GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - View Single Post - U.S. accidentally shuts down 84,000 sites

emmanuelle · 02-17-2011, 06:25 PM

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in an effort to clamp down on websites that host and advertise child pornography, inadvertently shut down more than 84,000 innocent websites across the Internet.

In a Feb. 15 statement, the DHS announced the seizure of 10 domain names of websites that were believed to host or advertise child pornography. But one of those domains was actually a DNS server that managed hosting for up to 84,000 separate and independent websites, according to online news site torrentfreak.com.

Without notice, all 84,000 sites had their content blocked and visitors were re-directed to a Homeland Security banner that read, "This domain name has been seized by the ICE - Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court..." followed by a warning about the consequences of distributing child pornography.

The error was quickly noticed, but because of the time it takes DNS addresses ? essentially an index of the Internet ? to propogate across the web, some websites still carried the DHS warning up to three days later.

"Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses," torrentfreak.com wrote. "A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the sites' owners."

02-17-2011, 06:25 PM
emmanuelle Confirmed User Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Oh Canada! Posts: 3,662	U.S. accidentally shuts down 84,000 sites The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in an effort to clamp down on websites that host and advertise child pornography, inadvertently shut down more than 84,000 innocent websites across the Internet. In a Feb. 15 statement, the DHS announced the seizure of 10 domain names of websites that were believed to host or advertise child pornography. But one of those domains was actually a DNS server that managed hosting for up to 84,000 separate and independent websites, according to online news site torrentfreak.com. Without notice, all 84,000 sites had their content blocked and visitors were re-directed to a Homeland Security banner that read, "This domain name has been seized by the ICE - Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court..." followed by a warning about the consequences of distributing child pornography. The error was quickly noticed, but because of the time it takes DNS addresses ? essentially an index of the Internet ? to propogate across the web, some websites still carried the DHS warning up to three days later. "Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses," torrentfreak.com wrote. "A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the sites' owners."