Government censors CrimeThink™ web site

The Spanish region of Catalonia is planning a referendum on independence from Spain.  Unsurprisingly, this is extremely unpopular with the Spanish government, no doubt because Catalonia is the wealthiest region of Spain and therefore a major source of tax revenue.

And so the Spanish government has "black holed" the referendum web site, by changing the DNS record for it:

The website of the National Catalan Assembly at assemblea.cat was also shut down and for a while displayed a message from the Spanish military police announcing in Spanish and English that the domain has been "seized pursuant to a seizure warrant."

DNS (for non nerds) is Domain Name Service, the Internet protocol that translates site names (say, borepatch.blogspot.com) into Internet Protocol addresses (in this case, 4.125.131.132).  The Spanish government changed the address mapping to point to their own server that hosted their own message.

The problem was that the owners of the domain went to a non-Spanish registrar who got them back up and running in a jiffy:

The domain has since been redirected to assemblea.eu, outside the purview of the Spanish authorities.

It's a cat and mouse game of censorship.  The Spanish government is very likely to keep losing this unless they up their technical game.