 Alexander Yusupov,Blogetery’s owner |
Blogetery.com’s bloggers will get their information back.
That’s the word from Joe Marr, chief technology officer of Burst.net, a Scranton, Pa.-based Web hosting service. Burst.net abruptly pulled Blogetery.com offline on July after FBI agents alleged the blogging platform was used by al-Qaeda operatives to distribute recruiting materials and to offer bomb-making tips.
Marr said in a phone interview Friday that his company intends to transfer a “zipped up” copy of Blogetery’s records and move it to another server that Blogetery’s owner has with Burst.net. Marr said the al-Qaeda materials–as well as some copyright infringing files were removed. He said the transfer is due to occur later in the day and that Burst.net will not be hosting Blogetery in the future.
Marr stressed again that the reason for the service termination was that the materials the FBI alleges belonged to terrorists are a violation of Burst.net’s terms of service and this would be only one of Blogetery’s multiple TOS infractions, Marr said. He noted that typically, Burst.net does not return data to customers booted for TOS violations, but Marr said that his company wants to do right by Blogetery users.
>> …and this would be only one of Blogetery’s multiple TOS infractions,
Ah, now we’re getting to the bottom of this story.
What are the chances that Alexander Yusupov has been a pain-in-the-butt to Burst.net and this was the last straw?
It’s weird for me to be defending the FBI but this story does not seem like FBI over-reach.
If they find terrorist activity on a web site, they have the right and responsibility to investigate.
Some nitwit is always going to be posting something they shouldn’t either by intent or accident. When it happens you pull down the offending site and if it’s something minor you contact the client and they fix it. If it was something seriously illegal you send a copy to the authorities or if they asked you to kill the site you do that.
Freaking out and doing what Burst.net did, jerking 78,000 sites off line and blocking the owners from their contents, suggests the reasonable and prudent thing is not to do business with burst.net because it doesn’t matter how righteous your are these doddle bugs may kill your site anyway.
This is the kind of service everybody can do without.
Stupid. If I were the FBI, I would want to have access to the Al-Qaeda communications only. Shutting everything down with a big stink is just broadcasting a stupid message:
“Hey, Al-Qaeda, we found your stash, now go find another place we don’t know of, where we won’t be able to monitor you! Neenar neenar neenar.”
#4
Read the stories and read what the FBI was doing. They simply asked for information about the the person running the site. Any information that was taken down and removed had nothing to do with the FBI.
I wonder if anyone will ever actually look at what happened and repeat this story correctly.
#4, Rider,
Sure. A hosting company was asked about one specific client that may, or may not, have been violating the TOS. In reaction, the hosting service closed all accounts. Legitimate or not.
Dumbest hosting service ever!
Burst are idiots. It would be like the highway patrol closing down ALL roads because of that idiot who faked the Prius brake thing to get out of his car loan repayments.
Did anyone miss anything while those 70+ thousand blogs weren’t online?
The key words here are “copyright infringing files”. Digital rights owners run the FBI.
i’m curious as to why this blog cares about this shithead
this is the worst post of the week
short run hack
I confess I only looked at the guy’s picture.
#10 The FBI according to them didn’t say jack about copyright infringement. Burst apparently did that on its own. Something they are not required to do unless somebody goes through a legal process which doesn’t seem to have occurred.
#9 The people who created and paid for the blogs did.
#6 True as far as it goes but Blogarty was actually administering the blog site or should have been. Burst was just renting the server to run it on. On the face of it they shouldn’t have even known the client list or what any of the content on any of the blogs was. This is what seems out of sync.
If people had issues with a blog for any reason they should have been contacting Blogarty, not Burst.