The WordPress blogging service bloggetry, which is used by roughly 70,000 people, has been mysteriously shut down with no warning and no explanation according to ReadWriteWeb. BurstNET, the host of the service said it was suspended at the request of an unidentified law enforcement agency.
“(Blogetery) 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.”
There have been rumblings that copyright infringement might have been the motivation, but how would this justify taking 70,000 individual blogs off-line? Either way the owner has already clearly said…
“(I) got C&D letters from copyright owners to remove pages with links to torrent/rapidshare. I always handle such abuse reports within 24 hours and remove such material.”
A spokesperson for the company later told CNET that the case had nothing to do with copyright infringement.
Simply put: We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious is afoot…This is the last post we will make on this subject.”
SO far the law enforcement agency involved has not been identified nor has the alleged wrongdoing been made public. 70,000 potentially innocent people though have tonight lost their blogs, for how long remains to be seen.
Update: Blogetery is online again, and all websites and blogs hosted on the site should be accessible again.
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I’d be interested to know the country in which this took place. Not like it matters all that much I guess; most seem to be getting on the Internet clampdown bandwagon of late.
The whole “kill em’ all and sort ‘em out later” attitude of law enforcement is somewhat horseshit though in situations like this, which is of course rooted in HUGE ignorance of online culture and a tendency to over-react. There are myriad cases where technical luddites are holding the gavel, which is ridiculous to you and I, but the public couldn’t care less.
I wouldn’t be shocked at all to learn that the two-bit glory whore Andrew Cuomo of NY had something to do with this, and that it was or will be spun as “for the children”.
We shall see.
https://www.burst.net/news/blogetry.shtml