan is down. Looks like the CDN is under attack. We opened a ticket.
Actually, its not an attack. It seems @bitmitigate might have just been deplatformed for hosting 8chan.
Going to give bitmitigate some time to find a solution for their peering problem. If we are still down in a few hours then maybe 8chan will just go clearnet and we can brave DDOS attacks like Ishmael on the Pequod.
Edit to add:
We have mitigations going up and strategies are being developed to bring services back online. Doing my best to #StayTheCourse.
I'm sure the irony is lost. It's also interesting to watch the pieces tumble as they find out one step at a time that nearly no one that will do business with them owns their own hardware.
I'm sure the irony is lost.
It's also interesting to watch the pieces tumble as they find out one step at a time that nearly no one that will do business with them owns their own hardware.
Here’s seemingly decent techy journalism from CBS explaining that bitmitigate rents servers from Canadian firm Voxility: Edit: I love that plain language from Voxility. It is important for many...
"At this point, the entire network that supported the 8chan website is completely banned from Voxility," Sirbu said, adding that Voxility's decision affected not just 8chan, but all Epik and BitMitigate services associated with Voxility's servers:
"This company is no longer using our services. We are not a fan of hate speech and this is against our policy."
Edit: I love that plain language from Voxility. It is important for many reasons, including setting a bar for the executives of the next company which Epik and BitMitigate go to for services.
Also please note that this is bigger than just 8chan. The mainstream nazi site, the dai?ily stoi.rmer, is also down thanks to Voxility getting called out by Alex Stamos[0] on Twitter.
[0] from his wiki:
Alex Stamos is a computer scientist and adjunct professor at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is the former chief security officer (CSO) at Facebook. His planned departure from the company, following disagreement with other executives about how to address the Russian government's use of its platform to spread disinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, was reported in March
They're not being DDoSed right now, the site is just totally down because their CDN (Bitmitigate) seems to have been kicked off its hosting service. He was saying that they may have to give up on...
They're not being DDoSed right now, the site is just totally down because their CDN (Bitmitigate) seems to have been kicked off its hosting service. He was saying that they may have to give up on finding some sort of CDN or DDoS-protection service that will take them and will need to expose their servers directly to the internet, risking future DDoSes.
Hey look everyone a convenient scapegoat! Now the people in the US can say "look, we did something, that website is no longer there and we've prevented any future 8chan shooters!". Ignoring of...
Hey look everyone a convenient scapegoat!
Now the people in the US can say "look, we did something, that website is no longer there and we've prevented any future 8chan shooters!".
Ignoring of course all the other shooters that will have become radicalised on Reddit, or Facebook, or just by reading their President's twitter feed. And ignoring of course the root causes of the issue like poor education, lack of mental health care, godawful gun laws, and having someone who emulates Abu Bakar Bashir as a leader.
this is definitely not the case; i have literally not heard anybody claim this or anything close to this, and i have had my twitter lists--which consist of collectively something in the ballpark...
Hey look everyone a convenient scapegoat!
Now the people in the US can say "look, we did something, that website is no longer there and we've prevented any future 8chan shooters!".
this is definitely not the case; i have literally not heard anybody claim this or anything close to this, and i have had my twitter lists--which consist of collectively something in the ballpark of 7,500 people from all over the political spectrum--open almost the entirety of the past 3 days. maybe not-technologically-savvy randos think this, but even presidential candidates want to force social media to handle their massive problems with radicalization.
I agree that mental health care is important. There's no solid evidence to support the idea that people suffering from mental illnesses commit higher numbers of gun violence against others. E -...
I agree that mental health care is important.
There's no solid evidence to support the idea that people suffering from mental illnesses commit higher numbers of gun violence against others.
There is more to mental health than mental illness, the same way there is more to physical health that physical illness. By definition, ANYONE who chooses to kill a bunch of people then kill...
There is more to mental health than mental illness, the same way there is more to physical health that physical illness.
By definition, ANYONE who chooses to kill a bunch of people then kill themselves has mental problems, whether or not they fit an arbitrary definition of illness.
Do you mind if I ask what definition you're using? The only reason I ask is that, for example, we dont automatically assume someone who murders another person is mentally ill.
Do you mind if I ask what definition you're using? The only reason I ask is that, for example, we dont automatically assume someone who murders another person is mentally ill.
You're stuck on mental illness. If you are overweight, you don't have a physical illness, but you are not physically healthy. If you murder someone, you might not be mentally ill, but you aren't...
we dont automatically assume someone who murders another person is mentally ill
You're stuck on mental illness. If you are overweight, you don't have a physical illness, but you are not physically healthy. If you murder someone, you might not be mentally ill, but you aren't mentally healthy.
I'm stuck on mental illness because that's what I said. It just seems like you're interpreting my words in a manner in which they were not intended, which is my concern.
I'm stuck on mental illness because that's what I said. It just seems like you're interpreting my words in a manner in which they were not intended, which is my concern.
It's not helping that you replied to someone that used the term "mental health care" with the term "mental illness", essentially equating them to be the same. I think that's where the confusion...
It's not helping that you replied to someone that used the term "mental health care" with the term "mental illness", essentially equating them to be the same. I think that's where the confusion started.
That's fair. I should've made the clauses more distinct, my mistake. To be clear, poor mental health care is still not one of the root causes of gun violence against others, as I intended to say....
That's fair. I should've made the clauses more distinct, my mistake.
To be clear, poor mental health care is still not one of the root causes of gun violence against others, as I intended to say. Against one's self, sure, but not others.
I think there's a lot of bigoted propaganda on other sites too that should be dealt with, but I wouldn't be surprised if 8chan was orders of magnitude more effective at radicalizing people than...
Ignoring of course all the other shooters that will have become radicalised on Reddit, or Facebook, or just by reading their President's twitter feed.
I think there's a lot of bigoted propaganda on other sites too that should be dealt with, but I wouldn't be surprised if 8chan was orders of magnitude more effective at radicalizing people than those sites. I know a good number of people who I used to consider friends that became far alt-right whack-jobs, and the cause was 8chan for all of them. I don't know anyone radicalized by other sites.
Granted this is extremely skewed by my friend group having been very 4chan-adjacent, but on the other hand, in various threads about 8chan going down, I've seen numerous posts talking about 8chan radicalizing people they knew, and only many hypothetical posts about other sites being capable of doing the same. (Granted there's a further skewing of that maybe people with stories to tell about 8chan affecting their friend groups are more likely to post in threads titled after it, and that maybe the friend-groups of people radicalized by other sites aren't so closely connected to the sites with discussion threads that I read, but I feel like it still adds up to some amount of signal.)
8chan is almost certainly the worst, but a huge part of the issue is that the less-extreme sections on other sites lead people to 8chan. Almost all of the users on 8chan would never have ended up...
8chan is almost certainly the worst, but a huge part of the issue is that the less-extreme sections on other sites lead people to 8chan. Almost all of the users on 8chan would never have ended up on it if they had to find it directly. The problem is that they get involved in somewhere "lighter", and that place repeatedly acts like they're being oppressed by the platform and that you have to go to 8chan to see the real truth that we're not allowed to talk about here because the SJWs are censoring us, man!
All the other sites only take action when things start to drift into 8chan-level hatefulness on the site itself, but don't really do anything to fix the fact that they're all working as 8chan's "normie pipeline". 8chan, Voat, etc. are all only able to get their userbases by continually pulling people over from the mainstream sites.
sometimes it's not even that. my trajectory for going to 8chan and becoming a semi-regular user was literally as simple as reddit -> 8chan because /r/KotakuinAction had a link to the place and it...
The problem is that they get involved in somewhere "lighter", and that place repeatedly acts like they're being oppressed by the platform and that you have to go to 8chan to see the real truth that we're not allowed to talk about here because the SJWs are censoring us, man!
sometimes it's not even that. my trajectory for going to 8chan and becoming a semi-regular user was literally as simple as reddit -> 8chan because /r/KotakuinAction had a link to the place and it was more active for gamergate stuff than KiA back then. (although that said, i never exactly radicalized--the tumblr anti-SJW movement, which was nowhere near as bad, was my edgy "lol blue hairs" phase and that was in 2013-14)
I guess we'll wait and see here: will it really be the case that actual physical violence will reduce due to deplatforming, or was it really a case of 90-9-1 where it's only that one percent that...
I guess we'll wait and see here: will it really be the case that actual physical violence will reduce due to deplatforming, or was it really a case of 90-9-1 where it's only that one percent that are the even potentially murderers, in which case the actual violence part of it may end up taking only a light hit or even nothing at all. It might even cause that 1% to get even more radicalised, increasing the number of attacks.
All I said above is speculation of course. There is one thing that is certain: the traffic to these websites take huge hits, and they even cease to exist at times. But I don't think we can make the jump from "deplatforming seems to work" to "deplatforming definitely works" just yet; it'd be wishful thinking to be totally sure of it at this early point.
I'm glad it's back online (though the media server is still down-ish), but I really wish that Watkins would destroy the worst boards. The lack of images is making it impossible to make a solid...
I'm glad it's back online (though the media server is still down-ish), but I really wish that Watkins would destroy the worst boards.
The lack of images is making it impossible to make a solid archive of the board I visit on occasion, and I really hope I get the chance in the off-chance that they decide to cut their losses.
We've been discussing 8chan getting kicked off Cloudflare, with a fair amount of the conversation about whether it's pointless for Cloudflare to kick them off, and whether Cloudflare should be getting involved in situations like this at all.
I think it might be a bit of an underappreciated aspect that Cloudflare effectively hides the actual provider of hosting services for sites that use it. If a site is fully behind Cloudflare (and didn't make any mistakes), it's impossible to figure out who's actually hosting the site. Because of that, people can't report the abusive site to its actual host or any other upstream providers. All they can do is complain to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare almost always won't take any action. There's been criticism about this problem in the past, often related to Cloudflare protecting malware, phishing, DDoS-for-hire sites, etc.
So once 8chan was pulled out from behind the Cloudflare curtain, suddenly it became possible to figure out who's services they're actually hosted on, and complaints to those providers are having an effect.
I just hope they won't hop to a Cloudflare alternative. Short of 8chan being shut down altogether, our best hope is it moves to tor, which presents a small barrier to entry.
They did. They moved to Bitmitigate. Then Bitmitigate's provider (Voxility) kicked Bitmitigate (technically, Bitmitigate's parent company) off their network.
So as of now, 8chan is down and the site providing DDOS protection (Bitmitigate) to 8chan is also down.
I'm really not understanding how the same discussions on Reddit & HackerNews respectively have been able to garner 3000+ and 800+ comments respectively. To me this is a clear cut case of the 1st amendment and companies are legally exercising their rights to choose what they want to support. Nothing new or controversial there.
because reddit and hackernews are both full of crypto-libertarian and techno-libertarian types, and conversely many of those people also are probably only a step or two to the left of just being actual 4chan or 8chan posters themselves.
HackerNews and Reddit are cesspits when it comes to issues touching their so-called "free speech". They will rant and rave about "compelled speech" when it involves cakes* or Jordan Peterson†, but scream about censorship as soon as a subreddit is quarantined.
Some of them do have a slightly better argument. They believe that internet providers, and presumably companies like Reddit & co, provide a service that should be considered a public utility.
Whatever their arguments, though, they always fall back to "censorship", unjust because over "just a difference of opinions", and then start thinking heavy thoughts, trying to solve problems like "who decides what's bad?" and "isn't badness relative?", before shaking themselves out of their stupor to go "first they came..."
Whether because they are reactionaries, or just contrarians, they don't like being told that there are lines that they should not step over, and they are not shy about letting others know.
* One or more bakeries refused service to gay people on religious grounds. They defended themselves against discrimination by claiming that their cakes are a work of art - a way for the artist to express themselves - and that thus refusing service falls under freedom of speech.
† Jordan Peterson famously used the term "compelled speech" to refer to Canadian bill C16, which only expanded the already existing protections to include gender identity and expression. Neither he nor his lobsters like that idea, so they gather under the banner of "compelled speech!" to avoid using the right names and pronouns for trans people.
Public utilities wouldn't be required to respect these nutjob's rights though - public utilities, services, and venues can and do refuse service to people who abuse them to harass or harm other members of the public. A park is not required to let you in if you harass or intimidate other park goers, and my public university is not required to give a platform or to financially support groups that use said platform to intimidate or threaten other individuals. I'm certain that 8chan has long crossed the point where any public utility hosting provider would refuse service to them, because they'd be using said access for the purpose of harassing and intimidating other members of the hosting provider.
Imagine if racists, white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and other scum would be refused access to things like the power grid, running water and plumbing. I think that's a very dangerous precedent, if you want to to classify Cloudflare and other commercial internet services as public utilities. At a certain point, you either need to lock people up in prisons because they went too far, or you need to actually allow them to exist in society. That implies access to the basic infrastructure of society.
Fortunately I don't think you can quite classify such services as "public utilities". But if that's how you want to frame the argument, think about what the phrase actually means and what you're implying.
I would support locking up more people who run cesspools of internet hate that encourage people to commit violence. But I do not support making them second-rate citizens, without access to the basics of society, without actually punishing them within the framework of the law.
Yes, they would, because they are not talking about parks and other public venues. They are talking about roads, the power grid, phone lines, water outlets and sewer access, and access to those can't be denied - not even to Nazis or other hardened criminals.
Of course, while Internet access is very important - almost necessary to participate to society - that's not the same thing as unregulated usage, and unregulated access to third-party systems. That is, even if we decide that everyone should have an Internet connection, that would still not give them the right to have their speech be hosted wherever they please.
In any case, it's not a good argument, just slightly better than no argument - than "censorship bad! fatpeoplehate did nothing wrong!" - and, above all, a distraction. Free speech absolutism is indefensible, and I think they know it. They are just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
I honestly don't understand this hypocritical argument. The government they themselves support and their puppet in the FCC has declared that ISPs and internet services are not public utility and promptly allowed them to sell customer data or create "fast lanes" in their services. So if those things aren't, what leg are they standing on debating that Cloudflare is?
That's a very reasonable stance to hold, so long as even if the cultural climate was inverted and it was far-left sites getting booted off the web you would still hold the same position. To be clear, I do believe that this argument is a very strong one, but it's ideologically both quite libertarian and quite capitalist. It always strikes me that a substantial subset of the people who employ this line of argumentation are fairly diametrically opposed to both libertarianism and capitalism. This leads me to the undeniable conclusion that they are simply employing the argument out of convenience, rather than principle - because they know that in the modern climate, far-right sites will be shunned far more than left-wing sites by hosting and infrastructure providers. While I won't be shedding a tear by any means for 8chan dropping off the web, I do think it is dishonest to smugly cloak oneself in the first amendment when it suits without being committed to its principle as well as its effect.
I think much of that is used to point out the irony of what a libertarian or laissez faire capitalist wants. They want no internet regulation from governments, until the government is wanted to protect their ability to organize.
It's quite ironic, especially, when the same ones who cried out against NN rules, and for deregulation of internet service providers now want regulation of internet service providers and want a neutral network.
One cannot have it both ways.
Most of the HackerNews people make money by working for unethical businesses, supporting 8chan and free speech maximism is not that far of a leap.
I hate 8chan, but that a few companies can decide what stays online and what doesn't worries me. Not for 8chan, but for the future.
That's not how the internet works. 8chan can buy their own servers and host it out of their mom's basement.
Sure, and they shouldn't be legally allowed to do that, because they're hosting people openly calling for murder. And, in practice, they can't do that, because they would be perpetually DDoSed.
See, I think 8chan shouldn't exist, but that shouldn't be left in the hands of a handful of companies. Leaving the responsibility to them has resulted in 8chan existing for much longer that it should.
The US needs better regulation of free speech, and the world needs a competitive and open internet which doesn't depend on the will of their current overlords to effectively work.
The hacker known as 8chan is reportedly "on an epic sperg out" following the site going dark due to his mom reportedly blowing a fuse. Sources close to 8chan allege the local mother was making tendies for the notorious internet pot-stirrer.
That seems like a conversation more appropriate for if and when these companies start rallying together and actually doing that.
You may be right, but that will probably be too late. However, 8chan or not, it's bound to happen. And I can't really defend 8chan, it's not really possible to do that without defending outright murder. So I don't know, I just know I'm very worried.
Edit: it's not that I don't want this to happen to 8chan. It's that I don't want this situation to be possible. But I realize it's possible regardless of what they do to 8chan, so even if 8chan was finally once again tolerated, that would mean nothing at all, the perspectives for the internet would be just as grim. I have nothing to say in favor of 8chan.
Is it? That sounds a lot like a slippery slope to me and that's a pretty wobbly base on which to build an argument.
Are you really worried that society collectively telling Nazis to get fucked will lead to anything more than that? Many countries outside the US have anti-hate-speech laws and they seem to be doing OK so far. Germany, for example, has been quite enthusiastically anti-Nazi for several generations now but they're managing to not go full-totalitarian about things.
It's not about any slippery slope. It's that, regardless if they actually do it or not, a handful of big companies have the power to decide what stays online and what doesn't, regardless of its legality. I don't care what happens to 8chan, but I do care about an internet governed not by law but by a very small number of corporations. And what I mean is that, regardless if those companies shut 8chan down or not, they have the power to shut down almost anything. I have a problem with that, not with 8chan disappearing.
The answer wouldn't be to force those companies to accept hosting anything while it's legal. The answer would be to break up those companies and change the laws to make new oligopolies impossible.
And yes, in a more competitive environment, probably there would be some company which hosts any kind of legal content, because there's a demand for that. Make open calls to murder illegal, then, as it should be. But don't let that responsibility fall into the hands of an oligopoly.
I don't know if I have explained myself well, as you can tell English isn't my first language. So my TL;DR would be that I have no problem with 8chan getting shut down, but that shouldn't depend on the will of a handful of companies. Among other things, because they could decide as well for it to stay up, as it has been until now. Both 8chan surviving so long and getting shut down by the will of a couple of companies is an expression of the same problem.
I'm not sure there are a handful of companies who can shut down anything. The internet is very resistant to that kind of thing by it's very design. Sure, there are a few very big cloud hosting companies like Cloudflare and Akamai and AWS and so on and if you piss them off life gets a little more difficult - but there's an awful lot of smaller companies as well.
8chan have so far discovered a few companies who won't host their crap. There's plenty more people with a server and some bandwidth out there. Lots of shitty places find hosting. Stormfront is still online (hosted by Cloudflare ffs).
I suppose the big backbone providers could decide not to transit certain traffic (I'm not certain that's physically possible but it might be) but even then there are always other routes.
You've apparently misunderstood @chembliss throughout this conversation. They're basically saying that we need legal framework for deplatforming where the decision is not up to private for-profit entities but instead the government(s) in whose jurisdiction the platform companies operate.
IDK of an example today, but it is not hard to imagine that if we had today's internet 30 years ago how anything that supported anything that's not cisgender & heterosexual would run the risk of silence via deplatforming. Or anti-war efforts, or socialist stuff.
And that it is yet to happen or whether it is likely to happen or not from what we can deduce today is irrelevant: that it might happen is dangerous enough. Also, if it is protected/obliged by law, proper deplatforming would be vastly encouraged and more companies would do it sooner, with legal ways to request and police it instead of mere mob pressure which is the only effective way we have at hand today.
Thanks for putting it so clearly.
Well, in that case, my apologies for misreading you, @chembliss
The problem, of course, is that you only need one country who decides not to have such laws and then all the controversial places go there for hosting. Or there's a number of distributed/anonymised hosting systems. To take a fairly extreme example, images of child sexual abuse are illegal everywhere, yet it's still on the internet.
I don't know how you'd go about solving that. Nation-level domain/IP blocking can go some distance - in the UK quite a number of pirate sites are unavailable to most internet users but it's astonishingly easy to walk past the filters if you want to. If anything it might even make that content more attractive, that "the man" doesn't want you to see it.
No need to apologize! Written conversations + English not as my native language + controversial topics = occasional misunderstandings.
And yes, CP is still on the internet, but it surely takes quite a bit more risk to get to it than if it were on the clearnet. And that's irrespective of if the clearnet is governed by companies or by law, it's a whole different issue. You can still access to illegal content, but you're risking the consequences, in the same way that you can still break the law in many other ways. But it's not up to a corporation to regulate that.
And, while it is a different issue, it's also worth appreciating the role of pseodonymous networks and anonymizing technology which isn't only negative. Citizens in many authoritarian countries currently rely upon them, and maybe one day not so far away we will, too.
The answer is to roll your own server on your own IP. There's nothing preventing anyone from doing so, and that takes it completely out of the hands of any/all of these companies.
If it's a content controversial enough (I'm not talking about straight up criminal as in 8chan) that those companies reject it, you are guaranteed that the site would be in a permanent situation of DDoS, if not worse. Also, if major DNS providers decided to drop your domain, you would be left into a very marginal place.
Of course you can always do something, you can set up a Time hidden service or move to I2P. But the point is that a handful of companies shouldn't have the ability to decide who effectively stays online, accesible and visible to everyone, and who doesn't, even if there will always be some way in which you could stay online.
If 8chan really wants hosting, I have a hunch they can get plenty of it for cheap in Russia, without even the slightest chance it'll be taken down. Plenty of countries still out there that don't care who you are or what you host, illegal or reprehensible, they don't mind.
Yes, I agree. However, I wasn't talking about 8chan. Russia would happily host 8chan, but maybe not other kind of content, if they too find it damaging to their interests.
The site admin's been posting on Twitter:
Edit to add:
Him drawing parallels between himself and someone who was surrounded by ruin brought on by an attempt at an unjust revenge is an interesting choice.
I'm sure the irony is lost.
It's also interesting to watch the pieces tumble as they find out one step at a time that nearly no one that will do business with them owns their own hardware.
Here’s seemingly decent techy journalism from CBS explaining that bitmitigate rents servers from Canadian firm Voxility:
Edit: I love that plain language from Voxility. It is important for many reasons, including setting a bar for the executives of the next company which Epik and BitMitigate go to for services.
Also please note that this is bigger than just 8chan. The mainstream nazi site, the dai?ily stoi.rmer, is also down thanks to Voxility getting called out by Alex Stamos[0] on Twitter.
[0] from his wiki:
O Canada! Loving those hate speech laws today, it's about damn time. Tildes is covered by the same laws, too. ;)
They're not being DDoSed right now, the site is just totally down because their CDN (Bitmitigate) seems to have been kicked off its hosting service. He was saying that they may have to give up on finding some sort of CDN or DDoS-protection service that will take them and will need to expose their servers directly to the internet, risking future DDoSes.
Oh shit, you're right, my bad. Misread the article...
8chan also just lost an agency which represents its parent company, apparently: Reno company cuts ties with 8chan parent company.
Hey look everyone a convenient scapegoat!
Now the people in the US can say "look, we did something, that website is no longer there and we've prevented any future 8chan shooters!".
Ignoring of course all the other shooters that will have become radicalised on Reddit, or Facebook, or just by reading their President's twitter feed. And ignoring of course the root causes of the issue like poor education, lack of mental health care, godawful gun laws, and having someone who emulates Abu Bakar Bashir as a leader.
this is definitely not the case; i have literally not heard anybody claim this or anything close to this, and i have had my twitter lists--which consist of collectively something in the ballpark of 7,500 people from all over the political spectrum--open almost the entirety of the past 3 days. maybe not-technologically-savvy randos think this, but even presidential candidates want to force social media to handle their massive problems with radicalization.
I agree that mental health care is important.
There's no solid evidence to support the idea that people suffering from mental illnesses commit higher numbers of gun violence against others.
E - Clarified clauses
There is more to mental health than mental illness, the same way there is more to physical health that physical illness.
By definition, ANYONE who chooses to kill a bunch of people then kill themselves has mental problems, whether or not they fit an arbitrary definition of illness.
Do you mind if I ask what definition you're using? The only reason I ask is that, for example, we dont automatically assume someone who murders another person is mentally ill.
You're stuck on mental illness. If you are overweight, you don't have a physical illness, but you are not physically healthy. If you murder someone, you might not be mentally ill, but you aren't mentally healthy.
I'm stuck on mental illness because that's what I said. It just seems like you're interpreting my words in a manner in which they were not intended, which is my concern.
It's not helping that you replied to someone that used the term "mental health care" with the term "mental illness", essentially equating them to be the same. I think that's where the confusion started.
That's fair. I should've made the clauses more distinct, my mistake.
To be clear, poor mental health care is still not one of the root causes of gun violence against others, as I intended to say. Against one's self, sure, but not others.
I think there's a lot of bigoted propaganda on other sites too that should be dealt with, but I wouldn't be surprised if 8chan was orders of magnitude more effective at radicalizing people than those sites. I know a good number of people who I used to consider friends that became far alt-right whack-jobs, and the cause was 8chan for all of them. I don't know anyone radicalized by other sites.
Granted this is extremely skewed by my friend group having been very 4chan-adjacent, but on the other hand, in various threads about 8chan going down, I've seen numerous posts talking about 8chan radicalizing people they knew, and only many hypothetical posts about other sites being capable of doing the same. (Granted there's a further skewing of that maybe people with stories to tell about 8chan affecting their friend groups are more likely to post in threads titled after it, and that maybe the friend-groups of people radicalized by other sites aren't so closely connected to the sites with discussion threads that I read, but I feel like it still adds up to some amount of signal.)
8chan is almost certainly the worst, but a huge part of the issue is that the less-extreme sections on other sites lead people to 8chan. Almost all of the users on 8chan would never have ended up on it if they had to find it directly. The problem is that they get involved in somewhere "lighter", and that place repeatedly acts like they're being oppressed by the platform and that you have to go to 8chan to see the real truth that we're not allowed to talk about here because the SJWs are censoring us, man!
All the other sites only take action when things start to drift into 8chan-level hatefulness on the site itself, but don't really do anything to fix the fact that they're all working as 8chan's "normie pipeline". 8chan, Voat, etc. are all only able to get their userbases by continually pulling people over from the mainstream sites.
sometimes it's not even that. my trajectory for going to 8chan and becoming a semi-regular user was literally as simple as reddit -> 8chan because /r/KotakuinAction had a link to the place and it was more active for gamergate stuff than KiA back then. (although that said, i never exactly radicalized--the tumblr anti-SJW movement, which was nowhere near as bad, was my edgy "lol blue hairs" phase and that was in 2013-14)
I guess we'll wait and see here: will it really be the case that actual physical violence will reduce due to deplatforming, or was it really a case of 90-9-1 where it's only that one percent that are the even potentially murderers, in which case the actual violence part of it may end up taking only a light hit or even nothing at all. It might even cause that 1% to get even more radicalised, increasing the number of attacks.
All I said above is speculation of course. There is one thing that is certain: the traffic to these websites take huge hits, and they even cease to exist at times. But I don't think we can make the jump from "deplatforming seems to work" to "deplatforming definitely works" just yet; it'd be wishful thinking to be totally sure of it at this early point.
I'm glad it's back online (though the media server is still down-ish), but I really wish that Watkins would destroy the worst boards.
The lack of images is making it impossible to make a solid archive of the board I visit on occasion, and I really hope I get the chance in the off-chance that they decide to cut their losses.
Images are working again, so I'm gonna try and give archiving this a shot. We'll see.
Went offline a bit after I started; disappointing. No biggie though, at least they're trying to get it up.