An American neo-Nazi website has taken a cue from Donald Trump Jr. by looking to Russians for help.
Less than a day after The Daily Stormer went dark, Ars Technica reported the notorious hate-centric website was up and running again Wednesday, this time using the Russia-based domain dailystormer.ru.
On Monday, Google suspended the site from its domain name service (DNS) almost immediately after the Nazi blog was evicted by its long-time domain provider, GoDaddy. This means that the blog could no longer use the coveted “.com” top-level domain. According to Andrew Anglin, The Daily Stormer’s creator, Google has refused to allow him to change his dailystormer.com registration to another company.
After being shut out of his regular .com domain, Anglin and his technology adviser, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, moved the site to dailystormer.wang. “.wang” is a top-level domain which normally caters to Chinese-language websites. Yet within hours, the site was suspended again.
In the interim, Auernheimer migrated the site to Tor, an anonymous peer-to-peer network, sometimes referred to as the “dark web,” that is inaccessible without special software. Finally, The Stormer was registered through a Russian domain service, meaning it is easy to visit on the “normie internet,” as Auernheimer described it.
The site’s new registrar, a private company called Ru-Center, is Russia’s largest domain name and web hosting provider.
Throughout all of this domain-hopping, the Nazi blog relied on security and protection services from Cloudflare, an internet security firm that has come under fire from activists for protecting terrorist and hate groups who enlist Cloudflare’s services.
On Wednesday afternoon, however, Anglin announced that the Daily Stormer had been suspended by Cloudflare as well — leaving the site open to denial-of-service attacks from anti-Nazi hackers who have long wanted to target it. Previously, with Cloudflare’s protection, they were unable to do so.
http://twitter.com/mattsheffield/status/897873969897975808
The Daily Stormer has been around since 2013, but gained heightened notoriety – and tons of traffic – for heavily promoting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that turned deadly over the weekend.
NPR reported that GoDaddy had received many calls and tweets to ban the site for its incendiary stories, including one article that cruelly mocked Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed Saturday in a car-ramming attack allegedly perpetrated by Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields, Jr.
The question now is whether the Daily Stormer’s Russian domain host will face pressure to boot a site that promotes an ideological movement that cost Russia 20 million lives in World War II.
As of this writing, the site is not accessible via its .ru top-level domain suffix.
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