Yesterday at 12AM (GMT) Neowin was taken offline when our provider received a Demand for Immediate Take-down order from a Microsoft contracted company that investigates illegal activity on the Internet for Microsoft. The email was sent to the provider and not to the Server admins that lease the server, IPS or Neowin. Its fair to say this went 3 levels above our heads and 2 above IPS.
Neowin and IPS did not have the chance to remove the Windows XP Peer to Peer SDK post before the provider deleted (access to) the contents of the server without contacting Neowin or IPS. Charles of IPS received a copy of the email that Microsoft sent and we can confirm it was a standard "remove the content" email that did not warrant a total shutdown or deletion of the site.
We have spoken to Microsoft UK who are willing to investigate the nature of this report. Additionally the Server provider has promised IPS an internal investigation into the cause of this incident. Our SQL database was deleted by the server provider on reading the email from Microsoft so we have had to restore from an external backup of Feb 13th which Charles had saved with our server move and all (Thanks alot Charles, saved us alot of work!!) Oh, IPS also had a backup of all files on the server less than 24 hours old. So again, the service is excellant at IPS.
I also want to appeal to everyone that has been sending direct emails to IPS or Charles blaming him for this incident.. You are way off base, Charles is as much a victim here as Neowin because his client (Neowin) was pulled offline. IPS did not block Neowin.
Some sites (including c|net) contacted us and made reports about Neowins downtime
View: The Register | Wininformant | The Inquirer & Dutch Sites: ZDNet | Planet.nl
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