The U.S. Gov't appears to have nuked an entire blogging site from orbit, via a yet-unreleased memo to hosting provider burstnet.

The prevailing theory seems to be "copyright infringement" as this comes on the heels of Joe Biden's announcement of Operation "In Our Sites" (great pun, roll eyes) which seeks to protect the interests of the Obama administration's arguably greatest political benefactor, the entertainment industry, through rigorous enforcement of copyright law.

Others argue the response was uncharacteristic for DMCA maneuvers and therefore must mean the FBI suspected one (1) or more (2–72,999?) of the 73,000 hosted blogs to contain child pornography and/or a threat to fatherland security. Still others believe this is merely a breaching experiment, a practice run, to guesstimate how adversely the public would react to something more consequential.

Dump your databases. Dump them often.

Some coverage:
*http://www.helium.com/items/1893892-why-73000-wordpress-blogs-were-shut-down-by-the-us-government
*http://www.geek.com/articles/news/73000-wordpress-blogs-shut-down-by-u-s-government-20100716/
*http://www.infowars.com/feds-ignore-due-process-first-amendment-shut-down-thousands-of-blogs/

Funny, I'd never heard of Blogetery before.

But you can learn a few things from Alexa's report on it. Damn, it was popular.
Judging only by the lists of search queries and by Google caches, someone on it was hosting copyrighted materials, sure enough.

Even better: go to archive.org and see if they have an archive of blogetery.com.
All you get is an error message. Hmm.

Interesting, especially the archive.org part. Looks like they're acquiring tools and contacts to pull off pull-downs.

Database collectors should probably be vigilant about wikileaks.

Also from Alexis:



Ahmadabad?

Yet having a good reason in this case (as perhaps they did) would not imply they'll always need one.

That's what I got out of this, at least.

Right. All we know now is they can do this, without the media making a hubbub. Smart people they got there... I hope they're good people too.

Here's the "evidence" that the nefarious Obama administration was behind the action from the first link cited above:





Not particularly compelling evidence, but I'm sure that won't slow down the guns, ammo & gold bullion crowd...

This link is a little better in the evidence department:

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-sh...0-blogs-100716/

Sounds like anti-terrorist hysteria although the movie pirates are running scared.


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