Major hat tip to the good folks over at BoingBoing who spread the word about the Department of Homeland Security accidentally shutting down 84,000 personal and business websites in what was a an attempt to block child pornography gone awry.
DHS maintains it has the authority to shut down domains and subdomains it sees as having child pornography on it. However in this instance it might have been a case of too much too fast.
The people over at Torrentfreak.com have a good summation.
The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well. All sites were redirected to the banner below.
The FreeDNS owner was taken by surprise and quickly released the following statement on their website. “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.”
Apparently DHS noticed the error and released control over the subdomains, allowing them to once again be viewed on personal computers. But for any visitors to those sites, they would have been treated to:
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So who at DHS OIT is out of a job right now, I just want to know where to apply. Oh wait this is government, whoever did it will probably get a raise.