Google around for their very colorful history. These are bad hombres.
As far as I can tell, Epik focused on hosting and DNS management for marginalized/excluded groups on the internet, so naturally they attract a lot of groups. Not sure why that'd be bad though.
Things like this also makes me actually like the company more:
> Pharmaceutical watchdog website LegitScript reported in 2018 that they had alerted Epik to the sale of illegal drugs and counterfeit medications on websites registered by Epik, and that Epik had refused to act upon the information without a court order
That's exactly how I want my hosting company to act, and any that don't are actively fragile.
Rob Monster for instance has expressed support for the KKK and claimed that the Christchurch shooting was a hoax.
I’ll defend with my life his right to say abhorrent things. But that also means I get to express myself and call him a bad dude.
Does this mean we need — actually, needed — to do research on the political standings of every founder, CEO, CXO of every service we use? And somehow predict they won’t do abhorrent things in the future even if they appeared harmless at the time? Otherwise we deserve it when we get doxxed for being a customer of a disgraced person?
I believe the answer is no, that’s unreasonable. These hackers are just criminals illegally doxxing a huge number of people. They don’t deserve cheers. I hope everyone of them gets arrested, which is highly unlikely.
(This is really not a direct response to your comment; not saying you were cheering them on.)
Fully agree. First and foremost the rule of law must be blind. However, spectators need not be similarly blind.
I am not cheering on the hackers. I am merely accepting the Newtonian forces at work here. I doubt that there are many (any?) Epik customers who I would consider good people (there’s simply no logical reason to host with them otherwise). That doesn’t mean they aren’t entitled to their rights, under the law.
But it does mean that I definitely don’t sympathize with them like I might someone else. Much like I wouldn’t sympathize with a drug lord who gets robbed by a rival drug lord. A crime is a crime, and the law should be applied accordingly.
Buuut I am only human. And I only have so much sympathy.
This is an incredibly shortsighted / insular perspective. We live in a world where conservative orthodox Jews (e.g. Ben Shapiro) are called Nazi's and conservative Black folks (Larry Elder) are being called white supremacists, simply for being conservative. Likewise, progressives and other left leaning individuals that dare utter criticism of the left are met with the milder insult of being called conservative (e.g. Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, Bill Maher). People are deliberately shifting the overton window to a ridiculous degree and the scary thing is that they are getting away with it.
I can imagine a lot of regular conservatives worry about censorship and may find Epik to be a safer bet than, say, Google who blocks pro-life ads [1]. I can understand that maybe from your perspective (assuming you're left leaning) you are not aware of how hostile society has become to mainstream conservatism, but you should try to see things from the perspective of a regular conservative who sees prominent mainstream conservatives being slandered, lied about, and cancelled all around them.
Aside from that, Epik did have a few differentiating features like offering single purchase lifetime Domain ownership that I haven't seen elsewhere, which by itself could be sufficient motivation for people to host with them, without the necessarily knowing anything about potential controversy surrounding the business.
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/google-blocks-ad-for-s...