Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince at a 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in London. (credit: Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Until recently, CloudFlared prided itself on its unwavering commitment to free speech. Even when he was criticized for providing service to alleged terrorist groups in 2013, CEO Matthew Prince stood firm, insisting that "a website is speech. It is not a bomb."

So a lot of people were surprised on Wednesday when the company abruptly changed its tune and canceled the account of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. The action seemed to fly in the face of everything the company claimed to believe as recently as May.

And in an internal company email obtained by Gizmodo, Prince acknowledged that the decision was exactly as arbitrary as it seemed.

Enlarge (credit: Squarespace)

Some tech companies that provide hosting, domain, and CDN services to many of the most prominent hate groups are now re-evaluating those decisions in the wake of recent far-right violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. However, other firms are holding their course, in the name of free speech principles.

Squarespace, a hosting company, told Ars on Wednesday that it would soon be booting some of its current customers. The company currently hosts numerous extremist sites, including freedomfront.org, identityevropa.com, npiamerica.org, among others.

"In light of recent events, we have made the decision to remove a group of sites from our platform," Terry Wei, a Squarespace spokesman, e-mailed Ars. "We have given the site owners 48 hours’ notice. We cannot provide further information at this time but we’ll be in touch as soon as we have an update."

Enlarge / Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle counter protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on August 11, 2017. Photos of marchers are being used to identify and shame them on social media. (credit: Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In the wake of the violence and repugnance of the "Unite the Right" march in Charlottesville, Virginia last week—and the vehicular murder of a woman by a neo-Nazi connected to the event—the quest to identify and out those who marched with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups last Friday and Saturday is in full swing.

In short order, people started sharing photos of the event on the Internet to "crowdsource" identifying members of the groups, with fairly rapid results. One marcher from Berkeley, California lost his job at a hot dog restaurant as a result of being identified, as complaints poured in from customers. Another from Fargo, North Dakota was disowned by his family. One person posted to the now-offline Daily Stormer that he would not attend future rallies, because "The thought of getting outed as 'white supremacists' to our employers and possibly losing our jobs is a horrifying prospect, " as Steve Blum reported in Broadly. Many of the identifications have been coordinated through a Twitter account called Yes You're Racist.

If you recognize any of the Nazis marching in #Charlottesville, send me their names/profiles and I'll make them famous #GoodNightAltRight pic.twitter.com/2tA9xliFVU

— Yes, You're Racist (@YesYoureRacist) August 12, 2017

There have been misfires. As the New York Times reported, Kyle Quinn—an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas' School of Engineering—was mis-identified as a marcher, resulting in a torrent of threatening social media messages.

Enlarge / Google Home. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

At I/O 2017, Google promised that Google Home would get the ability to make phone calls. Today, the feature is rolling out to users in the US and Canada.

Google Home users can call businesses listed in Google Maps or people in Google Contacts with a simple "OK Google, call [whoever]." It also combines Google Contact's relationship knowledge and Google Home's multi-user support, allowing people to say something like "Call my mom" and have the system accurately look up and dial the right person.

Calls are free to anyone in the US and Canada. For most people, international calls and premium numbers are not supported, and the recipient will see "Unknown" or "No Caller ID." Subscribers to Google's Project Fi MVNO service or Google Voice numbers get a whole other experience, though: there's an option in the settings to have caller ID show your Google number, and international and 900 numbers can be billed to your account at the usual rate. For everyone else, Google says that, "by the end of the year," you'll be able to link any mobile number to the Google Home for caller ID. 911 calls aren't supported, and it doesn't sound like it can receive calls to your number.

Mark Walton

Just when you thought we were done with so-called Android "flagship" phones for the year—what with the likes of the HTC U 11, LG G6, OnePlus 5, and Samsung Galaxy S8 already on the market—along comes Nokia with another.

The Nokia 8, just like every other flagship Android phone, is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. It has a QHD screen, 4GB of memory, 64GB of storage, and the obligatory dual-camera setup, complete with branded optics from long-term partner Zeiss. Priced at €600 (UK price TBC, but probably £550) and due for release in September worldwide (except the US), the Nokia 8 is about as exciting as its generic aluminium body and by-the-numbers spec sheet suggests—but perhaps that's the point.

Matthew Prince, cofounder and chief executive officer of CloudFlare. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

All week, the infamous hate site Daily Stormer has been battling to stay online in the face of a concerted social media campaign to shut it down. The site lost its "dailystormer.com" domain on Monday after first GoDaddy and then Google Domains blacklisted it from their domain registration services

The site re-appeared online on Wednesday morning at a new domain name, dailystormer.ru. But within hours, the site had gone offline again after it was dropped by Cloudflare, an intermediary that defends customers against denial-of-service attacks.

Daily Stormer's Andrew Anglin reported Cloudflare's decision to drop the site in a post on the social media site Gab. His post was first spotted by journalist Matthew Sheffield.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Linda Braucht)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai should explain why he's taken a series of actions that help the business of Sinclair Broadcast Group, Democratic lawmakers said in a letter to Pai on Monday.

The Democrats told Pai that recent news reports raise questions about "whether actions taken by the FCC under your leadership show a pattern of preferential treatment for Sinclair and whether a series of interactions between your office, the Trump campaign and Trump administration, and Sinclair demonstrate inappropriate coordination."

Also on Monday, a New York Times story titled "How a Conservative TV Giant Is Ridding Itself of Regulation" said that "Pai has undertaken a deregulatory blitz, enacting or proposing a wish list of fundamental policy changes advocated by [Sinclair Chairman David] Smith and his company."