Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2003/03/07/riaas_hide_the_website_game/

RIAA's ‘Hide The Website’ game moves to Virginia

It's now hidden with an accountant

By Andrew Orlowski

Posted in Legal, 7th March 2003 20:42 GMT

The RIAA's travelling "Hide The Website" gameshow rolled into Virginia this week, with a new hosting company given the privilege (or curse) of looking after one of the world's most reviled web destinations.

But this strange story gets even stranger.

A few minutes after we reported on Monday that the RIAA's website had flickered back to life (see RIAA website now routable and public), it was down again. The RIAA had given the job to a first-time hoster, a 'Small Disadvantaged Business' whose owner was maintaining the site from his home in Rockville, Maryland.

The following day a new company was given the responsibility of Hiding The Website.

This time, it's an accounting firm in Arlington, VA called Kilday CPA. The accountancy firm - whose front page motto is "We're ... NOT ... What ... You'd ... Expect" also runs a Techology Services operation.

Which contains this introduction:-

Wow, who would have thunk it. What organization today, large or small, doesn’t have technology needs? The fascinating thing is, we ain’t seen nothing yet. The day of being able to handle your own computer needs is in the past. Any efficient organization today is using some sort of a network, and that network is probably tied into the Internet.

If it’s not yet, it will be soon. But doesn’t this bring in another whole host of issues inside your company? KILDAY CPAs, P.C. is prepared to help. And before you begin to shake your head, don’t worry, we are not sending our bookkeeper out to fiddle with your network.

Our technology affiliate has highly trained specialists who have earned their stripes. We specialize in connecting computers to each other in one form or another. Whether it is connecting through a local-area network, a wide-area network or over the internet, we can help. Call us and you’ll see.

We'd never have thunk that an accounting firm would be hosting the RIAA's website.

So we called, found an answering machine, and eagerly await a reply.

Needless to say, the RIAA website remains hidden. Over the past few months riaa.org has suffered a series of attacks, although the recent downtime seems to owe more to technical naivety than anything else. In fact subatomic matter in a particle accelerator - that exists for only a few microseconds seems - to exhibit more uptime than the RIAA's website.

And we're beginning to wonder if that's the point. You're not supposed to see it - just find where it's been hidden. ®

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