Hosting is an inexact but entirely acceptable term of art for the services that are provided by a CDN.

Exactly. To the outside world, for all intents and purposes Cloudflare was their host. Cloudflare's IP addresses served 8chan's content, even held it on their local drives. I don't care (and neither should anyone else) that their primary source of truth was internally hosted elsewhere.

Cloudflare often tries to skirt definitions and would love to be seen as a neutral utility, a simple carrier. They're not though. 8chan was their customer. They hosted their DNS, served their content and potentially took their money (I don't know whether 8chan was on their free plan or not, but again that doesn't matter).

Yeah but now they can be DDoS’d.

They will find another CDN. Piratebay and others have been around for ages.

That's fine. They won't be using Cloudflare, one less option for them. That's worth doing.

May create a cascading effect where less and less CDNs will accept them.

Let's hope.

keep hoping. daily stormer is still online like nothing happened

Piratebay is still using Cloudflare.

Punishable as a federal crime (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or 18 U.S.C. §1030).

True but between DDOS and murder I'm gonna say a jury will prefer the DDOS.

Yeah a prosecutor is definitely going to try that case lol

Prosecutors plea bargain slam dunk cases all the time.

DDoSes are rarely prosecuted as the perpetrators are rarely caught. This is even more true when the DDoS is done by large groups of people (such as the scientology attacks a decade or so ago).

Further, 8chan is run in the Philippines, which would add a lot of complications to any prosecution

The computer is in SF. CFAA applies and the US has jurisdiction.

You watch too much Law and Order SVU.

If you think vigilance internet justice is a solution to America's gun problem, you Americans are very deluded.

Yup. Just widening the divide.

In the same way that punching someone in the face is "speech", yeah.

In the U.S., at least, one is free to argue any number of ignorant things -- and often does.

What differentiates the speechy bytes from the punchy bytes?

Not even close