Following up on our posts below about Republicans stealing copyrighted materials, it’s more than just Congressman Michael McCaul that vanished from cyberspace. We’ve discovered that the following sites are all down, and they have a commonality: They were created by Austin-based Republican web designer Colton Brugger.
Not every site that has Brugger’s name on it is down, but the following sites for current campaigns are all MIA at the time of this posting:
http://www.michaelmccaul.com
http://www.thereallarryjoe.com
http://www.timkleinschmidt.com
http://www.wallacejefferson.com
http://www.justicephiljohnson.com
WTF?
UPDATE: Sunday morning, looks like some of these sites are gradually resurfacing.
UPDATE 2: Message I just received from Brugger:
“Because of a copyright dispute against one of the many websites on my server, my host company decided to shut down my entire server rather than just block the single offending website.
“Thus, all of my clients’ websites went down. I have set up new hosting for all of them and all websites should be up-and-running normally in the next 24-48 hours. All of the websites should already have at least a splash page showing now, rather than a ‘cannot be found’ error that many folks saw in the past 24 hours.”
This article appears in October 24 • 2008.