8chan (new name 8kun) is a popular anonymous forum with the ability of users to create their own thematic sections of the site and administer them independently. He is known for his policy of minimal intervention by the administration in moderating content, which is why it has become popular with various dubious public.
After lone terrorists left their messages on the site, persecution began on the forum - they began to expel them from all hosting providers, registrars divided domain names, etc.
From a legal point of view, the situation with 8chan is quite controversial, since the administration declares that it follows US laws and removes prohibited content from the site, as well as fulfills law enforcement requests. Claims to 8chan are more of a moral and ethical character: the place has a bad reputation.
November 2, 2019 8chan came to our hosting vdsina.ru . This caused a lively debate within our team due to which we decided to publish this post. The article tells the story of the persecution of 8chan and why we eventually decided to provide hosting for the 8chan project ( which still closed ).
Timeline
We will not describe specific episodes of the tragedies whose participants are somehow mentioned in the context of 8chan. The attitude to these events is unambiguous for any healthy person and is not a subject of debate for us. The main question that we want to raise is whether the service provider can act as a censor and decide who to refuse to provide the service based on, not on the letter of the law, but on its idea of morality.
The danger of such an approach is not difficult to imagine, because if you develop this idea, at some point, for example, your mobile operator may disconnect your communication services, because you, in his opinion, are an immoral person, or somehow collaborated with unworthy people. Or your ISP will disconnect you from the Internet because you are visiting bad sites.
Google search results exclusion
In August 2015, the site 8ch.net ceased to appear in Google search results. The reason for removal was “Complaints about content containing child abuse”. At the same time, the site’s rules clearly prohibited the publication of such content, and such media content was quickly deleted from the 8ch.net website itself.
A few days after publishing on ArsTechnica , 8ch.net partially returned to Google search results.
Disconnect from CloudFlare
The 8chan website used the CloudFlare service to protect against DDoS attacks and as a CDN. On August 5, 2019, a great post was posted on the Cloudflare blog about why they decided to stop serving 8chan.
Here are brief excerpts from this post:
... it became known that the terrorist suspected of executions was inspired by the 8chan online forum. Based on the evidence provided, it can be argued that he posted the whole speech right before killing 20 people.In its post, CloudFlare compares the 8chan site with another scandalous site, the anti-Semitic news publication The Daily Stormer , which had also been denied service earlier. However, the main difference between The Daily Stormer and 8chan is that the first site is directly positioned as anti-Semitic and the content is published by the site’s authors, while on 8chan all content is user-generated, just like in conditional facebook or twitter. At the same time, the position of the 8chan administration is to not interfere with user content “beyond what the US law requires.” That is, the site administration blocks, for example, scenes of violence against minors, but does not prohibit discussions.
... 8chan more than once confirmed the title of cesspool for hatred.
- Cloudflare 8chan Service Termination
CloudFlare is clearly aware of the ambiguity of their decision when they write that they don’t like it too much, but it’s completely legal.
We still find it extremely inconvenient to act as content judges, and we do not plan to do this often. Many mistakenly assume that the reason is the first amendment of the United States. This is not true. Firstly, we are a private company and we are not limited to the first amendment. Secondly, the vast majority of our customers, and more than 50% of our income come from outside the United States, where neither the first amendment, nor the similar libertarian defense of freedom of speech are applicable. The only resemblance to the first amendment here is that we have the right to choose with whom to conduct business and with whom not. We are not obligated to do business with everyone.The news of CloudFlare's solution resonated on the Internet. Under the post there were a lot of indignant comments. One of the top comments, when sorted by the number of likes, belongs to the ValdikSS
- Cloudflare 8chan Service Termination
Free translation:
What? Why do you call 8chan a hate site and blame it for “lawlessness”? This is just an engine on which anyone can create their own board and administer it independently. How do you compare this to The Daily Stormer, a news site with your administrator?
And why do you blame the site for murder? These are people killing people, not a forum on the Internet. If they will use sms and mobile communications to communicate with other people, then it is necessary to disable mobile communications?
Hosting Disconnect
After disconnecting from CloudFlare, the real IP hosting platform 8chan was discovered. These were the addresses of the Voxility data center. Voxility's official Twitter account wrote that the addresses belonged to the reseller under the names Epik / Bitmitigate, which was immediately turned off.
Relocation to Russia
Three months after disconnecting hosting, the site resumed work under the new name 8kun.net. According to an investigation by CBS News , at first the site was deployed on the Selectel site, but it was blocked on the same day. Then he moved to us.
Almost immediately, one of our business partners demanded to block the resource, because 8kun violates their AUP. We started looking for an opportunity to provide hosting for 8kun without breaking partner agreements, and as soon as we found one, we unblocked 8kun servers. By that time, the resource managed to move to Medialand.
We decided not to block the site until it violates the laws of the countries in which we operate.
Underground hosting Medialand
Soon, the 8kun.net domain began to point to the IP address 185.254.121.200, which formally should not belong to anyone, since it is in an unallocated pool of addresses and has not yet been officially allocated to any provider. However, this address is announced from the autonomous system AS206728 , which according to Whois belongs to the MEDIALAND provider. This is a Russian underground hosting, which became famous after the investigation of Brian Krebs - The largest bulletproof hosting.
The company "Media Land" is owned by Russian Alexander Volovik, and according to Brian Krebs and other researchers, it is used to host fraudulent projects, control panels of botnets, viruses and other criminal purposes.
Report at the BlackHat USA 2017 conference on the network infrastructure of criminals, which featured the Media Land hoster.
How exactly this hosting exists is a big mystery.
Domain separation
During the existence of the site, its owner has changed. Due to disagreements with the previous owner, the domain name 8ch.net could not be saved. In October 2019, the site was renamed 8kun.net and a restart of the project was announced .
While the 8kun.net domain was active, strangers registered several domains with the name.com registrar:
8kun.app 8kun.dev 8kun.live 8kun.org
And set up a redirect to the 8kun.net domain. All these domains were divided by Name.com for allegedly breaking the rules, while blocking the ability to transfer domains to another registrar. This was reported by the domain owner .
Soon, the 8kun.net domain was split up at the request of the former owner.
For some time the site was available at 8kun.us, but this domain was also split.
A funny moment - the registrar of this domain wrote to us with a request to block the hosting, although they themselves could turn off the domain in one click.
At the moment, the 8chan website is completely unavailable on the Internet (on the normal Internet) and you can access it only through the TOR network using the onion address.
Conclusion
We in no way support violence or intolerance in any form. The purpose of this post is to discuss the technical and legal side of the problem. Namely: whether service providers themselves, without waiting for court decisions, can determine which resource is illegal.
It is obvious that any public services that allow the publication of user-generated content will be regularly used for evil. Hundreds of terrorist appeals and even their live broadcasts are published on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter . However, the question is not raised that the existence of these sites affects the number of crimes.
The case of 8chan shows that several private companies can unite and simply destroy another resource, methodically disconnecting communication services and dividing domains. According to the same scheme, any other resources can be destroyed. It is unlikely that full censorship of the Internet will lead to a reduction in violence in the world, but it will definitely give rise to many similar sites on the darknet, where it will be much more difficult to track the authors.
The question is complex and you can easily find arguments for and against 8chan lock. What do you think?
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