After being refused service by two domain registrars and a hosting provider, a notorious neo-Nazi site has apparently fled to a Russian domain and a new server host, with a backup on the dark web.
Neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer resurfaces with Russian domain following Google and GoDaddy bans
The notorious site bounced around various domains and the dark web before landing on a .ru domain.
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Aja Romano wrote about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
The Daily Stormer came under fire following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend. The neo-Nazi website had its account terminated with domain registrar GoDaddy on Sunday after Twitter users complained about a post lobbing insults and slurs at Heather Heyer, the anti-racism demonstrator who was killed in Charlottesville. The website also quietly had its server hosting disabled by hosting company Scaleway. And even though the website quickly moved to another domain registration company, Google, Google promptly terminated its account.
Thus, heading into Tuesday, the site — founded by prominent neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin in 2013 — was essentially bouncing around looking for places to land. It briefly attempted to gain hosting through a Chinese service provider at the URL DailyStormer.wang, only to quickly be taken offline.
Next, the site attempted to set up shop on the dark web, using a .onion domain. Websites on the dark web are hidden from search engines and can only be accessed by special browsers such as a Tor browser. But the site’s move underground didn’t last long. Currently its home on the dark web is a parked announcement that it has relocated to DailyStormer.Ru:
The .ru domain in the URL isn’t exactly proof that the website is now hosted in Russia, because anyone can register a .ru domain. A Whois lookup for the .ru site reveals that the controversial hosting proxy CloudFlare, which has refused to terminate its business relationship with the neo-Nazi forum, continues to mask the identity of the site’s true server host.
On the website, Anglin celebrated the site’s return with a litany of anti-Semitism and criticism of GoDaddy and Google, calling the latter an anti-speech site. He also took the opportunity to deliver more insults against Heyer, whose memorial is today.
Update: The Dailystormer.ru domain now appears to be offline as well; the .onion domain accessible via Tor browser has not updated. We are following developments and will update this article as new iterations of the site appear.
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