RIAA website now hidden in plain sight

The Professionals

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco, 17th March 2003

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

For those of you who have been following the RIAA's "Hide The Website" game, you'll be relieved to hear it's moved on again, and now can not be accessed at an entirely new location.

This is the third hoster who can't host the site since January, although strictly speaking, it's come back home, to UUNet.

The Recording Industry Association of America has been bedevilled in keeping its anti-piracy information flagship afloat. After numerous attacks over several months, in which the site was more down than up, the RIAA began to hide it with hosting companies who you'd never suspect of being professional global hosters.

First, it was smuggled into the basement of a "small disadvantage business" in Rockville Maryland giving "Tomorrow's Solution's Today, Inc." the first ever big hosting contract for the hoster. That lasted only a few weeks, during which time the site was visible for a few minutes.

Then it wound up with a small DC law practice, who had this folksy side sideline of connecting your computers. We clocked almost 20 minutes of uptime there, before it disappeared from sight again.

Now it's back home with UUNet, who relinquished their duties at the end of January. And how they must be glad to see it back. Like an unwanted cargo hulk lugging its toxic payload from port to port around the world, there's no telling where it will end up next.

Although if the analogy holds up - look out Cumbria! ®

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