Blogetery Shutdown Due To al-Qaeda Info

Archness1 writes "Over the weekend we discussed news that blog host Blogetery.com had been shut down at the request of the US government. Now, it appears the site was shut down because some of the blogs it was hosting contained information on al-Qaeda hit lists and bomb making. According to the article, Burst.net shut down Blogetery of its own accord after the FBI made a request to the host for information on the people who made the posts. '[Burst.net CTO Joe Marr] said the FBI contacted Burst.net and sent a Voluntary Emergency Disclosure of Information request. The letter said terrorist material, which presented a threat to American lives, was found on a server hosted by Burst.net and asked for specific information about the people involved. In the FBI's letter, the agency included a clause that says Web hosts and Internet service providers may voluntarily elect to shut down the sites of customers involved in these kinds of situations.'"

Comments

Burst.net have NOT handled this well

[Michael Hunt]

So, the Burst.net guys get a request for information about a machine they host which has ~70k users, give or take. Instead of asking the box's sysadmin (who's their CLIENT), they pull the pin, then go on to mutter vague conspiracy-minded commentary such as "getting a refund is the least of his (the site owner/sysadmin) problems" on fora such as WHT (see http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=05a61aabdfcacdb369e1582aff4686a1&t=964013 ) Apparently the fact that he _received_ abuse complaints in the past was grounds to terminate his service; never mind the fact that he had SEVENTY THOUSAND USERS and acted on DMCA notifications and other abuse requests in a timely fashion, which is better than can be said about a lot of sites.

Had burst.net forwarded the request to the site owner (or even simply given the feds his name, and explained how he fit in) instead of disconnecting the machine, making borderline slanderous statements (such as 'he'll never get his data back' and 'a refund is the least of his worries right now',) they would have come out of this looking reasonably good. As it stands, you'd have to be completely brain-dead retarded to even think about giving them money.