Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
-- 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).
Your link is wrong, it doesn't even mention the .uk TLD.
Yes, oddly enough, I looked long and hard for an article on British war crimes on mil.uk but couldn't find any...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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
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.
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.......
Are you being ironic? Because as it happens, every one of these is the case in the UK except the gas chambers.
Right to trial by jury - 28 day detention/recent use of this power/"Kettling" of students as young as 15 on demonstrations for 12+ hours at a time - did you know this particular policing technique originated in Nazi Poland to force Jews to the gas chamber? :/
Logged on some huge database - Police DNA database (they take a sample if merely questioning you and will lie about removing the data - EU has to get involved and force them), TV licensing, DVLA, Council Tax, Electoral register, etc, etc - in most of these cases the operating body also sells an edited version of the database to private companies for targeted mailing or other purposes.
Sections of the population segregated - Largely propaganda driven in the media against certain groups/ethnicities; in particular the Muslim population has been targeted for example by CCTV
Forced to move into slums - The new government is stripping out housing benefit and cutting down the length of time you can 'own' social housing to two years minimum (previously they were owned for life) and if your earning power increases above an arbitrary threshold they'll toss you out; the Conservative mayor of London even finds this unpalatable ) and predicts that it will lead to the cities becoming the preserve of the rich and white.
So yeah, no gas chambers just yet, but I'm sure some bright spark will suggest it as a way to cut down on the money spent in fuel subsidies for pensioners or whatever soon enough.
Posting AC because I really don't have any faith in this country any more.
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.
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.
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.