A neo-Nazi site that disparaged a woman who died during protests in Charlottesville has faced another wave of rejection by web companies.<\/p>\n
The Daily Stormer’s account with Cloudflare – which protects websites from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks – has been terminated.<\/p>\n
Cloudflare’s chief executive Matthew Prince said he had “had enough”, in a\u00a0company email obtained by Gizmodo.<\/p>\n
However, he added that he felt conflicted over the decision.<\/p>\n
“Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet,” wrote Mr Prince.<\/p>\n
“No-one should have that power.”<\/p>\n
On Sunday, the Daily Stormer published an article denigrating Heather Heyer, 32, who was killed after a car rammed into protesters against a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.<\/p>\n
This led to a backlash in which the site had to switch domain name registrars twice in 24 hours, after\u00a0GoDaddy and Google both removed it\u00a0from their services.<\/p>\n
Cloudflare’s service involves handling web users’ requests to view a site and filtering out those that appear to be coming from systems set up to overload the site.<\/p>\n
Without such protection, websites can sometimes be knocked offline.<\/p>\n
Mr Prince said leaving the site open to DDoS attacks could lead to “vigilante justice”,\u00a0in a blog post\u00a0published later on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
However, he also said: “Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion.<\/p>\n
“The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.”<\/p>\n
Earlier in the week, the Daily Stormer was set up as a site on the dark web and later relocated its open web presence to a Russian domain name ending “.ru”.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for the Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor said it had asked web firm Ru-Center to shut this down.<\/p>\n
A BBC check on Thursday morning found that the .ru address no longer appeared to be working.<\/p>\n
The Daily Stormer has faced frustration elsewhere in recent days.<\/p>\n
Three Twitter accounts associated with the site that had previously been active were suddenly listed as “suspended” on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
And cyber-security researcher Joseph Evers\u00a0announced that he had stopped hosting\u00a0an internet chat channel he said was used by staff at the Daily Stormer.<\/p>\n
Describing himself as having once been a “free speech absolutist”, Mr Evers added: “I’m glad to do my small part in countering white supremacy.”<\/p>\n
Donations blocked<\/strong><\/p>\n Besides the Daily Stormer’s case, this week Paypal reiterated its stance on blocking donations to organisations that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance.<\/p>\n “This includes organizations that advocate racist views, such as the KKK, white supremacist groups or Nazi groups,” the payment-processing firm said.<\/p>\n Internet companies were facing a “dilemma” over how to balance support for freedom of speech with a desire not to encourage hate groups, said Prof Eric Heinze, at Queen Mary, University of London.<\/p>\n “Had the Charlottesville events not occurred, the hate sites would still be operating from Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and other such venues,” he told the BBC.<\/p>\n “Some might call it satisfactory to wait until actual harm occurs before closing such a site. But others will say that’s too little and too late.”<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A neo-Nazi site that disparaged a woman who died during protests in Charlottesville has faced another wave of rejection by web companies. The Daily Stormer’s account with Cloudflare – which protects websites from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks – has been terminated. Cloudflare’s chief executive Matthew Prince said he had “had enough”, in a\u00a0company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[106],"tags":[10282,10283],"yoast_head":"\n