Go Daddy, MySpace Lock out SecLists - SecLists.org Disagrees
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That’s not quite the way it happened, according to Gordon Lyon, known better by his pseudonym Fyodor Vaskovich. Vaskovich is the owner of SecLists.org. He tells of getting a voice message from Go Daddy saying that it was suspending his account – and receiving an email telling him his account had been suspended about a minute after the voice message had been sent. He wasn’t told why his account had been suspended, other than “violation of the GoDaddy.com Abuse Policy,” nor did the email or the voice mail contain a phone number which he could use to reach them to ask about it.
Vaskovich called GoDaddy several times, and spoke with three people, all of which told him that the abuse department doesn’t take phone calls. (This directly contradicts information that Go Daddy gave CNet when it filled out a survey the news organization sent to several registrars in the wake of the story, by the way). The abuse department takes emails, which it responds to in one or two business days. “Given that tens of thousands of people use SecLists.org every day, I didn’t take that well,” Vaskovich notes. The support people finally put him through to the abuse department, where he found out why Go Daddy cut him off: “MySpace asked them to.”
Vaskovich flamed both MySpace and Go Daddy on his site for their actions. “Instead of simply writing me…asking to have the password list removed, MySpace decided to contact (only) GoDaddy and try to have the whole site of 250,000 pages removed because they don’t like one of them. And GoDaddy cowardly and lazily decided to simply shut down the site rather than actually investigating or giving me a chance to contest or comply with the complaint. Needless to say, I’m in the market for a new registrar. One who doesn’t immediately bend over for any large corporation who asks.” Vaskovich also pointed out that his site was unreachable thanks to Go Daddy for about seven hours, not just one.
As I mentioned earlier, Go Daddy was not presented with a court order to take down Vaskovich’s site. There can be no doubt that MySpace felt it was acting in the best interests of its users, many of whom are teenagers. Likewise Go Daddy probably believed it was acting quickly in the hope of preventing these teenagers from becoming victims. Still, this kind of action is somewhat unusual. Michael Froomkin, a University of Miami law professor with an interest in domain name regulation, has never heard of a registrar taking down a domain name this quickly without a court order. “Some people might feel safer with a registrar that’s a little more pro-customer,” he says in an understatement.
Next: Is This Standard Operating Procedure? >>
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