online, there are people that can hurt you. "vigilante" is one slanted name for them. (i prefer "digilante"). you can just as easily call them the "good guys" or the "bad guys" depending on which receiving end you are. domain registrars (people that let you buy domains on the internet) and blacklist organizations (people that maintain lists of "bad guys"- spammers, and such) both have control over you in different ways. both can knock you offline, and both can knock you offline without you having commited any wrongdoing.
domain registrars can turn you off with the flip of a switch. if you falsify your domain information, that is grounds for suspension. if you spam, or hack, or don't pay your bill, those too are grounds for suspension. it's all a grey area, though, because no group of people will ever agree on which was right to do and which was wrong.
the comments below are from a couple slashdot posts. the people had their domains suspended by their domain registrar, godaddy, for spamming. the issue to contend with is that they didn't do anything wrong. their domains were spoofed by spammers, and godaddy turned a mute ear, claiming "we don't know that you're innocent".
a metaphor: joe is at the library friday night with many people who know him. frank, in another city, goes into a bar and proclaims, "i am joe!", and shoots the bartender. the police arrest joe the next day, and tell him "you have been arrested for shooting the bartender". there's plenty of people who saw joe all night at the library, but the police don't bother to verify, or even listen. they were told by the people at the bar that joe is the killer.
unmetaphor: company ABC with a domain is online, doing innocent things. a spammer, in another company, addresses an email server for a bar and proclaims, "i am company ABC!", and spams the bar customers. the domain registrar (godaddy) suspend company ABC the next day, and tell them "you have been suspended for spamming the bar". there's plenty of server logs that prove company ABC is innocent, but the domain registrar doesn't bother to verify, or even listen. they were told by the people at the bar that company ABC is the spammer.
read on:
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17, @10:54AM (#15554742)
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=188762&cid=15554742
About six months ago, GoDaddy held 78 (yes, seventy-eight) of our domains
hostage. They had all of our sites down (we receive approximately 2
million web server hits per day, about 160,000 unique sessions) for nearly
48 hours while we wrangled control of our domains back.
What was their excuse?
Someone outside of our organization had (for whatever unknown reason, as
this is not our business) spammed using ONE of our domains as a the
spoofed header-from domain. And yes, we publish SPF records. That wont
stop idiots from trying.
Anyway, I personally spent close to one hour on the phone with their
"abuse" people (ironic that they consider what we were doing abusive). I
explained the situation over and over to no avail. We escalated to their
lead "abuse" person. Same story. "Your domain was in a spam and we do not
allow this"... When I would try to explain that it was not from us or on
our behalf in any way, shape, or form -- we were curtly told "that's not
what we've been told."
Now, I had also received the spam complaint. Their "abuse" ("abusive")
people were going solely off what was written in this complaint itself. In
ALL CAPS, the user cried bloody murder about "I DID NOT SIGN UP AND DO NOT
WANT SPAMS FROM THESE PEOPLE"... GoDaddy did not lift one finger to
actually investigate the situation and instead took the end users' word
for it.
We had to get our lawyers involved. We had to fax them threatening
letters. Finally, they so gracefully allowed us to tranfer our domains
away from GoDaddy to another registrar for the very low highjacking fee of
$50 per domain we were going to transfer.
Again -- this was not a spam from us, for us, or by us. It was a
completely third party individual just randomly choosing our domain to
spoof.
GoDaddy is a goddamn scam and I hope their company gets burnt someday. It
would not surprise me if the spam was created by them for the specific
purpose of looting their more deep-pocketed customers through these $50
"re-activation" fees. Month getting slow? Craft up another fake spam.
Fuckers.
--------------------------------------- REPLY BY ANOTHER:
by SlashChick (544252) * on Saturday June 17, @02:05PM (#15555403)
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=188762&cid=15555403
Since the parent comment was written by an anonymous poster, I would like
to add that one of our customers was put in the same situation by GoDaddy.
His domain was used in a "joe job" (that is, someone sent out a spam with
nonexistent addresses from his domain as the From: header in their spam
emails.) He called us (his web hosting provider), furious, wanting to know
why his domain name was down. We had received spam complaints as well, but
since the spams were not from him and were not advertising his product (he
runs a legitimate business that does not use email marketing), we did not
shut him down. However, when running a quick WHOIS check on his domain, I
noticed that GoDaddy had set his name servers to
NS1/NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR-SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM. This was well over a year ago
and since then, I have urged all of our customers to switch away from
GoDaddy. Some of our customers have responded, "But I don't spam
anything!" Of course you don't. It doesn't matter. If any spammer sends
out spam with your domain as the From address, even if you had nothing to
do with that spam, and it gets reported to GoDaddy, your domain is toast.