Slashdot Mirror
US Gov't Mistakenly Shuts Down 84,000 Sites
Chaonici writes "Last Friday, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seized ten websites accused of selling counterfeit goods or trafficking in child pornography. However, in the process, about 84,000 unrelated websites were taken offline when the government mistakenly seized the domain of a large DNS provider, FreeDNS. By now, the mistake has been corrected and most of the websites' domains again point to the sites themselves, rather than an intimidating domain seizure image. In a press release, the DHS praised themselves for taking down those ten websites, but completely failed to acknowledge their massive blunder."
How many people now have friends or family thinking they're pedophiles because of this little 'oops' from the government?
After this, I figure the only safe assumption when I see someone accused of child molestation or possessing kiddie porn, is that they are innocent.
...the fact that they've done damage to all those websites of businesses...im sure potential customers aren't at all put off seeing that domain seizure image.
If you're running your business' web presence through freeDNS, you have bigger issues than this my friend.
Come again? Care to elaborate? I might be dense today, I can't imagine what issues an organisation may have, issue bigger than to be falsely painted as a child abuser in public?
Any NGO which is happy to save every dime in costs and use that dime for the goals of the NGO has suddenly "bigger issues", eh? Yes, I can see they do have issues, except that the issue is not caused by them, but by incompetence...
What's scarier: the issue was caused by the active incompetence of those in power.
Even more, this also reveals there are not enough checks in the system to prevent such actions, no matter the cause/intent: incompetence, malice or corruption.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
There was a point last year when the total number of DHS warrented searches (you know, the ones where an actual judge goes through all those silly processes from the constitution), had been aimed at 6 actual suspected terrorists and over 5,000 suspected drug dealers since the program started. Homeland security was never about actually stopping terrorists, it's always been about how all the money we spend openly on the war against drugs isn't producing results, so lets covertly spend even more and see if that helps. Why do you think there's all those efforts to track money flow in the program, all the requirements to show current ID to take out a loan and such? . it's hard to actually catch terrorists by tracking any spending except possibly that aimed at actual bomb components, chemicals, and maybe biological support. No one is going to figure out a plot from tracking a terrorist renting a car or opening a regular checking account. But drug dealers need to do a LOT of money laundering. .
Who is John Cabal?