They are calling this operation #OpDarknet, and apparently have taken down Freedom Hosting, providers of free hidden web hosting. Anonymous found that Freedom Hosting was hosting a variety of child porn sites on the Tor network, a system that is used to enable anonymity online.

Earlier this month, the folks behind #OpDarknet discovered a section on the Hidden Wiki called “Hard Candy,” any found that is was full of links to child pornography. They took down the links, only to find that they had been restored 5 minutes later. They then discovered that 95% of all the child porn on the list could be traced to one provider: Freedom Hosting. Here’s what happened next, as told by Anonymous:

At apprx 9:00pm CST on October 14, 2011 We identified Freedom Hosting as the host of the largest collection of child pornography on the internet. We then issued a warning to remove the illegal content from their server, which they refused to do.
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At apprx 11:30pm CST on October 14, 2011 We infiltrated the shared hosting server of Freedom Hosting and shutdown services to all clients due to their lack of action to remove child pornography from their server.
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At apprx 5:00pm CST on October 15, 2011 Freedom Hosting installed their backups and restored services to their child pornography clients. We then issued multiple warnings to remove all child pornography from their servers, which Freedom Hosting refused to do.
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At apprx 8:00pm CST on October 15, 2011 despite new security features, we once again infiltrated the shared hosting server at Freedom Hosting and stopped service to all clients.

Anonymous not only shut down the sites, but exposed login details from more than 1,500 users, many who were tied to the most popular site of the bunch, Lolita City.

Here’s their mission statement, as it pertains to #OpDarknet:

The owners and operators at Freedom Hosting are openly supporting child pornography and enabling pedophiles to view innocent children, fueling their issues and putting children at risk of abduction, molestation, rape, and death.

For this, Freedom Hosting has been declared #OpDarknet Enemy Number One.

By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites, among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date containing more than 100GB of child pornography.

We will continue to not only crash Freedom Hosting’s server, but any other server we find to contain, promote, or support child pornography.

That’s the official version of events. Here’s a little more entertaining depiction of how it went down, according to another Anonymous release on pastebin –

We broke down the heavily fortified door of the Pedo fort. We cocked THOR and fired Nyan Nyan bullets in every direction. After a bloody battle with trolls, pedos, and pedo bear, we Anonymous became victorious. What was left of pedo fort, pedo bear, and fellow pedos was a 100 mile hole. Lolita City and it’s neighboring 40+ pedo strongholds were destroyed.

And this video statement takes the same kind of tone, saying that they armed themselves with their “Chris Hansen cannons” to take down the child porn ring.

Anonymous is best known for their attacks on corporations and governmental secrecy, and this is a bit of a departure for the group. If you check the Twitter chatter and YouTube comments for the above video, you’ll see that most people are both impressed and thankful for this operation.

Not everyone thinks it’s a great idea, however. Graham Cluley of Sophos said that “their intentions may have been good, but take-downs of illegal websites and sharing networks should be done by the authorities, not internet vigilantes.”

Maybe Anonymous did something that the authorities were unable to do or they simply did it faster. What do you think? Is this AnonOp something you support? Let us know in the comments.

This may work to get a lot of site-owners using Google products that they weren’t necessarily using before, and in theory could help their visibility, traffic, and revenue in the long run.

"Website owners generate more traffic to their websites by optimizing them using Webmaster Tools," says Google Search Group Product Manager Rajat Mukherjee. "They can engage their users with inline Web Elements, including maps, news, videos and conversations. Custom Search and Site Search provide Google-quality search on their websites for better user retention. AdSense helps website owners monetize their sites with relevant advertising. And besides providing these valuable services to millions of customers, hosting companies can also generate additional revenues through referral programs."

This also marks the first commercial control panel to offer Google Services for Websites, allowing the hosting companies to monetize the services, according to Parallels. "These significant updates enable shared hosting companies to generate new revenue streams and deliver better services to their small business customers," says Parallels President Jack Zubarev.

Google Services for Websites was announced last year. Other partners include DomainHost, GoDaddy, FatCow, Aplus.net, and about 15 others. Such partnerships provide hosting providers with a few bells and whistles to offer their customers.

This year, GoDaddy says it has a new ad that was banned from the Super Bowl, even though the company finds it perhaps even less objectionable than some of its past ads.

"Of the five commercial concepts we submitted for approval this year, this NEVER would’ve been my pick for the one that would not be approved," says Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. "This is about a guy who starts an online business and hits the jackpot. I just don’t think ‘Lola’ is offensive, in fact we didn’t see this one coming – we were absolutely blindsided!"

The ad can be viewed below:

"We’ve accepted we have to go with another option – one that’s been approved and one that is still 100 percent GoDaddy-esque," says Parsons. It remains to be seen just what that will be, but GoDaddy is not wasting "Lola", as it is promoting the ad heavily online.

The company points out that another controversial ad with a political message, starring Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow will be airing. GoDaddy essentially says that its Lola ad is less controversial than that.

One has to wonder if this is just GoDaddy just trying to get some attention, but if that is the case, it has worked. The company at least knows something about getting videos to go viral.

Do you feel that the GoDaddy Lola ad is too offensive (or offensive at all, for that matter) for the Super Bowl? Share your thoughts below.
 

Related Articles:

> GoDaddy Makes Twitter Part Of Domain Registration Process

> GoDaddy Gets Smart and Social

> GoDaddy Auction VP Gets Slashdot Treatment

We learned that Yahoo would be closing the door on GeoCities back in April, so users have had plenty of time to migrate to other services. Earlier this year, for example, MSN partnered with WetPaint  to allow people to create "fansites". After Yahoo’s announcement, Wetpaint took the opportunity to announce a "bailout plan for foreclosed GeoCities properties," which it called the "GeoCities Asset Recovery Plan (GARP)."As it shuts down GeoCities, Yahoo itself is now plugging its own $4.99-a-month Web hosting service.

Ok, so there are other options for GeoCities users, but is just shutting down a community that still attracts so much traffic the right thing to do?  Yahoo’s way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

"Then there’s the fact that Google, not Yahoo, appears to be responsible for the lion’s share of GeoCities referrals, sending about 31.45 percent of the site’s traffic its way," noted Doug Caverly upon Yahoo’s original announcement. "Yahoo’s only behind of 16.89 percent of all GeoCities visits. So by closing GeoCities, for which it paid $3.6 billion in 1999, Yahoo seems to be turning its back on a large amount of traffic.  Moreover, it’s turning down free traffic from its biggest competitor." 

"Carol Bartz may be trying to get Yahoo’s costs under control, but it looks like sticking a ‘for sale’ sign on GeoCities would be at least one preferable option compared to a closure," he added.

But alas, it looks like the sign reads "closed" rather than "for sale." So say goodbye, and in the words of Richard Marxx, "hold on to the memory."

It seems unwise from a business perspective, but what about the users? Does Yahoo have an obligation to its users who may have spent years using their GeoCities site only to have it pulled from the web? Should Yahoo provide a forwarding web address for GeoCities users? After all, it was the GeoCities users that built their sites, promoted them and put up with sometimes annoying ads. A simple forwarding of their GeoCities url to their new home would be appreciated! Do you agree?

MySpace isn’t exactly at the peak of its popularity, but there are still tons of people who use it. What if they just pulled everything? What if Google bought Facebook and decided to kill it? What if your Tweets vanished? Sure these things seem unlikely now because these services are still fresh. Well, GeoCities was once the "it" thing too. Granted, most GeoCities sites I have seen are not much to look at now, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t getting use out of them. They’re obviously getting page views.

Here’s what Yahoo is telling GeoCities users to do if they want to keep their sites:

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. If you’d like to keep your web site, you’ll need to move your site files to another web hosting provider.

We recommend moving to our award-winning Web Hosting service, which works a lot like GeoCities but includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, terrific new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more.

Perhaps it’s not worth it to users to go throgh the hassle of migration, but it has been nice to have their GeoCities site at least remain in tact. Well, tough luck. I hope you’ve gotten what you wanted away from it before Yahoo obliterates it. There are some sites out there that have not yet been shut down, but it appears that is only a matter of time.

What do you think of Yahoo’s decision to simply shut down GeoCities? Discuss here.

Remembering GeoCities

GeoCities held a lot of web memories for a lot of people. There was a time where you could barely surf the web without running into one GeoCities site or another. Wikipedia provides a little history:

GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California.

The company created its own Web directory, organized thematically in six "neighborhoods". The neighborhood included "Colosseum," "Hollywood," "RodeoDrive," "SunsetStrip," "WallStreet," and "WestHollywood". In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as "Homesteaders") the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods. Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of "community" were added soon after, helping foster rapid growth. On July 5, 1995 Geocities added additional cities, including "CapitolHill," "Paris," "SiliconValley," and "Tokyo." By December 1995, the company, which now had a total of 14 neighborhoods, was signing up thousands of Homesteaders a day and getting over six million monthly page views. The company decided to focus on building membership and community, and on December 15, 1995, BHI became known as GeoCities after having also been called Geopages.

"It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet," writes Mark Milian with the LA Times.

In early 1999, Yahoo purchased Geocities for about $3.57 billion in stock. Now a decade later, Geocities is no more.

Do you have fond memories of the Geocities days? Should Yahoo be obligated to forward GeoCities pages to your new site? What if Facebook, MySpace or Twitter suddenly shut down? Should there be a web or social homesteading bill of rights?

>>> Share your thoughts below …

Related Articles:

>GeoCities Users Get a Bailout From Wetpaint

>Yahoo Failing To Consider GeoCities Alternatives?

>Yahoo Turning Lights Out At GeoCities

>Ballmer Talks About Yahoo and GeoCities

>Should You Stop Blogging?

Reading about CO2Stats (via TechCrunch), a company who says it monitors your website’s environmental footprint and purchases renewable energy to neutralize it:

[...] The carbon footprint of air and automobile transportation is widely known, but few people are aware that the electricity generation required for information and communication technologies (ICT) is now responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions, exceeding the emissions of the entire aviation industry. With CO2Stats it is for the first time possible to get precise emissions data on a site-by-site basis, enabling fine-grained ownership and management of environmental footprints at the experience level.

We’re paying more attention to green issues and energy conservation with things like recycling, asking more questions of manufacturers and suppliers about their supply chain and their social responsibilities regarding the environment.

So why not concerning your website?

I’m already green thanks to my hosting service, DreamHost.

How about you?

Comments

Analysts cited by the Financial Times Mergermarket report think the big data centers Microsoft or Google could construct would lead them to offer hosting services.

The significant reason for this rests with the telecom industry in the country. Said Financial Times:

Paul Budde, an Australian telecommunications analyst agreed that “in a new digital media environment the value-added infrastructure will evolve around IT, including data centres, content hosting, management, billing and outsourcing.” This, he said, is one of the fastest growing segments of the market.

“In their scramble to keep their monopolies in place, the telcos have taken their eyes off the ball and, for example, MSN, Google and Yahoo are building more than one million servers as we speak,” Budde said. Telcos “should have been in this business,” but have chosen to see the Internet companies as enemies rather than customers, he said.

Such shortsightedness leaves big Internet companies without formidable entrenched telcos to battle, as they have to deal with in the US. Whether Microsoft and other companies want to step into Australian Internet hosting operations in this manner depends on how well they can profit from doing so.

So if a web host offers ASP technology, they say it’s an ASP hosting company. With that in mind, in this two-part series we’ve laid out many of the most common types of web hosting services you’ll read about in the web hosting reviews you peruse. Last time we started at ASP and got as far as FrontPage. Now we’ll finish the alphabet.

If the web hosting review mentions Java Hosting, it refers to one of the most widely used and widely recognized programming languages, the use of which practically assures you that your website will be understood by any computer in the world. Java is a simple, versatile, cross-platform, tag-based language that lets you build all sorts of things: bit maps and vector graphics; server-side applications for forums and forms, online polls and stores; improved database, email, PDF, XML, and Microsoft Office functionality and more. Using Java opens you up to libraries upon libraries of prewritten code for every imaginable use you could have for your website. You may also see web hosting reviews mentioning JSP or Java Server Pages, which allow you to create entire websites that are platform independent.

If the web hosting review mentions MySQL Hosting, it’s referring to one of the most widely used and recognized databases on the internet. If your web presence is going to be a database-heavy operation, consider a MySQL hosting provider. You’ll get extra support for adding, accessing, editing, and processing data in your many MySQL databases. Web hosting reviews for MySQL hosting providers should mention the number of databases offered, the ease-of-use of the interface you’ll be using day in and day out, CRON support for automating routine tasks, and PHP support since PHP and MySQL go hand in hand. Read on!

If the web hosting review mentions PHP Hosting, it refers to a server-side scripting language that is commonly used in conjunction with MySQL databases. It is an open-source language and as such can be altered and amended in any way you see fit. As such, there are tons of free, prewritten PHP scripts all over the internet for your convenience. Because PHP is a server-side language, it is cross-platform (meaning Unix, Linux, and Windows computers can see your site the same). And since PHP is a server-side language, if you plan to use it in running your dynamic, interactive, database driven website, you must go with a PHP hosting provider.

If the web hosting review mentions SSH Hosting, it refers to Secure Shell, a Linux-based protocol that gives users remote terminal access to their computer systems, meaning that administrators can perform private, confidential administrative tasks on their server — tasks that ordinarily must be done directly on the server itself — from a different computer in a completely different location — securely.

If the web hosting review mentions Windows Hosting it just means that, like a computer might run Microsoft Windows as its operating system, your web server too will be running Microsoft Windows. That’s all. A windows hosting company might very well offer PHP hosting, MySQL hosting, FrontPage hosting, Java hosting, ASP hosting, and more. Which brings us to our final point…

We closed Part I of this series with this note and we’ll close Part II the same way. One web hosting provider alone quite likely will offer a great many of the hosting services we’ve described and more. Make sure you read each web hosting review carefully to be clear on exactly what types of hosting each company offers.

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