NSL Photography and the NSL Photography Blog are back up!

Hi All,

Update: Scott Wagner, GoDaddy's interim CEO said in the afternoon of September 11th, in an emailed statement, "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."

I wish GoDaddy would get their story straight.

Whether hackers took down the site or not, hackers which do take down websites, or make public the private accounts of individuals, for any reason are criminals, and must be dealt with by our court system to bring them to justice for their criminal behavior which affects ordinary people everywhere.

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On September 10, 2012, my registrar and intermediate URL host of my NSL Photography galleries, GoDaddy, went down at 10:20am. They returned to operation fully about 9 hours later.

Some weren't able to access my galleries at all, or this blog. I'm sorry for the inconvenience that caused some of my visitors.

They were apparently taken down by a single hacker group, Anonymous, as they have taken credit for the event, over their stance against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) which GoDaddy initially supported, but eventually pulled back from that support. Apparently it wasn't enough for Anonymous who has taken the law into their own hands as they have decided to be prosecutor, judge and jury.

While I disagreed with GoDaddy's support of the Acts, and publicly said so, I am outraged by the callous disregard for the law, and for the millions of innocent customers of GoDaddy, including me, that Anonymous has put out of business. We depend on our websites being operational. I believe that GoDaddy's support of these Acts was a poor choice, but they had the right to do so, and as one who believes in the US Constitution, I support that right, and the rule of law.

People will never be free unless they support the rights of others to also be free, even when they disagree strongly.

The hacker group who took down GoDaddy is nothing more than a common criminal who deserve serious prison time.

Thanks for bearing with me during this outage.

Ned

US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit grants injunction against 1994 Illinois eavesdropping law

In 1994 the Illinois legislature amended their eavesdropping statute so that it applies to “any oral communication between two or more people regardless of whether one or more of the parties intended their communication to be of a private nature under circumstances justifying that expectation.” (Ill. Pub. Act 88-677 (1994) (codified at 720 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/14-1(d)))

The law was intended to circumvent an Illinois State Supreme Court decision (People v. Herrington, 645 N.E. 2d 957 (1994) which held that “there can be no expectation of privacy by the declarant where the individual recording the conversation is a party to that conversation.”

Since then, the ACLU in their suit, “American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois v. Anita Alvarez has been seeking to have the scope of the law narrowed.

The ACLU had intended to implement a “program of promoting police accountability by openly making audio and audio/visual recordings of police officers without their consent when: “(1) the officers are performing their public duties; (2) the officers are in public places; (3) the officers are speaking at a volume audible to the unassisted human ear; and (4) the manner of recording is otherwise lawful.”