While the site is down, some 8chan fans have turned to a peer-to-peer version of the site, which not even 8chan’s admins endorse. The site’s administrators are still trying to bring 8chan online, they say. But in the meantime, someone else set up an 8chan clone on Zeronet, a peer-to-peer network.
An 8chan administrator told The Daily Beast he was unfamiliar with Zeronet, and that 8chan did not know who set up the clone site.
Most websites operate from a central server, which passes content straight to visitors. Peer-to-peer networks, often available through specialized browsers, cut out the middleman and let users share content directly with each other. While the peer-to-peer model is harder to take offline, it also turns 8chan users’ computers into hosts for the website. That means potentially downloading and redistributing content from the 8chan Zeronet site, which hosts a board called “Child Porn.”
“Say someones a f****t and uploads cp [child porn],” one Zeronet user wondered on Wednesday, as 8chan users flooded Zeronet’s discussion board. “If i happen to download it, it gets shared from my computer, right? And if i dont notice it bunch of people can download it from me? So im a distrubutor at that point, arent i?”
Fortunately for Zeronet users, their computers will only download and host content from pages they’ve clicked on. Unfortunately for 8chan fans, the website is home to images of gore, porn, sexualized drawings of children and sometimes illegal child pornography (
which 8chan bans, in theory).
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