Marketing Racism: From Barack Obama to a Racist Forum

Upon publishing this story, I received attention from one dubious and unexpected source, this racist forum. Now, I will admit that the piece I published could fairly be called a hit piece on Barack Obama, however my problems with Obama are strictly ideological, not racial. The racists see Obama in a totally different light. Of course, what was most interesting was some of the companies that profited from bringing racists together to chat amongst each other in an uninhabited environment on the internet.

The forum is filled with such lovely comments as

Yeah, I've seen ni$$er waiters before. I swear, they could f**k up a cup of coffee. Ni$$ers belong either shining shoes or cleaning toilets, or better yet, chimping out over a water-filled root in the African Toilet.

and...

What are ni$$ers doing at an Institution of Higher Learning anyway?? Is there that much janitorial work that needs to be done at that school?

and one last one and that's it...

When I register for classes, I try to schedule classes between 8AM and noon.
Even at my moderately-ni$$erfuxated school, these classes are always
ni$$er-free. Even if there are one or two, they'll forget that they have class
by the second week.

So how does such unadulterated racism finds its way onto the net and who is responsible. These are the answers I searched for in preparing this story.

Unfortunately, their main forum is down as of this publication. That's too bad because their web hoster not only advertised on the site but boasted about its own abilities. (I think it went something like if we can host this site imagine what we can do for you) The name of the company is Secure Server Tech and for sites like this racist forum they offer special "free speech" web hosting. Here is how they summarized it...

Hosting in Amsterdam with more freedom of content and speech. Main rules being no childporn, malicious scripts/pages or SPAM on the network, almost all other content is allowed. Abuse and DMCA messages will be forwarded to the client for resolution, in most cases action is not required.

The "free speech" that they talk about is those obscenity and pornography laws that we have here in the United States compared to the obscenity and pornography laws in the Netherlands. SST, and others like them, take advantage of the laws to create web hosting solutions that allow for racists like these to host forums for other racists. Of course, SST has a few rules of their own

No spam related sites or any site material is posted that can be used for spam such as email lists, mass mail programs and scripts, etc;

No harrasing material that may cause people to retaliate against you and attack our
servers - Have some common sense here.

No phishing pages of any kindWe have total discretion on all content. If we feel that you are endangering our good standing with the network in any way we will not hesitate to terminate your account.

Now, it may seem ironic that SST doesn't want such things as spam but are perfectly happy to bring a bunch of racists together to spew vile back and forth. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense. Racists forums are frequent target of such things as spam and viruses by hackers who disagree with their content. It is likely that the site powered by SST is down for exactly this reason. By providing such services like web hosting out of the Netherlands, SST not only doesn't mind making a buck servicing racists, but frankly they tailor their brand to attract such groups.

Not to worry, the racists actually created a back up forum for just such an occasion. This one is powered by a open source forum called phpbb. According to one of my commenters, PHP is an open source forum that allows its software to be made available for anyone. If this is correct, they have just become unwitting accomplices in bringing racists together to spout hate. Here is how their website bills their service...

Since its creation in 2000, phpBB™ has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB™ 3.0 “Olympus” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.

The other main company involved is V Bulletin. V Bulletin provides the layout and structure of this racist forum along with hundreds of other high brow forums along with it. Here are some of their general services...

Scalable solution - database server and web servers can reside on separate
machines. MySQL back-end database vBulletin can be run on any machine
that can support PHP and MySQL (Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows, Mac) Written
in PHP which makes for a fast and efficient product Admin Control Panel Moderator Control Panel User Control Panel Compliant with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998. See this page for more information: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/coppa.htm

This racist forum is tied to a main page. The main page is layed out much like most other blogs and websites only this one markets in hate. It links to other sites of like mind and in this case it is other racist sites. There is a pseudo news page, a site dedicated to tracking African American child predators, among several gross out sites. Many of them are powered by web hosting companies. At least one (Bravenet.com) proudly markets its own products (web hosting) on one of these sites. It is unclear how much tacit knowledge all of their so called partners have. For instance, this racist site boasts that it was tested by Macafee and found to have no virus. I maybe wrong but I believe that someone from the racist web site went to Macafee and tested their site there. That said, here is a comment from Macafee about the racist site..

When we visited this site, we found that most of its links are to sites
which are safe or have only minor safety/annoyance issues.

Clearly, someone visited the site and found most of their links "safe". Now, in the world of Macafee that likely means safe from virus, spam, and other "malicious" software, not necessarily safe from uninhibited hate speech and chat.

The most peculiar site linked from the racist main page is this site. This particular site is a collection of the "worst sites" on the internet. In other words, the goal of this particuluar site is to attract every freak, deviant (sexual and otherwise), racist, and anyone else with any other disorder and provide them with entertainment for any of their most outlandish vices. This site features everything from virtual porn, to gross out humor, to uninhibited racist chat can be found on this site.

This particular site is hosted by EGW. It is clear that this hate only finds an audience when so called legitimate companies get into bed with them. All of this chatting back and forth wouldn't happen if web hosting companies refused to do business with the racists. I can only assume that this was a business decision. These companies felt that the extra revenue would be more than off set from any potential negative publicity generated from getting into bed with racists. I don't know if they are correct however I am only getting started in sniffing everyone of these players into the open and exposing them.