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We've had multiple submissions on the confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia between white supremacists and counter-protesters. We lead off with a submission about the altercation which culminated with a car driven into a crowd which left 1 person dead and 19 injured. Then we continue with GoDaddy informing dailystormer.com — a white supremacist web site which called for the rally — that they had 24 hours to find another registrar for their site. They signed up with Google's domain registration service. Now there are reports that Google, too, has dropped the registration.
This story could very well cause a lot of heat, but it is my hope we can look beyond the details of this particular situation and focus discussion on the overriding questions of freedom of speech/publication raised by one of the submitters and the implications it may lead to. This saying comes to mind: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Terrorism in Charlottesville: 1 Dead, 19 Injured
ProPublica reports:
Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville, Virginia
At about 10 a.m. [August 12], at one of countless such confrontations, an angry mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters, many of them older and gray-haired, who had gathered near a church parking lot. On command from their leader, the young men charged and pummeled their ideological foes with abandon. One woman was hurled to the pavement, and the blood from her bruised head was instantly visible.
Standing nearby, an assortment of Virginia State Police troopers and Charlottesville police wearing protective gear watched silently from behind an array of metal barricades--and did nothing.
[...] the white supremacists who flooded into the city's Emancipation Park--a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee sits in the center of the park--had spent months openly planning for war. The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi website, encouraged rally attendees to bring shields, pepper spray, and fascist flags and flagpoles. A prominent racist podcast told its listeners to come carrying guns.
[...] the white supremacists who showed up in Charlottesville did indeed come prepared for violence. Many wore helmets and carried clubs, medieval-looking round wooden shields, and rectangular plexiglass shields, similar to those used by riot police.
[...] The police did little to stop the bloodshed. Several times, a group of assault-rifle-toting militia members from New York State, wearing body armor and desert camo, played a more active role in breaking up fights.
[...] The skirmishes culminated in what appears to have been an act of domestic terrorism, with a driver ramming his car into a crowd of anti-racist activists on a busy downtown street, killing one and injuring 19 according to the latest information from city officials. Charlottesville authorities tonight reported that a 20-year-old Ohio man had been arrested and had been charged with murder.
[...] A good strategy, [said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who has worked on police reform efforts in Los Angeles], is to make clashes less likely by separating the two sides physically, with officers forming a barrier between them. "Create a human barrier so the flash points are reduced as quickly as possible."
GoDaddy Stomps 'Daily Stormer' -- Site Moves to Google
The Washington Post reports GoDaddy bans neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer for disparaging woman killed at Charlottesville rally:
After months of criticism that GoDaddy was providing a platform for hate speech, the Web hosting company announced late Sunday that it will no longer house the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that promotes white supremacist and white nationalist ideas.
[...] We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.
— GoDaddy (@GoDaddy) August 14, 2017
[...] In the Daily Stormer post[1], [Andrew] Angelin characterized [victim Heather] Heyer as dying in a "road rage incident." He said she was a "drain on society" and disparaged her appearance. "Most people are glad she is dead," he wrote.
"@GoDaddy you host The Daily Stormer — they posted this on their site," Twitter user Amy Siskind said in an appeal to the Web hosting company. "Please retweet if you think this hate should be taken down & banned."
[...] GoDaddy has previously said that the content, however "tasteless" and "ignorant," is protected by the First Amendment. The company told the Daily Beast in July that a Daily Stormer article threatening to "track down" the family members of CNN staffers did not violate Domains by Proxy's terms of service.
After the incidents in Charlottesville it seems GoDaddy have decided, one can gather from and after a massive amount of pressure, to no longer provide Domain name access to the Daily Stormer. While a private company is free to do whatever they like, I wonder if there will or might be further implications. I think the interesting question here isn't what happened in Charlottesville or what kind of stories they provide over at the Daily Stormer -- they might be or are a complete shitfest filled with neo-nazi-news for all I know. The interesting aspect is if companies should now monitor their customers, which it seems the Daily Stormer has been one for years, and ban or block customers that no longer align with company beliefs or that other customers find offensive. It seems the Daily Stormer has previously posted "tasteless" and "ignorant" stories that one can only assume have not aligned with GoDaddy policy or Terms of Service, but this one was somehow over the line and the straw that broke the camel's back?
I'm fairly sure the Daily Stormer won't be knocked offline or anything, there will always be someone willing to host them somewhere. So today they try to knock a neo-nazi site offline, I doubt many people will lose any sleep over that, but who is going to be next? Is this part of the ramping up of the current online-twitter-socialweb-culture? Is there a slippery slope here?
Google Domains, GoDaddy blacklist white supremacist site Daily Stormer
Ars Technica is reporting that Google Domains and GoDaddy have blacklisted white supremacist site Daily Stormer:
The article prompted a response from the site's domain registrar, GoDaddy. "We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy wrote in a tweet late Sunday night.
On Monday, the Daily Stormer switched its registration to Google's domain service. Within hours, Google announced a cancellation of its own. "We are cancelling Daily Stormer's registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service," the company wrote in an statement emailed to Ars.
[...] A lot of outlets covering this controversy described GoDaddy, somewhat misleadingly, as the Daily Stormer's hosting provider. But GoDaddy wasn't storing or distributing the content on the Daily Stormer website. It was the Daily Stormer's registrar, which is the company that handles registration of "dailystormer.com" in the domain name system, the global database that connects domain names like "arstechnica.com" to numeric IP addresses.
GoDaddy has faced pressure for months from anti-racist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League to drop the Daily Stormer as a customer. But until this weekend, GoDaddy resisted that pressure.
"GoDaddy doesn't host The Daily Stormer's content on its servers," the investigative site Reveal reported in May. "Because it provides only the domain name, the company says it has a higher standard for terminating service."
"We need to evaluate what level of effect we can actually have on the abuse that's actually going on," said Ben Butler, director of GoDaddy's digital crimes unit, in a May interview with Reveal. "As a domain name registrar, if we take the domain name down, that domain name stops working. But the content is still out there, live on a server connected to the Internet that can be reached via an IP address or forwarded from another domain name. The actual content is not something we can touch by turning on or off the domain name service."
But GoDaddy abruptly changed its stance on Sunday evening. What changed GoDaddy's mind? In a statement to Techcrunch, GoDaddy said: "given this latest article comes on the immediate heels of a violent act, we believe this type of article could incite additional violence, which violates our terms of service."
Reading GoDaddy's terms of service, this seems to support their stance that they could suspend the domain registration:
9. RESTRICTION OF SERVICES; RIGHT OF REFUSAL
[...] You agree that GoDaddy, in its sole discretion and without liability to you, may refuse to accept the registration of any domain name. GoDaddy also may in its sole discretion and without liability to you delete the registration of any domain name during the first thirty (30) days after registration has taken place. GoDaddy may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used, as determined by GoDaddy in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities. Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to:
- Activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which you conduct business;
- Activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; and
- Activities designed to harm or use unethically minors in any way.
As of the time of this being written, it appears that the Daily Stormer domain (dailystormer.com) is still being hosted by Google:
Domain Name: dailystormer.com
Registry Domain ID: 1787753602_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.google.com
Registrar URL: https://domains.google.com
Updated Date: 2017-08-14T14:51:45Z
Creation Date: 2013-03-20T22:43:18Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2020-03-20T22:43:18Z
Registrar: Google Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 895
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.8772376466
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 14 2017, @11:53PM (25 children)
I really doubt it.
After 3 days, I was really wondering if this story(ies) will ever get from the submission queue to the front page - I really don't think the involved parties would appreciate the lag.
And, after it, by the very editor's admission, it happened only because...
Before I start assuming things (it needed a death to occur for the police to intervene properly is no longer news worthy for S/N, it just happens every day in US, it's just a statistic), can the editors explain what it took so long for the story to hit the front page?
---
(If TMB feels the compulsion to "defend his editors" again... before he does, can he please answer to the following question: does a story need to get the "free speech" slant for it to get editorial approval?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:06AM (13 children)
They ain't "my" editors any moreso than they're yours. I got zero power over anyone else on staff except through rational discourse.
Now I dunno why they held the story past the weekend. Possibly to let more information accumulate. Possibly because the earliest submissions were shit. Possibly because they queued the entire weekend up with stories beforehand and didn't know anything about it until today. Possibly because they knew what a fun, fun pile of partisan shit the discussion would turn into and didn't think it worth running at all. Ask them yourself if you like.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:18AM (9 children)
(I'll save this link. The previous one, with you assuming the monopoly of abusing editors, is quite hard for me to find now).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:33AM (8 children)
Oh I remember saying it. Talking shit is something I do. I just prefer that people know when I'm talking shit or it comes off as tyrannical instead of funny. Thus me being informative up above.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:51AM (7 children)
"Rational discourse" is a way to shape opinions and actions. So what ideals do you hold? Did you want to keep the story off until the free speech / tech angle with godaddy came up?
Combining the stories certainly does muddy the discussion and will certainly cause emotional reactions to cross through the topics.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:58AM
See above. I don't make editorial decisions or even think about them unless they make one I disagree with enough to actually make my give-a-shit meter move.
As for this story, I don't care. Everyone at that rally (Nazis, BLM, Antifa) could have been hit by a random meteor strike and I wouldn't have shed a single tear.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:05AM (5 children)
I'll be as nice as I know how to be, and explain this very slowly, so you can keep up. TMB is not an editor. I typed really, really slow there - were you able to keep up? Let me try it again, to be sure.
T
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TMB makes things work. He's the background guy. He changes oil in the servers, filters the electricity for impurities, keeps the fusion plant running, and shit like that. TMB doesn't edit. You got that now?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:12AM (4 children)
Speaking of, you lot should be using the shiny, new Gentoo load balancer by now. The DNS change propagation should be worldwide aside from seriously long caching servers. Let me know if you see any problems (that didn't already exist last week).
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday August 15 2017, @03:09AM (3 children)
Why choose Gentoo?
I am a long time Gentoo user, still systemd-free (MATE desktop). I have used Gentoo on servers, but I don't know that I would choose to do that now.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:57AM (2 children)
Let the girl who started Linux with Gentoo 13 years ago answer that! :D
Control. Gentoo (and Funtoo and its other derivatives) are source-based, and allow you to include only those features in your packages you wish to. Emerge/Portage is basically a dependency-tracking frontend to good ol' configure/make/make install, and the USE flags are essentially global (or per package in /etc/portage/package.use) directives to always enable/disable certain options at compile time.
This is useful because it decreases the size and attack surface of certain binaries you produce. If web-facing $PACKAGE has $FEATURE that is an attack vector, and you don't use $FEATURE anyway, you can choose not to compile it in, and there will be no chance of that exploit affecting you. You might say "well why not just disable $FEATURE then?" but 1) sometimes you *can't* and 2) even if you do, disabling it may still leave you vulnerable depending on the nature of the exploit.
Source compilation does speed up your machine slightly if you can take advantage of things like AVX codepaths, but speed isn't the main reason to use Gentoo and family anymore. Though it certainly doesn't hurt. One nice use case is compiling a custom kernel for ONLY your hardware without module support, which can obviate a whole host of potential vulnerabilities. Basically Gentoo and friends appeal to the OCD and the control freaks and the correctness fiends, and I admit to being all three.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:15AM
I know that I have been using Gentoo for over 13 years, but I don't know exactly how long.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Tuesday August 15 2017, @02:43PM
On top of all that, the uniqueness of your system seems like some protection against exploits by itself, depending on how many of the knobs you actually bother to twiddle.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 15 2017, @12:40AM (2 children)
I start to be a bit worried that my question to the editors (in italic, asking "why took it so long", ending just before the '---') isn't visible.
Can you please confirm that at least you can read it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:01AM (1 child)
I see it just fine. They may be avoiding the story though on the grounds of knowing it's gonna be a bunch of partisan sniping. Their IRC channel hasn't had a word in it in the last two hours though, so they may be eating dinner or doing family stuff or whatever as well.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:17AM
Cool thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Informative) by martyb on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:14PM (10 children)
I cannot, and am not, speaking for the other editors — these are only my views.
Preface: Like most of you, I have a full-time job and have to buy groceries, do laundry, and all of the other things of life. In what limited free time I have, I have chosen to volunteer at this site. None of the staff are paid in any way for their efforts. I worked Friday and Saturday with only 4 hours' sleep between shifts. Sunday marked the start of my summer vacation and I was absolutely knackered, exhausted, wiped out. Oh, and we are understaffed atm because we have two editors who are on leave.
Posting a story when the first hint of a breathless "there are reports that...", "we are seeking confirmation...", "we have identified the victim as..." leads, in my experience, to a lot of noise around a very limited signal.
When politics started inserting themselves into otherwise non-political articles, mostly during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, a decision was made to create a Politics nexus with the intention that we would try to limit it to one story per day. The idea being that some people were going to discuss these topics anyway; it would be best to put them in one area so that those who are not interested can choose in their preferences to avoid them. The basic goal being a desire to provide a site where people could discuss things technical, nerdy, science-related, etc.
The first submission concerning this story was submitted on 2017.08.13 5:50 UTC, and the second on 2017.08.14 11:08 UTC. I ran the story on 2017.08.14 18:51 UTC. By my calculations that is 1 day 13 hours from the time of submission of the first story to its appearing on the site. That is, based on my experience, better turnaround than the norm. Merging the stories, doing background investigation on the links, updating the story to include breaking news that GoDaddy dropped DNS support, that it went to Google, and that Google was aiming to drop them, too... I easily spent two hours at that task.
I anticipated ("This story could very well cause a lot of heat,") that this story would likely generate a large number of comments. It has already made it into the top 10 commented stories ever posted to the site [soylentnews.org] AND that the comments would likely be very spirited and likely even acrimonious.
tl;dr: I correctly suspected this story would generate a firestorm of comments. I did not want to post anything until I could get some rest, gather my thoughts, and put out a story that was not just fire and noise. You, the community, deserve that.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:15PM (9 children)
Thanks for the explanation.
I think the time is ripe to propose the "voting/commenting on submissions" functionality as a way to orient the editors, correct the links and submit additional info.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:52PM (8 children)
If the queue is running dry, then the stories advanced may simply be ones that are well-formed summaries that need very little editorial input at all. Check the links, set the time, go! Next one...
If there's been a high density of contentious stories, then there will be a tendency to pick some more throwaway, or simple stories, in order to cool things down a bit.
If there's been a run of stories not likely to get much discussion - some CPU/GPU announcement, or some fun trivial news, then most editors will try to find a more heated issue, so that there's something for the masses to get their teeth into. It might be worded pro- the editor's personal stance, but could equally be worded anti- that stance. It matters not to me, I'm as happy to oppose as to support the motion when it comes to commenting time, I presume others are similar.
So whilst in theory voting on a submission or editor's selection seems like a good idea, it's not, as much of what is being done is for practical reasons rather than personal agenda.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:37PM
Look mate, the presses and TV in Australia were running this story for 3 days before it transitioned to the front page on S/N.
I was really dying to hear what the soylenters in US (and not only [soylentnews.org]) think about it, can you get my frustration?
If I'm not able to use S/N for this, then I might start thinking maybe my expectations and the S/N reality are not in a good enough fit for me to worth dwelling here.
Besides, I really don't get it. I reckon most of us are able to find news on internet by themselves, so the benefit of S/N stays somewhere else (than as a primary source of information). Perhaps this "else" is in the discussions and exchange of info/opinions?
And yet, you have quite frequent stories with under 10 comments - how's that serving the (non-monetary) interest of soylenters, how do you keep us interested?
(if I'm mistaken believing this, why/where am I wrong?)
Ok, I understand that this story lagging the queue wasn't because of a certain bias of the editors, but you have to admit there's too little info available for the editors to gauge the potential interest of a story in the queue. This is where a voting on the stories in the queue can help - a practical purpose IMHO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:05PM (6 children)
Ok, this is 3 years old [soylentnews.org], with many comments saying that would be a good idea to vote on submission and many comments saying "I'm here for comments, not for the news".
Are we better in these respects than 3 years ago?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 17 2017, @07:13AM (5 children)
Are you volunteering to assist?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 17 2017, @09:56AM (3 children)
As an editor or a coder to implement "submission pre-editing" - as much as I'd like to, my other obligations do NOT allow me to make commitments (I have fragment of times quite irregularly).
As a "Mechanical Non-Turkish Soylenter" on a supposedly already implemented "submission pre-editing" page?
Sure. I can write a comment on the line of: "This is big Down Under, push it sooner" or "Dupe, here's the dupped" or "Correct link seems to be <linky>" or "Additional info on <linky>: here's an excerpt", in the random fragments of time I have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:02PM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:31PM (1 child)
Thanks, I should be able to manage that (even if I was anti-social media long before social media was a thing - that is to say, socializing on chat was something I did very seldom when IRC was raging, even much less nowadays).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 17 2017, @10:20PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 17 2017, @10:19AM
As an example of others wanting to assist and not getting through:
https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=21825¬e=&title=Nanotube+spider+silk+article+is+a+dupe+from+2015. [soylentnews.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0