8chan resurfaces, along with The Daily Stormer and a Nazi site

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1547401

There doesn't appear to be much hosted on Epik's 45.88.202 netblock right now—all we discovered was TDS and this site, which dubs itself "The World's #1 Source of National Socialist Material."
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There doesn’t appear to be much hosted on Epik’s 45.88.202 netblock right now—all we discovered was TDS and this site, which dubs itself “The World’s #1 Source of National Socialist Material.”

Jim Salter

As of Monday, 8chan was down due to a complete disconnection of its host Epik’s services from the netblock it leased from its upstream provider, Voxility. The disconnection took notorious white nationalist site The Daily Stormer—and any other Epik customers hosted at Voxility—down with it.

Today, 8chan and The Daily Stormer are both back up. The Daily Stormer is up on its original Epik/Voxility netblock, while 8chan has popped up on a netblock owned by Reno, Nevada-based N.T. Technology.

We first discovered that 8chan was back online after testing its deep Web site, using the Tor browser. The site appeared to be offline entirely, and there’s little in the way of diagnostic tools available for the Tor network—but after leaving a window open and unresponsive for over 12 minutes, the site loaded. Hovering over links within the .onion site showed they were targeted to a non-deep-Web 8chan subdomain—and to our surprise, those links loaded. This led us to re-examine both the site’s DNS and overall hosting status.

Yesterday, Epik formally announced that it has “elected to not provide content delivery services to 8Chan. This is largely due to the concern of inadequate enforcement and the elevated possibility of violent radicalization on the platform.” The devil is in the details, however—although it’s true that Epik no longer appears to be involved in content hosting for 8chan, it’s brought the controversial site’s DNS services in-house to Epik’s own nameservers—which themselves are hosted at Amazon Web Services, Linode, and OVH.

  • 8chan remained accessible on the deep Web while it was off of the Internet proper—but it wasn’t easy to find, and it took over 12 minutes to load the front page.

    Jim Salter

  • 8chan is available on the normal Web again—this time with its DNS hosted on Epik’s own nameservers by way of Amazon, Linode, and OVH.

    Jim Salter

  • There doesn’t appear to be much hosted on Epik’s 45.88.202 netblock right now—all we discovered was TDS and this site, which dubs itself “The World’s #1 Source of National Socialist Material.”

    Jim Salter

  • The Daily Stormer’s hosting is on Epik’s netblock—the same one that went dark earlier this week when 8chan moved there. It’s online again now.

    Jim Salter

  • The Daily Stormer’s DNS is spread over a large number of individual IP addresses, all of which are served from China.

Ars has reached out to Amazon, Linode, and Voxility for comment. As of press time, we have no response from Amazon or Linode yet; Voxility’s CEO responded, “I am looking into this now, Voxility shouldnt be involved in this.” We will update with any further response as this story develops.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

August 7, 2019 at 12:32PM

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