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Beating Censorship By Routing Around DNS
jfruhlinger writes "Last month, the US gov't shut down a number of sites it claimed were infringing copyright. They did it by ordering VeriSign to change the sites' authoritative domain name servers. This revealed that DNS is subject to government interference — and now a number of projects have emerged to bypass DNS entirely."
The issue here is due process, registrars should ignore any government "request" to remove or redirect a DNS entry unless it is ordered by a court of law.
The same applies to the former DNS provider for wikileaks, visa, mastercard and anybody else who stopped doing business with them just because they got a call from some government dude accusing them of illegal activity.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
As has been noted elsewhere, a number of the sites seized were, in fact, quite legitimate ones.
Bypassing due process is quick and cheap in the (very) short term, but an expensive disaster over the long haul.
Instead of re-inventing the wheel Why not try out a existing darknet in the form of Freenet http://freenetproject.org/ or i2p http://www.i2p2.de/
the article says and even links to the fact that the US Government busted people selling counterfeit or pirated goods.
Wrong. The article says that the "ICE said" that these sites were "engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works". These are allegations, not "facts". Preponderance of evidence proving a crime has been committed is accomplished only through proper due process. There were no references to a court order, no references to a court trial, nor any reference to admittance of a crime. It is apparent to me that the DNS redirects were accomplished under duress of an executive agency without judicial oversight:
The seizures were accomplished by getting the VeriSign registry, owner of the .com and .net top-level domains, to change the authoritative domain-name servers for the seized domains to servers controlled by DHS.
I would call this unconstitutional, regardless of any supposed law that may be reference to the contrary. If these actions were done under a court order with judicial oversight accomplished through a supportive affidavit of the specific crime and specific circumstances, it would be different.
At this point in time, it is simply one government agency (or rather a group of related agencies), all this is is the effective removal of someone's publication of information. Until the judiciary orders its removal, it is nothing less than censorship.
We won't even go into the allusion in the article that the government is apparently deceptively redirecting site traffic to its own servers.
"We have laws against saying bad things about food, [wikipedia.org] for crying out loud."
No -- no we don't. We have laws against deliberately and knowingly spreading false negative information about food products. But I don't expect that to get past your Slashdot mental filter.
Hahaha, oh, that is rich. Try saying that rGBH is bad. Heck, try marketing milk that is rGBH free. By claiming that your milk does not have bovine growth hormone, you are saying that bovine growth hormone is bad. And you will be sued.
Did you know that the standards of proof are different when you are being sued for badmouthing
food than when you are sued for badmouthing a person? When you badmouth a person, that person has to prove your guilt. When you badmouth food, you must prove your innocence.
I will repeat that. When you are sued for saying bad things about food, you are presumed guilty and must prove your innocence.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
See the case Monsanto v. Oakhurst Dairy of Maine. Monsanto sued, forcing Oakhurst dairy to modify their labels.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton