For the past couple of weeks, the interwebs have been buzzing with news about the way GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest registrars of domain names, shut down the research archives of a prominent security expert at the request of MySpace. Out of the thousands of pages of archived data on SecLists, one contained some leaked MySpace passwords. Instead of contacting Fyodor Vaskovich, the researcher who owns SecLists, MySpace called his registrar, GoDaddy. According to Fyodor’s meticulous records, GoDaddy gave him about 50 seconds notice that they would be redirecting SecLists visitors to an error message. After a day of arguing with GoDaddy on the phone, Fyodor eventually got SecLists back up (minus the passwords). He was amazed at how easy it was for MySpace to censor an entire domain with just one phone call. Disgusted with his experiences, Fyodor set up NoDaddy, a site for consumer complaints and activism in response to GoDaddy’s wretched policies.

I called up GoDaddy to find out how they would respond to the protest site NoDaddy:

A spokesperson from GoDaddy said the company disagrees with the way Vaskovich characterized his experience. While the legal department at GoDaddy has not yet read the NoDaddy site, the spokesperson said the company will take legal action if any of its statements are untrue. Given that GoDaddy disputes Vaskovich’s story, such a suit seems inevitable.

Read the rest of my story about how GoDaddy censors the net.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 1:02 pm.
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