The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought to light something that most people know but forget every few years: Nazis and white supremacists want to really hurt people. On Monday, webhosting service GoDaddy dropped The Daily Stormer website. This ban was followed by Google rejecting the group’s attempts to get service. But one thing is clear: Trump has a lot of support in the Daily Stormer community. So, who will step up to get some of that hate-filled message out?
The decisions of Google and GoDaddy made the site inaccessible on Tuesday. But by Wednesday morning, the Daily Stormer was back online with a new, Russian domain name: "dailystormer.ru." In a post announcing the site's return, editor Andrew Anglin credited Internet troll turned neo-Nazi Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, the Daily Stormer's administrator, for getting the site back up and running.
The Daily Stormer has also set up a .onion address, ensuring that it will be accessible over the censorship-resistant Tor network even if it loses its new domain name.
This brief respite for those crazy Nazis on The Daily Stormer has ended. Arstechnica is reporting that Cloudflare, who has always defended their servicing of sites like The Daily Stormer under the umbrella of freedom of speech, has clearly decided they have had enough. Cloudflare is a company that protects online websites from DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks are denial-of-service attacks that can slow down your website and crash it. Racist white supremacist web community The Daily Stormer gets attacked a lot because most people fucking hate Nazis. Mostly because they’re Nazis.
Theoretically, you don't need a service like Cloudflare to publish a website. In practice, however, a site as controversial as the Daily Stormer is going to be swamped by distributed denial of service attacks if it doesn't enjoy the protection of a service like Cloudflare.
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The current controversy began over the weekend, when Anglin wrote a vulgar post attacking Heather Heyer, a woman who died during this weekend's violent protests in Charlottesville. Anti-racism activists convinced GoDaddy, and then Google, that the post amounted to incitement to violence and therefore violated the companies' terms of service.
Cutting off service to the Daily Stormer appears to represent a significant change of position for CloudFlare, which until now has adopted a position close to free-speech absolutism. "A website is speech. It is not a bomb," CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said in 2013. "One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred."
I ain’t mad at ya, Cloudflare.