[Infowarrior] - Unable to get a domain, racist Daily Stormer retreats to the Dark Web

[Richard Forno]

Unable to get a domain, racist Daily Stormer retreats to the Dark Web

“We can’t keep trying random registrars,” site’s admin writes.

Timothy B. Lee - 8/22/2017, 2:40 PM

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/unable-to-get-a-domain-racist-daily-stormer-retreats-to-the-dark-web/

Ever since Charlottesville, the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer has been struggling to stay on the Internet. The site's editor, Andrew Anglin, wrote a vulgar post disparaging Heather Heyer after she was killed in the Charlottesville car attack. Activists pressured technology companies to drop the site, and one by one they complied.

The site cycled through a sequence of different domains: dailystormer.com, dailystormer.wang, dailystormer.ru, and finally dailystormer.lol. In each case, registrars canceled the domains within a day or two of their registration.

The last registrar the Daily Stormer tried was Namecheap, and its CEO, Richard Kirkendall, explained his decision to refuse service to the Daily Stormer in a recent blog post.

"This was the right decision for the human race but it was also an existential threat for our company. While I feel I made the right decision, I also thought about what this meant for us as a business," Kirkendall wrote. "I thought about our 1100 team members that directly depend on this company for their livelihood and our millions of customers that depend on us for stability and peace of mind that we are keeping their domains safe."

"Could I have made any other decision here? I don't think I could have, and therein lies the problem."

Any company that accepted the Daily Stormer's business was guaranteed to face a wave of social media criticism, and it could have faced cancellations from other customers upset about the decision. In addition, many countries have laws explicitly banning hate speech. That means countries like Sweden and Switzerland that have been hospitable to sites like Wikileaks and the Pirate Bay are not an option for the Daily Stormer.

Now the Daily Stormer's CTO, notorious Internet troll Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, is acknowledging that the site might have run out of options for getting a conventional domain name.

"We can't keep trying random registrars," Auernheimer wrote on Gab, a right-wing Twitter competitor, this morning. "We need one that will give us written assurance they will hold the line."

Auernheimer has concluded that's not likely to happen. So the Daily Stormer has retreated to the Dark Web, operating as a Tor hidden service.

A Tor hidden service uses the Tor network to camouflage the location of a Web server, making it practically impossible for anyone to figure out where the server is physically located. Because no one will be able to identify who is providing the Daily Stormer with its hosting service, activists won't be able to organize a boycott to get the service shut down.

Accessing a Tor hidden service isn't difficult, but it's significantly more work than going to a conventional website. Users typically download the Tor Browser, a variant of Firefox configured to access websites via Tor's anonymity network. The switch to a Tor hidden service will undoubtedly limit a site's reach, but its hardcore fans will be able to continue reading it.