You may have noticed broken images in past posts. The host of those images, imgbox, is unreachable.
They have offered no explanation for their disappearance from the internet. Nobody knows when or whether they will return, and if so, whether content can be recovered.
As you may know, several popular image hosting sites, including ImgBox, ImageBam, and PixHost, experienced notable downtime and connection disruptions this week, and nobody has a good explanation. It’s quite an internet mystery.
Some are speculating that this is all related to a massive seizure of servers in the Netherlands, but even though the time frame seems concurrent, I don’t see any connection between Motherless (the owner of the seized servers) and imgbox or the other failed hosts. The only possible connection is that the Dutch police may have seized an entire server farm, which included other companies not on their subpoena, so they need to sort that out.
That’s just me speculating, not to be taken as fact.
The fact is that nobody on the outside seems to know jack shit, and the imgbox people are not communicating.
When European authorities (like the Dutch FIOD, Europol, or Dutch National Police) seize servers or domains, they almost always replace the site homepages with an official law enforcement seizure banner.
Not here. They just killed motherless. Then, it came back, so they just took every server they could find in their jurisdiction. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just seized an entire server farm to look for motherless evidence.
It’s a huge witch hunt now, driven by the inaccurate number that millions attended a “rape school” on the site. There was no such school, it was a group on the site that called the group that and featured “sleeping” porn. The issue there is that while the internet went crazy, there’s no evidence of which videos showed sexual assaults and which were consensual. CNC is a thing right now.
But the mob targeted motherless, politicians saw a way to score points, and now they’ll burn the internet down to find anything they can put the motherless folks in prison over.
Apparently it is related, a user on phun pointed out they’re all hosted by some company called Nforce and probably hosted on the same server rack. Other forums I’ve heard of and visited once in a while with celebrity focus like nudecelebforum, planetsuzy, and vintage erotica are down too, apparently grouped on the same servers.
Pretty lame that one site let anything get uploaded without restriction and celebrity and Playboy level material get nuked with it.
Especially since Motherless is apparently able to get back up by using servers outside the Netherlands. They were able to post a “technical difficulties” message, so they still control their name server.
But the NFOrce explanation is the best one I have heard so far. It fits all the known facts.
See here
BFD. Just performative. They just had all their content point also to motherless.xxx and continued business as usual. It’s a game of whack-a-mole, and these moles can scurry faster than a dullard like Paxton can catch them.
As long as illegal sites can locate their server farms and name servers in lawless and/or mercenary places that don’t give a fuck, the best anyone can do is to slow them down by blocking things here and there. Sure the law has some influence over .com and .net domains and legit companies like NetSol and Godaddy, but the internet is global, and countries like Russia don’t care about kiddie porn and copyright law. The more Putin can annoy the West, the better he likes it.
Based on some stuff I saw, there are structural reasons, too. They were entirely coded to cloudflare and other commonly used web tech, I guess. To bring the site back up with a backup on fresh servers would take a pretty good amount of effort, and the chance of recouping those costs are tiny right now. They’ve stopped all their income methods. It isn’t as simple as what they did before, which was making changes to their reporting systems and purging a metric ton of content, including anything remotely controversial.
I’d imagine any stakeholders that aren’t located in the EU are trying to pull the site back up, but it just might not be possible or affordable until this all comes out to be a nothing burger.
Now, if Cloudflare actually took a stand on anything other than money, it absolutely could bring down a site potentially. I don’t know what type of CDN that Motherless used, but it’s a well enough known adult site that the constant connections would make it extremely difficult for some random Dutch server farm to service all the geolocations and bandwidth without some form of caching and other means of connection handling.
They did terminate service for a neo-Nazi site, then 8chan for anonymously hosting CSAM, and another site that doxxed trans-individuals to harass and swat them. But its extremely rare for them to take a stand on anything. They allow plenty of Cybercrime content with phishing and domain squatting used for social engineering and only a handful of times have proactively terminated service when the public pressure has gotten high enough.
Yup, unless people want a closed garden type internet ALA China or Iran, completely controlled by a totalitarian state it’s nearly impossible. The entire goal is just to knock the big ones out until it’s not worth the will of the person doing it. I don’t mind the attempt with some of these disgusting sites, but the way the GOP is trying to implement adult ID verification for absolutely everything is completely ridiculous as well.
There’s always another country, there’s always VPN access, there’s always Tor, etc. And we know the official policy of the idiot in chief if there is someone who says something he doesn’t like even though he espouses ‘free speech’ he’s anything but for it. Frivolous investigations of enemies, expensive lawsuits, removal of federal funding for dissent, etc.
Take em down with due process and nothing more than that, although it’s not hard to find out who historically has pushed for censored internet, or to break various encryption algorithms with a back door to give to law enforcement (which we’ve seen abused time and time again given the means.)
Trump feels that free speech means you are free to praise him and his glorious achievements in any way you want. And because that is what Trump wants, that is what the Republican Party wants too. I believe they declared that “whatever Trump wants” is the guiding principle of the GOP back in 2020, but it was in effect by 2018, at the latest.
I have noticed a couple of other forums are unavailable also, must have been a popular host.