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This Just In: 8chan's Domain Has Been Seized (For Now)

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Published: January 12, 2015 9:18 PM

It's not very often that a piece on TechRaptor goes up reporting on 8chan, but I think that a good number of our readers frequent the site. After all, it is the site that carried GamerGate onward after the exodus from what some now (un)affectionately call "halfchan". If you are among the aforementioned group of people, you may have noticed that 8chan.co is no longer resolving. Over the past few days, the website has been under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack allegedly involving a group called LizardSquad.

Even until this moment, we are not absolutely sure who paid for the attack, but many people on Twitter have gone out suggesting that Dan Olson (known for his videos regarding GamerGate, going under the moniker of Foldable Human) bears at least some responsibility for what transpired in this period. All we know for certain is that a person using the name Dan Olson (who could be the man himself) has reported 8chan to CloudFlare — 8chan's reverse-proxy provider — in an email that was broadcasted through Twitter (screenshot below).

dan-olson-email

Only hours later, the domain was no longer resolving at all. At around 7 PM Eastern Standard Time, 8chan's Twitter feed showed us why:

Fredrick Brennan, the founder of 8chan, posted a screenshot of a notification he received from Internet.bs Corp., the website's host, showing that the domain has been seized due to "child abuse".

8chan-seizure

To put this into context, in the past, 8chan has been accused of hosting illicit material involving children (i.e. child pornography). Although the site has broken no laws, people have in the past cherry-picked it apart in order to create an impression that this site is a front for a market it simply doesn't belong to.

For those of you hoping for some insight into what will happen over the next few days, I have taken a little bit of Fredrick Brennan's time to reach out to him and ask for his comments on the situation. He said that he will be speaking about the abuse reports with Internet.bs (the domain host) and attempting to revert the seizure. "In the event that I cannot resolve this by speaking to them, I may just have to register a new domain," he said. "That's really all I can do."

While what has happened over the last few weeks may leave a few "8channers" in panic, they need not worry. If Brennan decides to register a new domain name, the registrar can have it up and running on the right IP address within a few hours.

As I come across more information, I will be updating this article to reflect the events that take place.

Update: Perhaps to the dismay of the people who initiated the campaign against 8chan, control of the site's domain has been handed back to Brennan, according to 8chan's tweet embedded below.

 

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With a reputation for writing suit-and-tie articles, Miguel Leiva-Gomez needed a place to relax and let loose. Aside from deciphering the workings behind… More about Miguel