Los Angeles – As part of the U.S. government’s ongoing
actions to seize the domains of websites believed to be engaged in illegal
activities such as counterfeiting or copyright infringement, some 84,000
websites were mistakenly taken offline and wrongfully associated with child
pornography, TorrentFreak reported.
Among domains seized last week by the
Justice Dept. and Dept. of Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) unit was Mooo.com, owned by DNS provider FreeDNS.
That service was host
to 84,000 subdomains — many of which are small business or personal sites — which
were taken offline as well, with the authorities posting notices on the sites
detailing penalties for child pornography crimes.
"Freedns.afraid.org has
never allowed this type of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the
issue sorted as quickly as possible," the company wrote in a note to users.
The mistake was eventually discovered, and the sites in question began to
reappear online — but in some cases not before the troubling notices linking
them to child pornography had been prominently displayed on their sties for as
long as three days, TorrentFreak reports.
Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/6gcqqyy
(TorrentFreak)
http://tinyurl.com/4eyembm
(DMW previous coverage)
