Even Epik Says the Texas Abortion "Whistleblower" Site Violates its Rules

[ruet]

Source: Ars Technica

The Texas Right to Life group's prolifewhistleblower.com website was booted by GoDaddy on Friday for violating its rules, including one that prohibits sites from using GoDaddy to "collect or harvest... non-public or personally identifiable information" without people's prior written consent. The website switched its domain registration from GoDaddy to Epik and switched its name servers from GoDaddy to hosting provider Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean quickly cut off service, and the abortion-whistleblower site's domain records now list Epik as both the registrar and name servers.

But the website—which encouraged people to report violations of the restrictive new anti-abortion law in Texas—is offline, and the domain now redirects to Texas Right to Life's homepage. The group says it plans to get the site back online.

Epik general counsel Daniel Prince emailed Ars and other news organizations on Sunday, saying, "When the site owner moved it to Epik's name servers... we contacted the owner of the site, notified them that the website violated Epik's terms of use, and persuaded them to stop collecting anonymous tips and to take it off the Internet entirely. At no time did Epik serve as the web host for prolifewhistleblower.com."

Read more: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/even-epik-says-the-texas-abortion-whistleblower-site-violates-its-rules/

[relayerbob]

1. These companies know that their liability will be huge

Some dingbat may get $10k for reporting someone, but that same someone may get a substantially larger payday from the lawsuits against web hosts who support virtual doxxing and bounty hunters.

[erronis]

2. I'm sure these groups can find friendly hosting in the USSR. After all, that's where some of their

funding is coming from. Perhaps not directly but similar to the NRA.

I'm sure there's a big connection between the US funders of these anti-democracy movements and pootine/spectre.

[ZonkerHarris]

3. Time to boycott whoever is hosting Texas Right to Life's homepage also.

cut off the head of the snake

[ZenDem]

4. Networksolutions n/t

[LeftInTX]

7. I thought it was Sucuri or something like that

[ZenDem]

8. According to Whois...

...it's Networksolutions. The do have web security set up, which I'm unfamiliar with.

These providers/hosts/etc have tentacles going everywhere. There's an odd crossover from GoDaddy and Networksolutions that I can't figure out. It could just be a funky algorithm that's merging the two, because from what I can tell, there's no real relationship between them. For a second I thought GoDaddy was playing both sides of the fence, but it doesn't actually appear to be the case.

It's been 100 years or more since I've built web sites. Someone else here is probably way more qualified to nail this down.

[rpannier]

5. When Epik boots you you're in trouble

They'll host anybody
Just ask the neo-Nazis

[ironflange]

6. There are some people even Epik doesn't want to be seen with