Sign in

Cloudflare: We dumped Daily Stormer not because they're Nazis but because they said we love Nazis

Hey, hey, It's cool, Matt, 'they're Nazis' is reason enough

Shaun Nichols in San Francisco Wed 16 Aug 2017 // 23:47 UTC

Cloudflare has explained why it made a rare exception to its strident free-speech policy in its decision to cut ties with white supremacist cesspit Daily Stormer.

As noted by El Reg a few hours earlier, Cloudflare today terminated the hosting and anti-DDoS services it was providing the neo-Nazi website.

After GoDaddy and Google pulled their DNS hosting services for Daily Stormer, Cloudflare took a neutral position, arguing it wanted nothing to do with policing people's content. It provided the site's DNS and a proxy service – in other words, the California biz hosted the fascist bloggers' pages and shielded it from any DDoS attacks. Daily Stormer hit the headlines this week when it celebrated the slaying of an anti-fascist protestor over the weekend.

Cloudflare boss Matthew Prince has now explained, in a long statement, that he terminated Daily Stormer's account after the web blog's administrators suggested Cloudflare was protecting them because it secretly agreed with the site's neo-Nazi articles.

"Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network," Prince explained.

"We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare."

The Cloudflare CEO and self-described recovering attorney said that until now, his company's support for enabling free speech has been ironclad, even when it was for sites he and others at Cloudflare found distasteful or outright vile.

This, Prince says, is because Cloudflare believes it and other service providers are playing an increasingly important role in keeping sites online.

"The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline," Prince explained.

"In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: 'Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the internet'."

Indeed, it seems that just hours after Cloudflare terminated its service, the latest incarnation of the Daily Stormer was blown offline by a likely DDoS attack.

While Cloudflare says it will continue to strive for strict protections on free speech and resist any effort by a government to shut down or obtain access to any of its customers, Prince admits that the decision to dump the Daily Stormer has come at a price for his company.

"It's powerful to be able to say you've never done something," Prince explained.

"And, after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like."

The Stormer, accused of inciting violence and infamous for its deranged ultra-right articles, has now fled to the dark web. ®

102 Comments

Similar topics

Broader topics

Narrower topics

Other stories you might like

  • Star loses $500,000 NFT after crooks exploit Rarible market
    This isn't the moving-fast-and-breaking-things future we wanted
    Jeff Burt Fri 15 Apr 2022 // 19:50 UTC

    Miscreants exploited a now-fixed design flaw in the Rarible NFT marketplace to steal a non-fungible token from Taiwanese singer and actor Jay Chou and sell it for about $500,000.

    That's according to folks at Check Point, who on Thursday said the vulnerability could have been abused by crooks to gain full control of victims' marketplace accounts and the funds in them. Earlier this month, Chou said his NFT was stolen in what looked like a phishing attack.

    When researchers Roman Zaikin, Dikla Barda and Oded Vanunu investigated the security shortcoming they found that fraudsters could lure users to click on a link to malicious NFT, enabling them to take control of their marks' Rarible accounts using a standard called EIP-721.

    Continue reading
  • Intel’s neurochips could one day end up in PCs or a cloud service
    The brain-like chip technology could aid with low-power AI tasks like speech recognition
    Dylan Martin Fri 15 Apr 2022 // 16:30 UTC

    You may have heard before about Intel's Loihi neuromorphic chips that mimic the way brains work, but what hasn't been clear yet is how the chipmaker will make money from the experimental silicon.

    In a recent roundtable with journalists, Intel Labs lead Rich Uhlig offered two possibilities: integrating Loihi in a CPU for PCs to perform energy-efficient AI tasks and potentially offering the its neuromorphic chips as a cloud service, although Uhlig was clear he wasn't firming actual product plans, just projecting what could theoretically happen in the future.

    "Right now with Loihi, we're at that point where we think we're onto something, but we don't actually have product plans yet. We're sort of earlier on in that work stream," he said last month.

    Continue reading
  • Cybercriminals do their homework for latest banking scam
    What could be safer than sending money to yourself through your own bank?
    Brandon Vigliarolo Fri 15 Apr 2022 // 15:30 UTC

    A new social engineering scam is making the rounds, and this one is particularly insidious: It tricks users into sending money to what they think is their own account to reverse a fraudulent charge. 

    The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center issued the warning, which it said involves cybercriminals who have definitely done their homework. "In addition to knowing the victim's financial institution, the actors often had further information such as the victim's past addresses, social security number, and the last four digits of their bank accounts," the IC3 said. 

    The con starts off as many that target individuals do nowadays: With a text message. In this case it's not a phishing attempt, it's an attempt to ascertain whether the person receiving the message is susceptible to further manipulation. Posing as the target's bank, the message asks whether a large charge ($5,000 in the example the FBI gives) was legitimate and asks for a reply of YES or NO. Replying no leads to a follow-up text: "Our fraud specialist will be contacting you shortly. 

    Continue reading

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022

Cookies Privacy Ts&Cs