Another neo-Nazi site, Stormfront, is shut down
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
In denouncing racism and other forms of extremism, we have to be careful not to turn society into a heavily normalised monoculture that, ironically, many of these extremist groups are themselves proponents of.
This is a really great analogy, it also shows when big brother is starting to over-reach it's authority.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid
In the United States, extremist groups have enjoyed the right to speak in public for decades and it almost never turns into violence. Violence is so rare at those rallies that it makes big news when it happens, such as we saw recently in Charlottesville.
We value our right to free speech so much that we tolerate people spouting hateful garbage, as long as speech is all they're doing. It's really a great sight to see the two sides shouting at each other in peace.
Eliminating racism doesn't turn society into a monoculture--it permits lots of different cultures to coexist without threat of violence.
The world would be better off in every way without racism (except for those who directly benefit from racism--but fuck those guys.)
OP is right, racist websites can be viewed a lot like a canary in a coalmine. That this canary has been killed implies the air might be getting unsafe to breathe.
The article makes it sound like the Southern Poverty Law Center's findings were key in Network Solutions' decision. I wonder if the same will apply to other groups the SPLC tracks as hate groups. The Nation of Islam's domain remains with Network Solutions.
I say this with a wife that they actively advocate murdering (it’s weird that everyone focuses just on the white supremacy and not the literal “we must kill the Jews” horror).
So as much as I hate them and all those people that wish that the USA (and England, etc) lost ww2 I still don’t think you get to take over their domain.
That accomplishes the goal of demonstrating how repugnant their ideas are without a company having to give them a platform to radicalize more people.
Where are you going to stop... will you turn off all the Berkeley Antifa domains also (whatever they are), since they directly radicalized Eric Clanton and his 7 assaults with a deadly weapon in 1 day, four of which he is currently charged with?
Or is 4 counts of assault with a deadly weapon not enough, and the bar should be set at say, 10?
Or is only murder, justification? What if Fields pleads to criminal negligence causing death, a lesser charge - will you give stormfront back their domain?
More importantly: it’s much better for everyone if we know who they are. I’d certainly feel better if I knew who was a direct risk for my wife.
Honestly I wish there was a site that just enumerates Nazis in America. But at the same time I’d be worried about the converse: a site the tracks “antifa”. There are some awful people who would fall under the strict “member of antifa gang” style semantic, but the Nazis are labeling all non-Nazis as antifa. Given there’s at the very least a white supremicist as president I’d be concerned about giving carte Blanche privilege to label people like this.
Everything is awful. I fucking hate those asshole “trump is better than Hilary because I don’t research anything other than some nd bite” people that put us in this position
I have an Israeli friend who's now thinking of relocating back to Israel--her synagogue gets regular threats right now (it didn't used to), and someone hung a banner reading "JEWS DID 9/11" on a freeway overpass near from her house recently (she lives in a heavily Jewish neighborhood, the placement was intentional).
Good on them for shutting down Stormfront.
The constant censorship and de-platforming is one thing, the support from otherwise intelligent and rational people (such as those on HN) for these actions is another, and vastly more worrying, thing entirely.
It's unfortunate to see society rapidly devolving to a far more basic, ignorance driven tribal culture driven by identity politics.
Time to go down to the Winchester, have a pint and wait for this all to blow over from a safe distance.
Web 2.0 will become a stale walled garden with increasingly throttled traffic. OTOH, Web 3.0 will flourish.
Then wait for people who are conservatives, alt-righters, or anyone else that's no longer PC enough to start sharing these spaces because they've been chased off mainstream sites. It's the best recruitment tool stormfront could hope for.
> Then wait for people who are conservatives, alt-righters, or anyone else that's no longer PC enough to start sharing these spaces because they've been chased off mainstream sites.
That's what just happened. They were chased off all mainstream sites and could only spew their hatred on SF. Then that got taken away from them.
Netsol absolutely has the right to no longer provide them DNS and/or registration, but they cannot simply place the domain on hold indefinitely due to their own capriciousness.
How is it acceptable to let a corporation arbitrarily decide, after taking your money, that they no longer wish to provide you with that service AND block your ability to use what you paid for?
When a person registers a domain name, they become the owners of that domain name. It does not belong to the registrar they hired to procure it, and they are not "leasing" the name from the registrar. A lease would suggest that the registrar owned the domain name prior to registration, which is not the case. And if you extrapolate, it suggests that some entity owns all unclaimed domain names de-facto, which is also not the case.
When you purchase a domain name, that does not award the registrar the status of "Actual Owner" of that domain. They are providing a technical service, nothing more.
ICANN should probably get involved and punish Network Solutions for this action.
Network Solutions might be within their rights to choose to no longer 'host' the domain name themselves, but in that case they must be obligated to arrange for a transfer to a different registrar. What they are not allowed to do is simply steal the domain name from it's actual owner because they disagree with the content of the owner's website, thus preventing a transfer.
It is important that we do not allow corporations to steal control or property from the open internet by using these politically charged circumstances as their theater of operation.
While private domain registrations seem like a mildly useful privacy tool, factors to consider is that you are no longer the “owner” or your domain name (ICANN defines who owns the domain by what is published in WHOIS), and also that you no longer have any rights unless you sue the registrar.
Technically correct may matter legally, but we should make it clear that it is not acceptable for companies like Network Solutions or Facebook to engage in this behavior. If the law does not protect speech in these instances, we should push back using other means.
It's simply not reasonable to expect non-technical, non-lawyers to understand these nuances well enough to get their message out without risking censorship. Today, that's OK because we're talking about a very bad message, but tomorrow it may not be quite so OK.
Don't be the guy that read 1984 and thinks all censorship is bad, and that the world is going to collapse because someone banned a neo-nazi forum. You don't have enough information to make that far-reaching slippery-slope conclusion, mostly because of the millions of other factors that you didn't consider in your model.
We need to encourage companies that engage in this behavior that censor violent people.
I think this also brings up the question of how much control registrars have over a "purchased" domain. Am I buying that domain? Or am I buying the ability to tell the registrar what to do with it?
It's important to remember and consider the reason that registrars exist and the reason ICANN was created. All of these things are meant to protect the sanity of internet operations, not to contribute to their corruption and breakdown.
IANAL, but I agree. When you sign up for privacy protection, you're hiring the registrar to act as your agent. If they then act outside their granted authority as such, then they're doing so in breach of contract. I believe that's called 'conversion'.
You never own the domain. You register it for a period of time, subject to terms of an agreement. I'm almost certain of that, unless something has changed recently. I'm surprised so many on HN seem unaware of it.
If you use privacy protection, you are not the registrant; the privacy protection vendor is. That's what I've read in agreements with the privacy vendors, and that's what the whois record says.
No, that's not what's happening.
When you register a domain you are purchasing it. The fees you pay are to cover the operations of the registrar, who are providing a public service. It is also to allow people to pick up dropped domains that nobody is using anymore. This system was never intended to be abused the way it is being abused today.
Look at it this way. Until a domain is registered, nobody owns it. When you pay to register a domain, you aren't buying it on the registrar's behalf.
When you register a domain name you are purchasing that domain name for the duration of the registration period. You own it. Period.
The registrar's role is to handle certain technical functions such as providing PTR service, WHOIS records, and to expire the domain when the registration period expires. They don't own it, and the cost of registration is meant to cover their operating costs.
This is also why domains are so cheap. A .com is about $10 per year. That's basically nothing, when you compare to other things you pay for. If there weren't a recurring fee, people would never give up their unused domain names.
I don't have the answer here; curious to find out what everyone thinks.
I could see a registrar telling you they don't want to do business with you any more; they should have to give you some time to transfer it out. However, it's still a dangerous precedent that people on all sides of the political spectrum would do well to heed as a warning of censorship to come.
If that were the case, letting it expire would result in it just being dead rather than available for others to register.
No, it was always intended that when someone no longer needs a domain name, it would be returned to the pool of available domain names for others to make use of. This is in the very spirit of the internet.
I mean the internet is a new world which is only about 40 years old. It was created by a lot of really smart guys who mostly don't care about the "traditional market rules" and it was created a specific way to follow specific philosophies one of which is when a domain name is no longer being used it should be available for other people to purchase.
It's not exactly counter-culture, but it's completely different. The distributed infastructure, the emphasis on putting equal power in the hands of the smallest operators rather than focusing it on the largest corporations, none of these things mesh with how the offline world has been operating for centuries.
People who were aware of the internet before it was cool remember these details.
I don't know how to make it more clear for you than that.
It's safe to say that it has not been settled yet. But it is in everyone's best interest to do our best to adhere to the intentions of the original creators.
They may own the name such that it would be improper to allow someone else to register it, but there entitlement to service from the registrar is based on the terms of the contract they have signed.
> ICANN should probably get involved and punish Network Solutions for this action.
What specific ICANN policy has been violated?
> Network Solutions might be within their rights to choose to no longer 'host' the domain name themselves, but in that case they must be obligated to arrange for a transfer to a different registrar.
They are obligated to process a transfer at the request of the owner and new registrar, subject to certain timing and other rules. They are not, AFAICT, required to arrange such a transfer proactively.
I'm not going to dig through their books, I don't have the time and that's a job for lawyers. But I was around when ICANN was created and I know what their job is, and preventing these kinds of abuses by registrars is right at the top of their priority list.
> They are obligated to process a transfer at the request of the owner and new registrar, subject to certain timing and other rules. They are not, AFAICT, required to arrange such a transfer proactively.
That isn't what I meant. I only meant that if they were going to refuse to perform their duties as a registrar for one particular customer then they should provide that customer a means to switch registrars.
What they did instead is a kind of theft, regardless of how you feel about that particular customer. (not a fan, myself, as I've stated).
And they don't have to provide DNS services to neo-Nazis.
Cloudflare rejects IP-only requests. The IP address is 104.20.30.134, but using that in the browser address bar won't work.
curl --verbose --insecure --header "Host:stormfront.org" https://104.20.30.134/forum/
It's still available on the Internet Archive.[1] Runs vBulletin, so the posts didn't get archived, just the titles.
Stormfront has been around for decades, getting little traction. It's partly David Duke's site, or was. Now it's just a forum. It's about as nutty as the usual white militia crowd, with which there's some overlap. Compare "vdare.com", which is somewhat white supremacist and pro-Trump. There's a whole spectrum of groups like that.
This was a bad decision by Network Solutions. If registrars start censoring everybody the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center don't like, they're going to run head-on into the Trump supporters. That won't end well.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170818020428/stormfront.org/fo...
I agree that it was a bad decision, however I think it's going to be revealed that the decision has more to do with the connections to violence that the forum apparently had, rather than the "speech" content.
Still, they (NS) are going to have to work really hard to convince people that they didn't just make a power grab.
I'm actually surprised it works, because I thought headers need a space after the colon.
Changing the host header to www.stormfrom.org gets me html.
curl --verbose --insecure --header "Host:www.stormfront.org" https://104.20.30.134/forum/
It sets a bad precedent IMO, but the positive aspect is Web 2.0 will soon be dead.
Bring on Web 3.0, a decentralized, censorship-resistant platform.
It would be far more tragic if the general public started associating privacy tech with hate groups, if using Tor became akin to wearing a pointed white hood.
How does changing the title from a detailed summary to something vague and politically charged benefit the HN community or the dissemination of worthwhile information.
The original title was, approximately, "Network Solutions disables and parks the stormfront.org domain".
My sympathies for storefront are not strong. Domains are no more concrete than a street address you don't own it. The sooner you realize this the better. If you have a better system, present it.
Registrars could give a fuck about you. You are a monetary item. If you don't produce they will find a way to make your domain produce.
We've let the internet become the a terrifying hate indoctrination tool and this is just the tip of the iceberg. It took a person driving through a crowd of protesters to wake people up. Racist thoughts are common as a function of biology, in regular society we have checks against it growing to insidious levels. Online it's been open season for the hate groups to take advantage of modern marketing tactics to recruit and spread hate with alarming efficiency leading to violence.