Epik Blog

I know Gab uses this domain registrar and hosting company called Epik but no clue how exactly how much of Gab's infra is handled by Epik. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company) https://www.epik.com

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…

The same Epik that turned down 8chan? https://www.epik.com/blog/epik-draws-line-on-acceptable-use.html At the end of the day, businesses gotta eat. They're not a charity or a benevolent public force. If your user generated content impacts their bottom line, you're gonna get kicked to the curb. >The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor. Both CDNs are primarily concerned about business risk with hosting content and calls to action that could be found illegal.

first hit on DDG: https://www.epik.com/blog/leasing-domains-how-we-do-it-at-epik-and-how…

Are they currently writing up a blogpost about this? Their blog has nothing: https://www.epik.com/blog/ And this is a megadump of a hack. But you can buy a .MONSTER TLD For $1.49: https://www.epik.com/promos/monster

> do you have more info on the 'forever domain'? https://www.epik.com/forever/

As someone with an account, I don't suppose you could comment on whether I'm reading this article correctly - that the only MFA on offer is SMS based. https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/enabling-disabling-mobile-2… That would sure be interesting for such profile domains.

From the article: > According to one letter, penned by Epik’s SVP of strategy and communications, Robert Davis, PayPal inquired about offshore accounts, money transmission licenses, and "other queries related to cross‐border activities and law enforcement." > “[The questions] were absolutely absurd, and well outside of any knowledge or experience we have as a domain registrar,” said Davis. These sound to me like things PayPal very obviously should be asking of anyone using them to run a cryptocurrency. Interesting that they've taken down the masterbucks page now linked in the article and with the archived note about tax advantages, and moved it to masterbucks.com which their FAQ claims they control: https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/using-masterbucks/