Yikes:
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-shut-down-wordpress-host-with-73000-blogs-100716/
After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.
It appears that some of the blogs hosted by Blogetery.com were being used for illegal file sharing. So the FedGuv took not only those blogs down… but *all* of them. Kinda like burning down a library because a few of the books were unauthorized copies. Additionally, it appears that the data for the blogs may be unrecoverable. Lost forever.
First Amendment implications? Oh, you betcha.
First thing I did when I read this was to download and use the “WP-DB-Backup” plugin for my WordPress blog and make a backup that I’ve downloaded. Disturbingly, it’s only 3.5 megabytes in size, so I’m guessing that it did not back up any of the images.
5 Responses to “US FedGuv wipes out 10’s of thousands of blogs”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I can’t see anything good about this. They’ll use the precedent to say that the blogs with which they disagree are promoting revolution, or spreading untruths, or simply anti-government. Only that last will be true, and not in a way that the current government would understand.
Something else came to mind: could it be that the sudden response was to a truly significant type of information hidden in images?
Seems unlikely. In this case I think the official story is probably accurate… people were doing some illegal file-sharing. But I have difficulty imagining that all 73,000 blogs were doing this.
What’s another analogy that comes to mind… hmmm… oh, how about cops dropping a bomb from a helicopter and burnign down an entire block just to clear out one houseload of whackos?
Good analogy, but tanks and flamethrowers against a rural compound of whackos is probably valid here, too.
This may be related:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100718/el_yblog_upshot/tea-party-group-expels-leader-for-clearly-offensive-blog-post
I still prefer mine. In this case, the FedGuv did not surround a group of people who all believed the same goofy thing, and then used overwhelming force to wipe them out… it used overwhelming force on (presumably) a small group of miscreants, in the process taking out a whole lot of uninvolved bystanders.