I guess I should be glad that we host sourceoftitle.com in-house!  The tens of thousans of sites hosted millions of sites hosted and registered on GoDaddy-- including thousands of small business sites that are the sole sources of income for the proprietors-- cannot be accessed.  These innocent people are simply out of business until the attackers relent, or GoDaddy can somehow stop the attack.

For those who did not follow Dan's link, this is not a random attack.  Apparently, GoDaddy was targeted by the hacker community Anonymous because they supported SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a very controversial bill that was considered by Congress last year but ultimately did not pass. 

What SOPA would have done in a nutshell would have been to make a site owner (for example Robert here at Source of Title) potentially liable for damages if a user (any of you) posted something that violated someone's intellectual property rights.  Currently, website hosts have some safe harbors in that regard. 

Now, naturally, I did not want such a law to pass, because we would not want to have to monitor the site 24/7/365 or else leave ourselves open to liability.  The awards can be considerable in these cases-- there was a recent high profile case where a jury awarded a record company almost $2 million dollars from a person who illegally downloaded 24 songs!  Needless to say, if someone uploaded 24 songs to the forum, and we were found to be liable and were forced to pay even a fraction of that, we would be out of business.  But as much as I opposed that law, I am even more opposed to vigilante hacker groups taking matters into their own hands.  What these hackers have done is a serious crime, and catching those responsible and putting them away should be a high priority in my opinion.  The proper way to stop bad legislation and promote good law is at the voting booth.