Do This Now

[digger]

On Windows, open up notepad and edit this file: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

(No .sam, no .txt -- the filename is just plain "hosts" with no extension.)

Add this line:

69.90.197.215 www.elitefitness.com

Long story short, someone is misrepresenting himself to our registrar, much like the offshore bank who got a judge to shut down Wikileaks.com for exposing their alleged criminal activity.

The above is a workaround that will get you to us despite any lies told to our registrar.

 

[digger]

We've moved to a new registrar who will answer bogus legal threats properly (how do you say "go pound sand" in French?).

That means it's safe to put things back the way they were, and let our address resolve in the usual way, in case we decide to add some more servers or something later.

You could also just comment out the new line so it will be handy, just in case. To do that, just put a hash mark in front of it, like this:

# 69.90.197.215 www.elitefitness.com

 

[digger]

Okay, attention on deck! If you did what we described above, it's time to UNdo it. It's a good trick to know and will stand you in good stead in the future, but right now it's time to start listening for changes in case we move to new IP addresses.

(Yeah, I know... one damn thing after another....)

 

[digger]

Okay, now you know what was going on.

First, I'm not a lawyer; this is an interpretation by a layman who has some practical forensic experience.

It seems that many hosting operators DO NOT understand their rights and responsibilities under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA tells them that when a copyright holder makes a demand that they take down a specific work, they do it; if the same person demands they take down an entire site, they are supposed to throw the guy out of their office, speaking metaphorically.

We have a new DNS provider. We have a new domain name registrar, and we are looking hard at getting a new hosting provider, just to make damn sure that everyone understands exactly what they are and are not required to do when someone starts spewing legalisms at them, and what they are required to refrain from doing (do you see the difference?).

They get extra points for distance on the caber toss.

As you can imagine, this has caused considerable loss of productive time, disruption of business, and actual expenditure.

What this has to do with YOU:

If we do move to a new provider, you will want your computer to follow us. That means you should NOT override our address by putting it in your "hosts" file, as I described in the first post above. That problem is behind us. If you made that change, undo it. If you didn't make that change, don't do it now.