Battleangel

Not Iraq but iSONEWS. Or at least the DNS has been hi-jacked.

The domain and web site were surrendered to U.S. law enforcement pursuant to a federal prosecution and felony plea agreement for conspiracy to violate criminal copyright laws.

David Rocci, a.k.a “krazy8,” pled guilty in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on December 19, 2002, to conspiring with others to violate federal copyright laws by illegally importing, marketing, and selling modification, or “mod,” chips. Mod chips illegally circumvent built-in security protections and allow individuals to play pirated games on game consoles, such as the Microsoft Xbox and the Sony Playstation2. Rocci and his co-conspirators used www.iSONEWS.com as the exclusive outlet to market and sell their mod chips to individuals in the illegal warez scene. As a result, the iSONEWS website is now the property of the United States government.

Los fascistas in the “land of the free” conveniently found a reason to shut the site down. I bet certain elements have been trying for quite some time and I also bet that the mod chip law suit is just one of the reasons for this act of aggression. It’s no secret that iSONEWS hosted a major catalogue of releases in the “warez” world. Every time a new game went gold you would head over to iSONEWS to check if it had hit the scene yet. By cutting of the head of the snake the little people probably would have a much harder time staying in touch with the community. For a while at least.
And as far as mod chips go, maybe this guy should have been selling assault rifles on his web site instead. I mean, hey, guns don’t kill, mod chips do, or what?

There is a note of this at Yahoo:
U.S. Takeover Fails to Shutdown Bootleg Web Site
And on CNN:
Feds take over bootleg game, movie site

The site itself seems to be alive and well actually. Hope someone did a backup of the server and database though. 66.201.243.170 edit: use doj.stolemy.com instead.