crackho.com DNS prank ruffles Sarah Palin's feathers

[struggle4progress]

A simple DNS prank against former GOP VP nominee and current Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has finally come to the attention of Alaskan authorities, resulting in a cease-and-desist order as well as somewhat misdirected copyright claims. The owner of the site in question has caved to legal pressure, although one has to admit that the whole series of events was worth a chuckle.

Houston-based DJ Shoe Latif registered Crackho.com ages ago (according to a Whois search, 1998), but decided to give the site a fresh face in 2008 after Governor Palin was chosen as the Republican Vice President nomineee. She changed the DNS settings so that all traffic to Crackho.com would go directly to Sarah Palin's official website.

The change apparently flew under the radar until earlier this month, when Alaska's Attorney General Michael Barnhill sent a letter (PDF) to Latif demanding that she knock it off. Clearly, Barnhill and gang have no real understanding of DNS and URL redirects in general, because the letter asserts that Crackho.com made illegal use of the official seal of the State of Alaska without permission, and that Latif was in violation of the federal Copyright Act. Nevermind that the seal was on Palin's own site ...

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/05/crackhocom-dns-prank-ruffles-sarah-palins-feathers.ars

The new site: http://crackho.com/

[heyheyhey]

1. Wish I could have seen it

I would have told everyone about it.