The irony of this is truly entertaining. At this point you might as well have sense of humour about what is going on. In a previous post I chronicled the origins of Net Neutrality. In a nut shell geeks sharing pirated movies cried “packet equality!”, when their ISP started throttling their traffic. Who will save them from the big greedy ISP fat cats?
I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
Over the weekend, “law enforcement” agencies shut down 73,000 blogs at once. The details are bit sketchy right now but it looks like it was over copyrighted material although there is plenty of speculation since nobody is talking.
A single individual was providing free hosting for wordpress blogs and collecting the revenue from advertisements. He had over 73k blogs a single hosting account. This individual came home to find the following email from his data center.
Due to the history of abuse and on going abuse on this ‘bn.***********’ server.
We have opted to terminate this server, effective immediately. This termination applies to: bn.affiliateplex.com
Abuse Department
BurstNET Technologies, Inc
From this email you could assume several cease and desist orders where sent prior to shutting down the service. Normally this is for some sort of copyright violation. After sending the WTF? response the data center replied with …
[...] Bn.xx*********** was terminated by request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server.
We are limited as to the details we can provide to you, but note that this was a critical matter and the only available option to us was to immediately deactivate the server.[...]
The data center refunded his money but has refused to provide access to the data. Probably because they no longer have physical possession of the data. This is just a guess but there are probably a couple people out of those 73,000 blogs that would like their data back. Good luck with that.
Once your data leaves your home computer for the cloud its no longer yours no matter what your told. A third party gives you access to your data that is most likely stored on a machine owned by yet another entity. In this case both the means to access and the data itself was removed. I don’t begrudge the data center, they had no choice.
The solution is to never leave your critical data in one place. Natural disasters, equipment failure, big government or a bankrupt company can wipe out your data in a second. I really hate to say I told you so. Ok I’m lying, I actually enjoy it in this case.