Well this is shitty. I have several domains registered through Epik. I think it’s bullshit all of my personal information is now being shared in a torrent because there were other unsavory customers. I, and likely countless others, have nothing to do with any of these domains/people this site claims Epik is hosting.
You're right, you don't deserve your information to be out there.
However, Epik is a badly run registrar (as evident by the leaks), and the only reason any of us know about them is because they've worked so hard to attract unsavory customers. Registrars mostly offer the same service at the same price, and catering to unsavory clients is their only differentiating feature.
It's their entire marketing scheme (take on customers that legitimate registrars won't), so it's not surprising that they're actually pretty illegitimate.
I'm sorry your data was leaked, and I'd take this as a sign to move.
How is that any different than a well lauded service like nearlyfreespeach.net? Just because you believe in the first amendment doesn't mean you should be the target of harassment.
Every single registrar is targeted by hackers daily. I'm not convinced this is a sign of targeted harassment as much as just shoddy security practices.
The hackers in this case released a statement giving their exact reasons for doing this, though, and it was hacked precisely because it hosts badspeech. So it's not a random hack, they did this specifically to give information out to activists.
I wonder if the media outlets will continue with their policies of not reporting on hacked info or not?
No media outlet in the world has ever had a policy of not reporting on hacks. Sure, they won't show the data or how to get it yourself, but that's crazy to say that media outlets don't report on hacks.
I agree that Twitter is not something generally trustworthy, but that ignores Twitter's role in breaking news. The many places that generally are called "media outlets" that have reported news with tweets as their primary sources to the point where I think you would have trouble finding a media outlet that is an exception.
I hadn’t heard any claims about unsavory customers until I was already a customer myself. I joined them because their Whois privacy was free while I had to pay for it on GoDaddy, nothing else.
Thanks, it looks like I’m going this route. It’s a bit pricey to transfer all domains at once so I have to pick and choose. For anyone else in the same boat, they offer a promo code “TLD21TS8” which reduces the transfer costs by 64%.
That linked forum discussion does not exactly make Epik look good.
The first post from someone not employed by Epik is someone from Nigeria asking if they can buy a .US domain.
An Epik staff member tells them that .US are restricted to those with US contact information (which is almost correct--you need to be a US citizen, resident, organization, or a foreign entity with a bona fide presence in the US).
Then the Epik CEO answers that post suggesting how to circumvent the .US rules:
> However, just use the free WHOIS privacy proxy. Problem solved. You will need to keep the privacy on in this case.
That won't actually work because (as the Epik staff member points out in another reply to the Nigerian post) .US does not allow WHOIS privacy proxies.
I didn't link it to make Epik look good. Don't like Epik, don't like its CEO.
But Epik is absolutely one if not the registrar you stumbled upon the last couple of years if you looked for good transfer prices.
I just think users should give other users in this thread the benefit of the doubt that they weren't Epik customers to support a fascist, hardcore libertarian Christian, Nazi, ... CEO and his company in any form.
They might just have googled for fair .com transfers and transferred a couple of domains in.
I don't bite. There's a whole diaspora of name registrars, but only one of them marketed themselves as the right-leaning choice (Rob Monster made damn sure of that). Hacks like this are the price of doing business with egomaniacs.
Epik started hosting Gab in 2018 (introducing "free speech" as a part of their marketing allegedly following the Gab move [1][2]) and BitChute and 8chan in 2019 [3] (although they stopped hosting 8chan [4] after some of their own upstream providers cut them off or threatened to do so; they may have continued to provide DNS, but I haven't tried to verify this since providing services to the far right on the down low wouldn't count as part of their marketing).
External criticism from prominent publications and organizations of Epik for its hosting of far-right sites also dates back at least as far as early 2019 [5][6].
HN search provides a story about Epik hosting Gab [7] as the highest popularity story result for "Epik" in the date range Jan 8th 2018 to Dec 30th 2019 (HN search is weird about date ranges and wouldn't let me do 1st to 31st) [8]. The front page of that search result has 5 other stories that are not just incorrectly matching on the word "Epic" or companies named "Epic", one of which is about Epik's "forever domains" service and got 3 points and 2 comments. One is about 8chan getting kicked off its previous provider and mentions them moving to Epik (it appears to be the same article as my [3]), but the comments mostly does not talk about Epik. The other articles are all about Epik hosting Gab or far-right sites but received few upvotes and comments.
In the first page of results for the corresponding search for comments [9] I can find 1 comment from 'sadris talking about Epik's low pricing, 1 comment from 'boultonmark on a non-Gab story describing Epik as seeming to be "the go to company for criminals online", 2 hiring posts from somebody who happens to have epik in their username near the bottom, and two comments using the word "epic" at the bottom. The 14 by my count other comments are all about Epik hosting Gab and/or either hosting or not hosting 8chan.
[1]: The SPLC article below [5] says this is the timing, but the Wayback machine[2] doesn't have frequent enough captures of their twitter account for me to verify the timing to more precisely than between
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190119014600/https://twitter.c... has "Protector of responsible Free Speech." in their bio, tweets calling for popular Youtube channels (including Jordan Peterson) to move to BitChute, and referring to itself as "Alt-tech", which afaict is a term coined to refer specifically to technology providers that alt-right sites & people have moved to as a result of bans or moderation policies on more mainstream providers.
Thanks for substantiating my point and doing the research.
The HN community - or even just small parts of it - did not go hard on Epik nor Rob Monster >12 months ago and mention all the horrible things about them, and it was not as commonly known as some currently make it out to be - not even in the thread about them welcoming Gab, nor the one about them not hosting 8chan.
You're welcome, but I don't think the information/citations I provided do substantiate your point at all. They show that Epik did market itself to right wing sites and individuals (and specifically the alt-right) as early as January 2019 (around 32 months ago),
Your claim upthread was:
> Even the threads here on HN from back then where epik gets mentioned don't mention that stuff.
but the HN search links demonstrate that the threads here on HN from back then where Epik gets mentioned are almost all specifically about that stuff! Not all of that discussion was opposed to Epik, but that wasn't the claim you took issue with.
As to your Google Trends link, yes, Gab has never been an especially popular website, and it was not as frequently searched for then as in the period immediately after Donald Trump's twitter account was suspended, but your trends link shows that the Epik coverage (and the only HN thread about Epik to get any traction in 2018 or 2019) coincided with the most searches Gab ever got (as a result of coverage related to the Tree of Life synagogue shooting) prior to Trump's twitter suspension, and was about three times as much as it gets nowadays. It was only exceeded during the week of January 10th through 16th of this year. Epik itself, of course, has never been as frequently searched for as even Gab ( https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... ).
> but the HN search links demonstrate that the threads here on HN from back then where Epik gets mentioned are almost all specifically about that stuff! Not all of that discussion was opposed to Epik, but that wasn't the claim you took issue with.
Yes it was? That's why I said threads - not posts. Threads include the discussion, not just the articles. And like you showed, even the big discussions did not have people mention how bad of a person Rob Monster is or that Epik is that right-leaning instead of just really free-speech.
In every second about a (big) company on HN, folk here mention how bad that company or some execs are - because it is common knowledge / opinion. And it's always one of the top comment threads in the thread.
Rob Monster and Epik being that right-leaning and not just "really free-speech", and also (Christian) nut jobs - was not common knowledge at that point. Which was my initial point "upthread upthread", that Epik had 100% a boat load of users that were just there for cheap domain prices and that did not know about it and were not there to support any of this. And thus are not guilty by association (and even deserve to be in that leak), like some in this thread claim.
I have to ask: If it wasn't for the freedom to share information, as is given by the Constitution, why'd you pick Epik? Their prices aren't particularly good, they don't really advertise themselves as having any features other registrars don't have, and don't really seem to have a lot going for them. They aren't even acknowledging the fact that they got hacked:
Pretty much every company has been offering it for free for the past six years because of the GDPR. Worth keeping in mind in the future; never use a registrar that's more sketchy than normal.
They have the biggest "real" (as in for existing customers and without other limitations) promo / "happy hour" thread on the biggest domain name board:
https://www.namepros.com/threads/epik-com-promo-deals-and-ha... - where they regularly had pretty good transfer in prices.
I googled this and I literally can not find anything he's done or said that is openly anti-semitic other than allowing anyone on his platform. Would he be a terrorist sympathizer for allowing ISIS or Alqueda on his platform?
I do not know if he did but we do know that cloudflare for example did, along with harassment groups like kiwifarms. Are they terrorist and harasser sympathizers?
It's funny because both Epik and Cloudflare used to host 8chan and the dailystormer. They are more similar than people think.
That doesn't make it any right to involve leaking the personal information of innocent users using the platform because they found that Epik was offering WHOIS privacy cheaper than another registrar. (GoDaddy)
The ones who hacked Epik are just as bad as the 'neo-nazis' and 'white supremacists' you speak of.
> The ones who hacked Epik are just as bad as the 'neo-nazis' and 'white supremacists' you speak of.
You don’t see a moral difference between people who hacked a company’s customer list, and people who want to very literally murder my family and me? Those sound the same to you?
You can just report whatever 'illegal' content you find that is hosted on a private company's website and they will take it down such illegal content since if they are found to hosting it, they're whole service can be taken down.
Assuming you have this evidence, did you just leave them online and then complain here and did nothing?
Maybe being obsessed around chasing Nazis everywhere and directly approaching them yourself comes with such risks and consequences which you should leave all to the authorities to deal with rather than using extreme illegal methods to attack any sort of service in the name of this so-called 'fascism' which at this point has become meaningless.
Why are you so obsessed with accusing everyone in this thread as a nazi or a white supremacist? So 'notadev' is a nazi because they chose Epik? With what evidence suggests that?
> Oh no! Why won't somebody think about the poor neo nazis and white supremacists posting violent content and murder lists?!
I assume you have evidence of this given your long obsession with Nazis in this thread. Did you forget to report these 'specific neo nazis' that posted this or did you just leave them online?
Why would you be inclined to believe the latter? I don’t host anything on Epik, just use them as a registrar because they offered free Whois privacy. None of the domains I have are anything political or offensive in any way. I’m innocent collateral damage as are many others I’m sure.
Epik is owned by Rob Monster, who is a open and proud Neo Nazi and antisemite. You chose to do business with him despite of who he was and what he enables. That you didn't understand these facts before hand was your failure.
This should be a lesson in exercising moral and ethical restraint, and being conscious of who you do business with. Guilt by association sucks, but I am very skeptical about anyone who says that they run a website on Epik, simply because it is the go-to webhost for extremist and violent content.
> Epik is owned by Rob Monster, who is a open and proud Neo Nazi and antisemite. You chose to do business with him despite of who he was and what he enables
When I first heard of Epik, it was due to the kinds of sites/domains he handled that were being kicked off other services for egregious reasons (including and not limited to: hosting white supremacist shooter manifestos, doxxing for murder). That in of itself told me to stay far, far away from Epik.
Advocating for free speech doesn't mean moral abandonment, either. There's a reason things like fighting words, threats of harm aren't considered protected speech... and there's (sadly) quite a few on here who still have yet to learn that part of the lesson when it comes to speech online.
Epik's business model is to specifically cater to Neo Nazis.
> Epik is known for providing services to websites with far-right content, such as the social network Gab, video hosting service BitChute, conspiracy theory website InfoWars, and neo-Nazi message board website The Daily Stormer.[1][6][28] It was described in 2019 by Vice as "a safehaven for the extreme right" and in 2021 by The Seattle Times as "a home for far-right websites" because of its willingness to host far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.[1][29][30] In 2021, The Daily Telegraph wrote that Epik was "a safe harbour for websites said to be enabling the spread far-right extremism and carrying Neo-Nazi content";[25] the same year, Fortune called the company the "right wing’s best friend online".[9] NPR reported in February 2021 that "when websites flooded with hate speech or harmful disinformation become too radioactive for the Internet, the sites often turn to [Epik] for a lifeline."[13]
