Fort N.O.C.'s Security in Obscurity

penciling_in writes "Brock N. Meeks of MSNBC reports on his recent visit to VeriSign's secret location: 'The unassuming building that houses the "A" root sits in a cluster of three others; the architecture looks as if it were lifted directly from a free clip art library. No signs or markers give a hint that the Internet's most precious computer is inside humming happily away in a hermetically sealed room. This building complex could be any of a 100,000 mini office parks littering middle class America.' The report goes on to say: 'Access to the Network Operations Center, the "NORAD" of the Internet's traffic monitoring, requires the electronic badge and then a double biometric hand print scan.' And here are Karl Auerbach and Robert Alberti offering their interesting analysis of this report on CircleID."

Comments

Good

[Call Me Black Cloud]

I'm glad it's down. Good on her for getting it done. Of course, the picture will live on elsewhere but at least she did what she could.

Just because you can post something doesn't mean you should post something. Redeeming value of that picture? None.

Yeah, baby, I'm using my real nick...unlike all the cowards who will doubtlessly reply.

Re:Good

[gujo-odori]

Well, actually, s/he never claimed to be in charge of what's on the Internet, but merely expressed an opinion on the value and propriety of goatse.

There hasn't been much calm rhetoric over the suspension of goatse.cx, but (fool that I am), I'll try to create some here.

While goatse.cx was probably not in violation of the law (IANAL, of course), we all know that a major hobby of some people on some forums is to post links, often deliberately disguised, to goatse.cx so as to trick the uninitiated (or even the initiated) into clicking it. Probably most every one of us on /. who has seen goatse.cx didn't know, before clicking, what it was. And of course, if you don't check all URLs before clicking, you may see it again. Even if you check, it might be a redirect.

Clearly, then, they had grounds under Item 5 to suspend goatse.cx once they had a complaint. Tht is what their rules say, and they do have to go by them. Certainly, these rules were not created with the intent of destroying goatse.cx, although they do neatly fit that purpose.

The issue the registrant(s) of goatse.cx can use in their defense is that while people often post links to goatse.cx and they typically do not identify them as such, on what basis should the registrant(s) of goatse.cx be held accountable for the unauthorized actions of third parties who are not under the control of, or even known to, the registrant(s) of goatse.cx? Similarly, if someone should post a link to a porno site in a children's forum, it is not the site operator who is liable for that, it is the poster. If the site operator himself promotes a porn site to kids, that is actionable and the site should rightly be shutdown and the operator arrested. However, the operator is not responsible under the law for (potentially malicious) actions of others who post links to his site in an inappropriate forum.

Take that line of defense in trying to get goatse.cx reinstated.

On a side note, I'd like to know exactly where she clicked such a link, if in fact she did. The native range of goatse links is /. and K5, and she just doesn't seem like the type you'd find in either of those places. And of course, if you go to those places, you have to expect goatse :-)

Re:Good

[gujo-odori]

Not that I really expected better than the way this thread has gone since my last post, but no one has mentioned at all the point that comes out in my description of how the owners of goatse.cx might pursue their appeal: that under the terms of service that are in effect now and were presumably in effect at the time they registered the domain, a clear violation of the terms of service appears to have occurred. Under those terms of service - which constitute a contract into which the registrants entered, the site may be taken down for violation. Therefore, their only shot at a defense is the Bart Simpson defense: "I didn't do it!" The clear implication of this is that whether you like goatse or hate goatse, from a TOS point of view, the registrants of goatse.cx were in violation and are merely being held accountable according to the TOS.

In other words, whether you support goatse or wish it would disappear up its own truly huge and grotesque anus, this is not really a censorship issue when you come down to it. It's a contract enforcement issue, and the registrants of goatse.cx have the short end of the stick because the onus is on them to argue that whatever link Rhonda followed to the image, they didn't post it and had no control over the person who did.

Someone will probably argue that I'm wrong and it is a censorship/free speech issue, and they would have me except for one thing: if I enter into a contract that says I may host/register a web site with registrar/hosting provider X, but that I may not violate a certain list of terms of service, I have to follow it. Let's say that one of the terms of service is that I may not post the goatse image or any variation thereof, and that doing so is grounds for termination of service. However, as soon as my site is up, I post the goatse image, the goatse Darl image, and any other goatse image I can get my hands on. In doing so, I am in breach of contract. A week later they catch me with the goatse images and pull the plug. Not because they are censors - they might even be goatse fans themselves - but because I violated my contract.

Some of you reading this think the departure of goatse is a good thing, and many others do not. I am taking no stand on the issue, but (perhaps futiley) trying to frame rational debate (yeah, yeah, I know, it's /. and I'm nuts :-).

However, let me show a very similar case, on which many of you might take the opposite stance. For a number of years, I was a sysadmin at an ISP. One of the hats I wore there was postmaster. Like most ISPs, we had a Terms of Service document and an Abuse Policy, that described in sufficient detail our terms of service, what we considered to be abuse of those terms, and what actions we reserved to resolve them.

Again, like most ISPs, one of the things we held to be a violation of our terms of service, punishable by termination of your service, was spamming. Whether you spammed through our outbound SMTP, whether you spammed through someone else's to which you had authorized access, whether you used an open relay elsewhere, or whether you used an entirely different network to spamvertise a site we hosted didn't matter. Spamming was a violation of our terms of service, and we could and would pull the plug if you were caught. And yes, we did once cancel the service of a long-time customer whose website was hosted with us and who spamvertised through other networks. The first time they were caught, they were given a clear "never again" order. The second time they were caught, they were told their business was no longer welcome, and their service was terminated. There were also a few (very few; our reputation went before us) spammers who would try it through dialup or DSL. Their accounts were terminated without notice as soon as we discovered them. If they had an active connection at the time, we dropped it with a sense of enjoyment.

Now, it is certainly an argument of spammers that those who cut them off are censors, and that

Re:Good for verisign..

[nucal]

Being slashdotted. What is it all about?

Is it good, or is it whack?

The goatse.cx domain has been suspended.