U.S. Government shuts down entire blogging site

[charmian]

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-shut-down-wordpress-host-with-73000-blogs-100716/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29

Damn. 73,000 blogs shut down because of the actions of just of a few of them? And the owner isn't able to get ANY data back?

In the recent LJ inactivity notification, there was a lot of talk about abandoned/inactive LJs that people wanted preserved. However, it seems to me that because of this kind of thing, and 'acts of god' (catastrophic technical failures), it's simply not enough to rely on the company alone to safeguard important data. If something is very important to you, archive it. Don't wait for disaster to threaten before you act.

Comments

[phoenix]

The Archive Team is a wiki devoted to archival projects (they were one of the major players involved in trying to save Geocities content last year). They have a page about backing up content from Livejournal that seems worthwhile. Not all of them allow downloading journals other than your own (like communities), but I believe ljdump does, probably others too.

[cesy]

That's...kind of scary. Particularly the actions of the hosting company, in caving and not letting him get any of the data back or anything. Isn't there meant to be a rule that the site isn't responsible for content the users post unless they edit it or police it in some way?

[charmian]

Yeah, it is very disturbing, although it maybe be that they didn't act according to the safe harbor rules. However, to shut down the entire site is going overboard. Also, this seems different from the typical DMCA in that it's the government going after the hosting company.