OKAY, THIS IS BIZARRE: After one county web page in California was hacked and redirected to a porn site, the GSA — which controls everything ending in .gov, including state and local websites — shut down access across the state of California:

They used a shotgun to kill a flea,” state spokesman Jim Hanacek said on Friday.

Federal authorities, who have ultimate authority over most local and state Web sites, attempted to block all domains ending in ca.gov Tuesday, Hanacek said.

State agencies across California experienced rolling e-mail and Web site outages for about seven hours, and Internet users had trouble pulling up some state Web sites, he said.

The General Services Administration, which shut down the sites, apologized for the inconvenience on Thursday and said it would try to find a more targeted solution for similar problems in the future.

Jeez. (Via Kevin Drum).