Register your own .mil Domain

JWSmythe writes " As reported in This Story at theregister.co.uk ,and on dailyrotten.com, it seems the US Department of Defense has dropped the ball. Not only can you register a .mil domain, but you can find "secret" domains that aren't publically known (the gov't uses security through obscurity?). I'm looking forward to hacker.mil, warez.mil, and porn.mil."

Comments

2600 contest?

[capnjack41]

Doesn't (didn't) 2600 have a contest like this? The first person to manage to get a .mil domain gets a free subscription, or something like that?

How long before Google is sued?

[jdreed1024]

For those who didn't RTFA, one of the points of the article is not only are there unprotected admin interfaces that let you register your own domain (that's what they're talking about - you still can't register .mil through register.com or anything), add a user, and view traffic stats on DoD sites (even "hidden" ones), but that all these pages (including default passwords) are cached by Google.

This implies that even if the DoD fixes the problem, the Google caches will still be available (until they expire or are replaced). Now, in the past, we've heard reports of people being upset that Google cached information. However, this time, the cache contains information pertaining to "national security" (that great new buzzword). I wonder, what will happen? Will these URLs be silently deleted from the cache? Will Google be told that cacheing links is now illegal because it could aid terrorists? Will they be prevented from cacheing .gov and .mil? Will Google be sued out of existence?

We've all found Google caches to be useful, when, say the documentation for an open source project is hosted via 56K modem line in the Czech Republic, for example, or even when a site is Slashdotted, but it'll be interesting to see what happens about this, and how the goverment may over-react.

(Note, if you're too stupid to understand this, I'm not talking about blame here - don't bother saying "Google rulez, the militery is dum asses for leeving these sitez open, u r an idiot...". I'm talking about reprocussions. Certainly Google doesn't "know" what information a link contains when they cache it. Certainly it's the government's fault for leaving open admin pages with default passwords listed on the page. But just because someone isn't at fault, doesn't mean they can't get screwed over.)

Re:How long before Google is sued?

[ReadParse]

"National security" is not a new buzzword. "Homeland defense" is a new buzzword, but "national security" has origins much older than 9/1/01 -- at least as far back as the beginning of the cold war.

Good point in general, though. Seems like the maintainer of a website should have the ability to remove content from said website, in the event that it turns out to not be true, to be libelous, dangerous, or any number of other things. I've always thought a Google feature to purge specific pages from the cache would be a good idea, but the implementation of that would be tricky.

One of the biggest problems with this is how to ensure that the requestor is authorized to speak for the website? A good first thought is to coordinate with the e-mail addresses in the whois record for the domain, but of course any domain can have any number of separate websites managed by different people.

Let me think aloud for a moment... we know that Google looks for a robots.txt file before indexing a site. Let's say that a field were added to the robots.txt file that identifies a specific PGP key that is authorized to perform such actions. Not specific to Google, of course... this would be the e-mail address that speaks for the site in any number of ways. Something as simple as:

MaintainerKey: 9AB3250D

I don't know a whole LOT about PGP, but I think I know that each public key has a hex identifier (mine is above) that uniquely identifies it and allows others to request it from a keyserver.

When an e-mail formatted in a specific format (at the discretion of Google and other individual publishers of course) comes in, the public key can be retrieved and the signature of the e-mail validated, and they at least know that the sender is authorized by the site to speak for it. Action from this point forward would be at the discretion of Google, but this is at least a potential TECHNICAL solution to the problem of access.

Then there's the matter of public key revocation and expiration. Perhaps it's a better idea to have an e-mail address is the robots.txt file and to accept e-mail from that address provided that the current PGP public key is used to sign the message.

Again, just thinking out loud...

Re:Hmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno but you can do it for him:

nic.mil/cgi-bin/domain

Lose your +2?

[schlach]

I'm responding to your sig.

Ok, so the new way of doing things is that instead of adding a point to your comment's overall score when you post with your karma bonus, your comment is posted at 1 with a separate "karma_bonus=yes|no" variable. Thereafter, users can specify how much weight to assign to the karma bonus on their preferences page. This was 0 when the editors quietly rolled in the changes without telling anyone (why so sneaky?), but has since been changed to '+1' by default, to by default be the same as the old way.

So, your comment that got 3 good moderations is scored at 4/1. Users who have a '+1' modifier to karma bonus will see this comment at 5, whereas users with a '0' karma modifier will see it at 4, and users with (for whatever reason) a '-6' modifier will see it at -2. If such a thing were possible.

Unfortunately, I see this as making it unlikely that comments posted with a karma bonus will ever be modded up to 5, since most moderators will be viewing with a karma bonus and see that the comment is already scored at 5, and that it therefore cannot be modded up further.

I'm going to say that the way this was changed was disgraceful. There is no reason not to maintain a place on slashdot indicating how the code is being changed. I have relied on CmdrTaco's journal to inform me of changes, but in this case it was silent, and after thinking about it further, it's still a crappy way of running things.

It all goes back to the difference between slashdot as community and slashdot as business. As a business, sure, slashdot can do whatever the hell it wants, who am I to lecture, blah blah blah. But as a community, changing things in profound ways without approval, comment, or even notification is bastardly. And slashdot as a business would do well to perceive its dimensions as a community.