What? You’re Not All Child Pornographers? Never Mind.

If you’re not familiar with how the Internet works, there are domains (stinque.com), and there are subdomains (zombie.stinque.com). A subdomain is very easy to set up — just an additional entry in your domain registration record. Heck, if there was a market for it, we could sell custom subdomains: YourNameHere.stinque.com.

Some web-hosting companies do just that. Of course, it means that your custom subdomain is dependent on the primary domain remaining live, but what could possibly go wrong?

The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

Say we had 84,000 subdomain customers, and one of those customers — without our knowledge — set up marksanchezgirlfriends.stinque.com for the purposes of conducting Naughty Business. So the ICE Squad swoops down on that operation and “seizes” stinque.com to cut off its Internet spigot. And to make the point, ICE redirects all 84,000 stinque.com subdomains to display the banner above. Nailed!

Unless you’re among the other 83,999 subdomains:

Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners.

But all’s well that ends well, and after the primary domain was seized Friday, ICE switched it back on Sunday. That’s only two or three days of telling everyone in the world that you’re a child pornographer. Plus another two or three days for the Internet to catch up with the changes.

Heck, could be worse. You could be Rick Santorum.

U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’ [TorrentFreak]