This Sounds Ominous....

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force... as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. " - Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode IV, 1976. 

Blogetery.com, a little-known WordPress platform used by more than 70,000 blogs, was shut down by its Web hosting company more than a week ago and nobody seems willing to say why or who is responsible.

In addtion to that:

Blogetery, ... went dark on July 9, less than a week before Ipbfree.com, a service that helped users create Web message boards, went offline. No one has said these situations are linked, but they nonetheless possess intriguing similarities.

• Each of the services host loads of user-generated content.
• Operators at both Blogetery and Ipbfree said they were shut down and aren't coming back.
• Both said they obeyed copyright law.
• In each case, those with knowledge of who ordered the closures or the reasons why said they are legally required not to disclose that information.

Source  and source -

The site was shut down after FBI agents informed executives of Burst.net, Blogetery's Web host, late on July 9 that links to al-Qaeda materials were found on Blogetery's servers, Joe Marr, chief technology officer for Burst.net, told CNET. Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization, as well as bomb-making tips, were also allegedly found on the server.

We have no particular reason to believe this story; it's entirely possible it's a story that someone felt would cause the least amount of hassle.  Like kiddie porn, eliminating this sort of material is likely to be accepted by the population at large.  We will have to wait to learn what really happened here.

About a month ago, I wrote about this topic in So The Gov Has Shut Down Internet. Now-What?  Is this the first round of such shut downs (not the big kill switch)?  It is hard to know, but it is still worth starting to prepare.  In the mean time, go get the old DOS version of PGP, ver 2.62 or so.  Go here.  Do not go to the new Windoze based PGP versions at PGP.com.  Use your favorite search engine to round up some information on how to use it, like this. 

You put your checks to pay bills in an envelope, right?  That's what PGP is.  Only it's a very secure envelope.