8 ms·

8chan's new provider BitMitigate goes offline

• setr 7y ago
  Jeez, this is getting dumb fast. So now CDNs and Cloud providers are operating politically, determing who can and cannot use their services depending on their beliefs; whats next, the ISPs? Within like 5 years, we went from facebook being a problem because it has power to direct politics through its incredible reach and filtering algorithms.. to suddenly every tech company, through the whole stack, wants a say on the matter? At least facebook had the “algorithms” defense, that they didn’t intentionally apply their political views into their ecosystems; this is far more direct — CEOs realizing they have a power over an infrastructure to weaponize their beliefs (generally agreeable, or not) How did we jump from net nuetrality politics to.. this? Just the difference between monetary reasons versus political?
  • ralusek 7y ago
    "Everything is political" mindset paired with viewing your opposition as evil and hopeless rather than mistaken and worthy of convincing.
    • sithadmin 7y ago
      I don't want to live in a world where groups openly advocating for their followers to commit hate crimes and mass murder are viewed as something less than "evil".
      • ralusek 7y ago
        What are group boundaries? Is Islam a group? Do you grant all groups the same leniency you grant Islam in regards to your demonization of the whole by association with the worst components? Are #KillAllMen or #EatTheRich advocating mass murder? The Ohio shooter was a radical leftist advocating socialism, to what extent does their evil require the leftist agenda to be considered responsible?
        • sithadmin 7y ago
          Racism/Islamaphobia aside, all you're doing here is engaging in whataboutism. There are certain forums (e.g. child boards on 8ch) wherein groups of people openly advocate for the commission of hate crimes and murder. Most civilized persons would regard this sort of behavior as a manifestation of evil, and no private person or organization should be obligated to facilitate this behavior.
          • ralusek 7y ago
            "Whataboutism" is a vacuous defense. It can be used any time an example is brought up to try to illustrate inconsistent application of rationality. Secondly, please illustrate to me the precise statement I made that was remotely racist or Islamophobic. Personally, I consider the accusation of racism with no evidence of such a claim to be a near perfect expression of evil. While I may think that you're an absolutely detestable person for doing so, I'm not advocating that this site be taken down for your presence here. In regards to private people or organizations being obligated to facilitate any behavior, you won't hear me making that argument. The argument I'm making is that I think it's an enormous problem that very important mechanisms in society are being targeted by a group of people who are completely irresponsible with their application of claims to objective morality (as you've perfectly demonstrated above), in various attempts to remove access to those mechanisms from the people they don't agree with.
            • burgerboy 7y ago
              You're right dude. This shit has virtue signaling written all over it.
  • trilila 7y ago
    Yeah the politics of mass killings and racial supremacy should not be welcome anywhere, neither should platforms that somehow thrive on such content.
  • knolax 7y ago
    Have you considered that they're not being rejected on the basis of their beliefs, but because they're coordinating/encouraging acts of domestic terrorism on these platforms? "I hate X" is free speech, "Let's kill X at Y" is a crime.
    • oblongx 7y ago
      IIRC crimes are prosecutable.
      • knolax 7y ago
        And giving a platform to them creates a legal liability.
        • hakeldama 7y ago
          I thought section 230 of the CDA protects them from liability?
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • nrook 7y ago
    It's because there is a wide distance between these two positions: (a) People who publicly support white supremacy should be imprisoned by the government. (b) Businesses should not make money by hosting or providing services to people who publicly support white supremacy. It's very easy to think that (b) is true, but (a) is false; this is a popular position among free speech advocates who know the law.
    • ThrustVectoring 7y ago
      There's more factors in play, too. It's coherent to think B && !A, but also (C) Unelected members of the press should not have the power to shame businesses into excluding individuals and organizations.
      • FDSGSG 7y ago
        What about just me? I'm not a member of the press. Should I not have the power to shame businesses into excluding individuals and organizations? Perhaps they're doing something they should be ashamed of.
        • ThrustVectoring 7y ago
          No, you shouldn't have that power. Doing business with someone and providing services to them isn't and shouldn't be an endorsement of their values. Jeffrey Epstein should be able to hire whatever legal council he wants, convicted sex offenders should be able to find an apartment upon release, gun stores should be able to take credit card payments, and generally speaking you shouldn't get excluded from the benefits of modern society simply for being unpopular, no matter how just the reasoning.
          • FDSGSG 7y ago
            So, in other words: Freedom of association should not exist. Am I getting this right?
            • 7y ago
  • kupiakos 7y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ applies here. I don't think it should be illegal to host sites like 8chan. However, I would be uncomfortable working for and/or paying for company X that knowingly supports/protects content I find this level of morally reprehensible. Many feel the same way, so they would lose customers and talent by keeping them on. Reputation is important. It's simply free market pressure to not support violent white supremacists. If you don't want that to be the case, create a company that supports them. The only ones stopping you are your customers.
  • FDSGSG 7y ago
    >So now CDNs and Cloud providers are operating politically, determing who can and cannot use their services depending on their beliefs; whats next, the ISPs? Yeah, this has always been the case. There's literally nothing new here. Fascinating to hear these expert opinions from people who have obviously never dealt with the hosting industry. If you think nazis and other undesirables have a right to hosting, then go ahead and start your own nazi hosting company. If cybercriminals can manage this, I'm sure you guys can do it too.
  • ryanlol 7y ago
    Funny, 5 years ago Voxility kicked me off for saying mean things to people on IRC. What exactly is supposed to have changed here? Hosting controversial content poses significant operational costs, nobody will do it for free.
    • setr 7y ago
      Who did what for free? As far as I was aware, everyone involved was paying everyone else. The only relationship was free was users -> 8chan website, and 8chan did do it for free..
      • ryanlol 7y ago
        Abuse handling isn’t free, there are providers who charge per report. I’m sure BitMitigate wasn’t paying Voxility sufficiently to deal with all the attention they chose to attract. If you pay enough you’ll have SLAs and your host will be contractually obligated to not cut you off for hosting 8chan. >The only relationship was free was users -> 8chan website, and 8chan did do it for free.. I’m sorry, but what the fuck are you on about? I get the feeling you don’t even understand the entities involved here.
        • setr 7y ago
          >I’m sorry, but what the fuck are you on about Users presumably did not pay 8chan 8chan was presumably paying cloudflare 8chan was presumably paying bitmitigate bitmitigate was presumably paying voxility The only part of hosting controversial content for free was the user -> 8chan relationship, which they very explicitly did for free. Everything else was not, and if money was the problem, I don't think sudden and arbitrary cutoff was the natural result. (marking up the price seems to me the reasonable response, which would have naturally gone up the chain, perhaps to the point of 8chan charging its users [or heavier advertising]). But this wasn't a business decision, so obviously it wouldn't be a business outcome.
          • ryanlol 7y ago
            Obviously this was a business decision. Handling inquiries costs money, BitMitigate was generating lots of them. If BitMitigate had been paying enough, Voxility would be contractually obligated to keep them up. I can’t imagine why the relationship between 8chan and its users would matter at all in this conversation.
  • DanBC 7y ago
    > whats next, the ISPs? You may wish to read your ISP's ToS, because many of them have had AUPs for years that would forbid use of some bits of 8chan. They don't appear to use these clauses very often, but we don't know because no-one is counting.
    • setr 7y ago
      Every company, and everyone, has the opportunity to operate politically; there's hardly anything illegal about it. But that doesn't mean we expect them to. Cloud infra companies and CDNs trying to filter their service offering based on its content, without government intervention, based on no "algorithm" or strategy, but instead, without any hiding of it, whatever whim realized by the CEO and his twitter feed; this is new behavior to me (that it could be done is obvious, that it would be done is not). I mean, its not new new, this is cloudflare's second time at it; the new part is that its not just cloudflare doing it, and we went another layer deeper.
      • FDSGSG 7y ago
        > new behavior to me How come you seem to only have picked up on this after it started happening to nazi sites?
• jakeogh 7y ago
  What's the best way to get the ASN database?
  • zb3 7y ago
    You mean a list of ASNs with their IPs? MaxMind provides one for free: https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2-asn-csv-database/ https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2-asn-csv-databa...
• olliej 7y ago
  If you want to support nazis paedophiles and mass murder you don’t get to demand other companies also support that. Buy your own hardware rather than demand other people look after you
  • nameismypw 7y ago
    I agree with you! Protesters in North Koreans and Hong Kongers, too. Nobody needs to help them break the law, they should just build their own infrastructure.
    • kjsbfkjbf 7y ago
      They do not _demand_ others help them. They ask. There is a difference.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• cwkoss 7y ago
  Manifesto-validation is a difficult task. Somebody could automate the generation of manifestos, and leak hundreds claiming responsibility after every shooting, arguing for a variety of different positions. Then the public would have less certainly about what shooter's political intent actually was - which could lead to less politically-motivated mass shootings? I wonder if someone has ever successfully tricked the public into believing a manufactured manifesto was written by a perpetrator, when it was actually written by someone unrelated to the incident.
  • bmiller2 7y ago
    In Neal Stephenson’s new novel Fall or Dodge in Hell (spoiler alert), social media becomes all powerful. A tool is created to bombard so much artificially created negative content about a person being cyber bullied, that the effect is to drown out all real condemnation, thus removing the social media collective’s power over that person. Sounds like an effective mechanism to potentially remove mass murderer’s ability to effectively communicate their reasons or beliefs. Since effective gun control in the US is impossible, it’s going to be out of the box ideas like this that might end up actually helping (besides god forbid some real focus on mental health in this country).
• Fjolsvith 7y ago
  8chan was shut down in an attempt to disrupt the QAnon movement's communications.