More than seventy thousand blogs were just deleted, and the reasons are mysterious. Blogetery was a WordPress hosting and domain service (apparently; the whole thing's gone now*).
BurstNet, the Web-hosting company, informed Blogetery's operator that service was terminated at the request of some law enforcement agency but wouldn't say which one.
The rationale? "As for the reason, BurstNet hasn't made that clear either." Some recent reporting offers conflicting reasons, without clarity. Copyright violation wasn't it, which is unusual.
We can speculate as to the bad thing meriting such an act: al Qaeda, child pornography, gambling, furry fan fiction. Similarly, the agency behind it could be a government conspiracy, a surveillance state overreaching, the start of something worse, or some hideous constellation of errors.
But before reasons come forth, it's a fascinating moment. This mass deletion opens up so many fearsome possibilities. We have to think through every possible fearsome thing online. All lines are open, all specters ready to be summoned. Call it Infocult Hour.
*Archive.org still has copies of the old Blogetery main page available.
(via Jesse Walker and others)
ipbfree.com - provider of free cloud-hosted discussion forums (fora?) - also went dark within the past week or so, much to the chagrin of some in the gaming community. No sinister intelligence-related motives imputed, so far as I know. The similar invisionfree.com is still in business.
Posted by: Ed Webb | July 20, 2010 at 19:31
Man, aren't you in fine form as of late, Great recession gothic, and now the 70,000 disappeared blogs. I would like to posit a Bermuda Triangle in the web, somewhere in the vicinity of the Caspian Sea.
If not that, it may be that the blogging network was actually an alien recruitment headquarters, or maybe the rest of the Russian spies in the US right now.
Maybe it was the Russian Business Network?
The possibilities....
Posted by: Jim | July 22, 2010 at 23:34
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/isp-says-blogetry-data-will-be-returned/
"Marr’s post was in response to comments on Web Hosting Talk by Alexander Yusupov, Blogetry.com’s owner. Marr also admitted a mistake was made in taking down all of Blogetry.com—which purports to have some 73,000 blogs, only one of which was apparently the subject of the FBI’s interest—but Marr stood behind the decision to terminate Blogetry.com’s service in light of the seriousness of the information in the FBI’s request and Blogetry’s alleged past violations of Burst.net’s terms of service and acceptable use policy."
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | July 25, 2010 at 08:00
Jim, the hour of Infocult draws nigh.
Eds, you're on to something re: Blogetery.
http://blogetery.com/features/ claims "We have managed to get our data back. We will be back online in few days!"
Nothing new from ipbfree.com.
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | July 26, 2010 at 22:41
Bryan, Jim, I suspect that some true version of "we have backups" really means "we have data in multiple jurisdictions on multiple power grids on multiple continents served by multiple providers, and it would take a coordinated international effort among warring nations to shut us down".
Posted by: Ed Vielmetti | July 27, 2010 at 15:11
Was nice seeing that Blogetery is back in operation now. Must have been a real shock for bloggers which had a lot of information on their blogs and thought they had lost everything. The problem I think was that with law enforcement terminating their site, they could not comment due to possible litigation, which may have had an impact on the judgment. There is always the danger that a particular blogging platform goes out of service, and that would mean the end of income and content on the affected blogs. It is important to keep a backup of the posts on your blog in case something like this happens, and at least you would save them and can migrate to another platform.
Posted by: Brad @myhosting | June 09, 2012 at 09:45