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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."

3 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. How long before Google is sued? by jdreed1024 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.)

    --
    There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
  2. Re:Hmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Dunno but you can do it for him:

    nic.mil/cgi-bin/domain

  3. Lose your +2? by schlach · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.