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GoDaddy Goes Down, Anonymous Claims Responsibility
An anonymous reader writes "A member of the Anonymous hacktivist group appears to have taken down GoDaddy with a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The widespread issue seems to be affecting countless websites and services around the world, although not for everyone. Godaddy.com is down, but so are some of the site's DNS servers, which means GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, and lots more. It's currently unclear if the servers are being unresponsive or if they are completely offline. Either way, the result is that if your DNS is hosted on GoDaddy, your site may also look as if it is down, because it cannot resolve."
By chance GoDaddy holds one of my domain since several days for ransom. Expiration date is tomorrow and they wont release it and delaying, reviewing, delaying. Requesting me to write them from an email under the domain name, not realizing that I am already doing this and they actually answering me to an email under the exact domain name. I guess to force me to renew with them due to the expiration date is their goal. Well, they manged. I have to renew today and now I can't even do that. The review60 team at GoDaddy is a class of its own. Besides shooting elephants, half naked girls and SOPA support, they just show unorthodox, unprofessional, possibly illegal business practices. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THEM! (The DOS attack is not their fault)
On top of that, you didn't read the TOS from GoDaddy. That allows *them* to turn your site off on a whim without prior notice. This might just be the hackers turning on the built-in kill switch for every GoDaddy site simultaneously.
Their decision was made because it was the short-run profiteering thing to do.
There, fixed that for ya. The fiscally responsible thing to do is to ensure the long-run fitness of the United States and global economy.
The MPAA and RIAA are pushing for increasing the strength of their regulatory monopolies to channel a larger share of GDP into their products, which shifts us further out on the cultural supply curve. That increases units produced and per-unit price, which has the effect of increasing cultural production while reducing the per-unit cost efficiency. That would be a good thing if we were suffering from a shortage of cultural production and the economy was running strong. Since we are on the opposite side of both those balances at the moment, however, supporting that agenda to curry their favor is short-run profiteering -- not fiscal responsibility.
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His point is that GoDaddy supported SOPA, which allowed companies to shut down websites on a whim.
If you continued to support GoDaddy after learning about this, then it is assumed you're fine with people's websites being shutdown for no good reason.
Therefore, why are you upset now?
You're the roofer on the Death Star. You knew the risks.
Actually, his point is probably that GoDaddy's policies, regardless of SOPA/PIPA support, allow them to shut down websites on a whim. They've repeatedly demonstrated this by completely shutting down entire accounts when served a DMCA complaint for one site. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/25/1744246/photographer-threatened-with-legal-action-after-asserting-his-copyright is one example. (Part of the reason she went crazy was that all of her sites, including one regarding special needs children, were suspended after GoDaddy received the DMCA complaint over one photo on one specific site.)
GoDaddy has made it clear that it takes very little to convince them to suspend a customer's entire account. If you choose to use GoDaddy's services, that's a risk you're taking.
It's affecting a lot more than commerce.
My cancer research website is down, too. (Only works on computers that had cached the DNS entries.) So much for inviting seminar speakers today.
I'm an academic. I set my site up years ago (before all the SOPA business) and don't have time to muck with moving my site around, hosting DNS here and content there, and the like. I barely have time to maintain content in the middle of a busy research career. I suppose I'm now supposed to be an expert on mathematical modeling + cancer + hosting my own DNS?
It's always worth keeping in mind that these things affect far more than business sites.
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