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UK Police To Get Major New Powers To Seize Domains
Stoobalou writes "British Police forces could soon have the power to seize any domain associated with criminal activity, under new proposals published today by UK domain registrar Nominet. At present, Nominet has no clear legal obligation to ensure that .uk domains are not used for criminal activities. That situation may soon change, if proposals from the Serious and Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) are accepted."
Does that include Google?
US already seizes any .com .net .org domain too.
Thinking of it, maybe we should give this right to every country, including Iraq, China and North Korea.
Well I guess that's it for the bad guys. Now they'll have no way to register their evil domains.
Two weeks ago, Fitwatch, a site dedicated to campaigning against what it sees as heavy-handed practices by police surveillance units, was taken down by its UK-based web hosting company,
With its domain name suspended, the only way for visitors to find a rogue site would be to type in its lengthy (and decidedly less memorable) numeric IP address.
This shows how well prepared is the british police to deal with matters regarding the internet: I reckon they never heard of the hosts file or, for an URL only, favorites.
Such simple minds... life for them must be a permanent bliss.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
They haven't seized paypal yet? If the people running that site aren't criminals then I don't know who is.
Monstar L
I can only assume there's a Mildly Worrying Organised Crime Agency?
Task Mangler
They've already done it without legal backing. The US-hosted, UK-centric police monitoring site FitWatch was closed by the British police, by simply asking the US host to remove it. The police officially objected to a single article, so requested that the whole site be closed for 12 months. The host complied.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/16/student-anti-police-website-closed
The UK does have freedom of speech protections, but they are implimented in a very different way. And are somewhat easier to overrule.
The imperial march further into the police state continues, soon you'll lose your right to trial by jury, be logged on some huge data base, sections of the population will be segregated, forced to move from the desirable areas into slums then the trains to the gas/torture chambers will start.......
The Truth Is Out There:
-- boggle! Of course there must be an appeals process.
The UK is becoming worse, there is a proposal by the home secretary to throw someone out of his house even if there was not enough evidence to charge; this is going to be abused by wifes who want a divorce -- get the bloke out on made up complaints of violence; by the time that he would be allowed back in she will have started the legal process and grabbed the property and stopped him seeing the kids.
Do you need to own a fluffy cat and a monocle to join?
Dear Police,
Please be informed that not just one but multiple criminals use the domains Hotmail.co.uk and yahoo.co.uk. Please disable these immediately to prevent further crimes from occurring. (and they annoy the hell out of me).
So is it the time for alternative censorship-free DNS system yet ?
There were armed rebellions in a number of colonies, and peaceful ones (most notably under Gandhi in India) in others. Most of Ireland got independence in 1920 following centuries of strife; and after WWII the political will to hold Empire at all costs was no longer there; the vast majority of the colonies became independent in the late 50s or early 60s.
What do you want to bet that serious and well-planned out crimes won't include:
Goldman Sachs UK (where to start)
Paypal UK (seizure of users' money without refund)
Microsoft UK (organized monopoly abuse)
Intel UK (organized monopoly abuse)
and anyone else who's a paymaster?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
There, fixed for clarity and better understanding.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I wouldn't necessarily call it free under those terms. If I can get in trouble for merely saying something, I don't think it's really free speech. Freer speech than in some areas, but not necessarily free at it's foundation.
I don't think many people in the UK would be offended if you asked about our past and wanted to find out more about it. Our ancestors did some good things, and bad things. Most people won't be offended because most of us are less than 100 years old so it's just history to us as well, we didn't personally take part in it or make any of the decisions.
But I think we'd all be happy for you to take an interest and read up rather than making random generalisations. Wikipedia actually has some pretty reasonable articles, start on the British Empire . Good on you for being up for learning more.
Indeed we have libel laws, they'll likely be different in England from Scotland as there as two different legal systems.
Why did we 'lose' the Empire: worth reading up - mixture of social change, political change, and economy. Some places people forced their freedom, other places it was more by agreement. Now we're pretty broke, the first and second world wars changed the world political scene: I believe it's only been in the last five years of so we finally paid back the loans we borrowed from the USA in the 1940s to pay for the second world war, we were pretty much in hock to the USA post-war so the USA could set the conditions to an awful lot of our international involvements (look up "Suez Crisis" for example).
There was a sort of shift in both British governmental policy and public attitudes combined with an inevitability of other nations gaining their independence. I guess the best way to put it might be that Britain saw the writing on the wall early enough that they decided to be smart about things and let go semi-gracefully. Take India as a case in point. There was no way that the British were going to be able to maintain their control over that country. The Indians could only be goverend in the first place because they weren't well organized and they had non-representative governments that could be suborned. The British government have always been bastards, but they've rarely been stupid except in the most enlightened frame of reference. The British had put down various resistance movements before in India (quite brutally), but when India as a whole started to say "no!", the British said: "okay, let's be friends". Many other cases are variations on that. The general policy was: "let's try and make the jump from ruler to leader". Success was variable and imperfect, but it preserved a lot of profitable trade for Britain, which was what it cared about most of all, it had the sympathy of the British public and, quite frankly, it made a lot more sense than anything else. Britain is a small land. It had the advantages of a well-organized, industrial-level populace and a fantastic Navy. They seized that opportunity and worked it till it was played out, then moved on when running costs became too high (rebellions, industrial action, et al.). Note that this is only the most general description. Posters could make a dozen small counter-examples of ugly instances of disengagement. The disintegration of India into India and Pakistan is one of the modern age's great tragedies.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
On the other hand, from what I read in Viz I would assume that the UK had no libel laws.
There's the "reasonable man" test. In the case of Viz, would a reasonable man believe what he's reading to be true. since Viz is a crude comic, the newspaper style articles in Viz are entirely ridiculous parody, and clearly intended as such, it's unlikely that anyone would think it to be true.
The extra "strictness" comes in two fronts. Firstly, the defendant needs to prove the allegations are true (not just that they believed they were true - journalists are meant to fact check), and secondly you can sue the author or the publication (not unresonable) or the publisher. There is legal opinion at least that a publisher includes everyone up to the retailer. In the case of online material, the fact that it's technically published everywhere it's accessed effectively gives British courts jusrisdiction over the entire internet. It's possible to sue an ISP over a usenet posting even if the posting originated from a user of a different ISP.
After the American revolution, the British governmnet was a lot more open to greater independence in the other colonies since the War of Independence was something of an expensive embarrassment. In fact, even before 1776, there was reasonable support for representation of America in parliament.
Freedom of speech in the US? Are you kidding? Just today the US Gov't seized torrent domains and is actively trying to stop WikiLeaks.
Is it just the UK that is fracked up w.r.t. surveillance issues and excessive police rights, or am I just not noticing it in my own country (Italy)? And what about other countries (excluding usual suspects such as China)?
I once confronted a friend of mine from the UK with her countries' big brother issues, and she didn't show any real concerns about these issues and said that everything was fine. Perhaps she isn't noticing, because she does live in the UK?
I think your view of history might be a little over simplified. The american revolution wasn't like hollywood, it was essentially one group of mainly british and irish people fighting another group of british and irish people. The colonists were fighting for their rights as englishmen, and many people in the british isles supported them in their struggle, at least until they invaded canada.
Parts of the empire that were settled by colonists (New Zealand, Austrailia, Canada) were gradually encouraged to become more and more independent by britain. Developed areas gradually conquered by the british such as india and egypt (or more accurately, by indians with a few british and irish commanders) were exploited and post war nationalist movements got them to leave. Undeveloped unsettled areas such as the afican colonies britain was eager to get rid of in the 1960's as they spent far more money developing infrastructure than they ever extracted. Most of the colonial wars they fought they won (Malaysia, Kenya) but they didn't want to hold on to the colony, they usually just wanted to stop it being communist after they left. Ireland was partitioned after a successful war of indenpendence after WWI as it was effectively half settled (North Ireland) and half exploited.
Will wash cars for karma
The po-lice state is coming
Do dah do dah
The po-lice state is coming
Oh do dah day.
Oh do dah day
It's on its merry way
The po-lice state is coming
Oh do dah day.
That's pretty much the same everywhere, though - whether it's enshrined in a written constitution or not. Every country has their own limits on speech, that might mean you can't speak out against the government, or it might mean you're not allowed to incite religious hatred, or make sexist comments. The UK is pretty free in terms of being able to criticise the government (verbally, at least, let's not get into the stupid laws on public assembly, etc), but does have the other limits that are supposedly there to help us all live together in a varied society. By your definition, I challenge you to find any country in the whole world that has truly free speech.
Your comment hurt me deeply. I hope you get locked up forever.