US Dept. of Justice, ICE Still Seizing Domains

Chaonici writes "Operation In Our Sites, a US initiative to crack down on websites related to online copyright infringement, appears to be ongoing. Rojadirecta is a site that links to (but does not host) broadcasts of major sporting events, including soccer matches. It is highly popular in Spain, where it has prevailed twice in court after its legal status was challenged. However, US authorities have now seized the .org domain of the website without notifying the site's owner or its web host, GoDaddy. Rojadirecta can still be accessed through .com, .es, .me, and .in domains, which are not controlled by the US, but rojadirecta.org currently redirects to this well-known image."

Comments

Why is heading red?

[line-bundle]

I saw this heading is red.

Why?

Is slashdot trying to make me read certain articles?

Re:Why is heading red?

[Anonymous Coward]

Subscribers see articles before regular users, they're "in the future". Sometimes when a brand new article is posted for a short bit, the article shows red because the post date is earlier than the publish date or somesuch.

Re:Why is heading red?

[MoonBuggy]

Red headings are "mysterious future" articles - the brief preview that subscribers get before they're posted publicly. I've been seeing them occasionally, too, so it's either a glitch with the new design or somehow related to the "Ads Disabled. Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!" box that you get for spending far to much time here without subscribing.

Re:Why is heading red?

[MoonBuggy]

And apparently I fail at previewing; s/to/too/g

Re:Why is heading red?

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this heading is red.

Why?

Is slashdot trying to make me read certain articles?

Is the head of a red herring.

Re:Why is heading red?

[icebike]

Glitch in the new design? How would you tell?

Re:Why is heading red?

[Baseclass]

I'm guessing it's another perk for us longtime users with good karma.
Like having the ability to disable ads (as if that ever stopped us).

Re:Why is heading red?

[mister_playboy]

a glitch with the new design

I saw them with the old layout, too, so it isn't just from the design change.

Re:Why is heading red?

[ocdscouter]

I suspect it may be the latter, as I've seen it myself even before the redesign.

Re:Why is heading red?

[mr100percent]

You'd see one story, and then the same story immediately after it.

Oh wait, is that the Matrix or /.? Probably both

Re:Why is heading red?

[d6]

I get the red bar stories too - and as you can tell from my #, I am new.

Re:Why is heading red?

[Baseclass]

Fair enough, on to the next hypothesis.

Re:Why is heading red?

[Opportunist]

I don't mind so much these glitches. But clicking on a reply in my comment list and being linked to some arbitrary article that has nothing to do with mine is kind of a letdown.

Let me ask again: Can we get a "use old design" button? Pretty please? With a cherry on top? And ponies?

Re:Why is heading red?

[icebike]

If you click Account, then Discussions tab it has an offering of Classic Discussion System (D1). Don't know if that is what you are looking for, as I haven't tried it yet.

Re:Why is heading red?

[interkin3tic]

And now I can't post for some reason.

Re:Why is heading red?

[Anne Thwacks]

Owing to a typo, it was mistaken for a herring?

Why are my long, complex, postings replace by a large single digit?

Re:Why is heading red?

[sglewis100]

Nothing beats a post complaining that you can't post! I'm going to go call someone and tell them my phone isn't working.

Re:Why is heading red?

[HiThere]

Isn't that what 611 [is | used to be] for?

(It's been quite awhile since I looked in that section of the phone book. A decade or so.)

Re:Why is heading red?

[Lanteran]

Probably the other one- I've seen red ones in 2.0. Or it's just a very long standing bug...

Re:Why is heading red?

[coolmadsi]

Red headings are "mysterious future" articles - the brief preview that subscribers get before they're posted publicly. I've been seeing them occasionally, too, so it's either a glitch with the new design or somehow related to the "Ads Disabled. Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!" box that you get for spending far to much time here without subscribing.

I am not a subscriber, but have seen it happen before the new design. It may be related to the Ads Disabled checkbox, I can't remember if I've seen it before without being logged in (I may have done, it was a long time ago if I did).

Re:Why is heading red?

[luckymutt]

I thought they appear red when you see them before there has been any comment in them.
There were certainly occasional red head(ings) prior to the recent re-design.

Summary is wrong, as usual.

[MaskedSlacker]

Rojadirecta.org works as of 4:14 pm, two minutes after this story was posted. No ICE image at all.

Rojadirecta.com has the ICE image.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Time Warner Cable subscriber in the US I get the ICE image. Resolved to 74.81.170.110 . Also google's DNS servers provide the same ICE ip.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[ethan961]

No, it really is seized. As of 4:20 PST I get the ICE image. The change is probably still propagating.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[c0lo]

If on Windows "ipconfig /flushdns" might solve your problem.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

Both have the image, as of right Meow.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[The_PHP_Jedi]

I use Google's DNS service, and the .org domain name appears to be seized, but the .com domain name still points to the owner's servers. However, Rojadirecta's Web site says that both their .com and .org domain names were seized, so I would assume it's only a matter of time before DNS records are updated globally.

That's probably why you're still able to access the Web site via one of the seized domain names.

Cheers.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[MaskedSlacker]

Not on windows, and never used the site before. Rojadirecta.org keeps coming up with the pic of the creepy looking dude in the top left corner and the following text:

US authorities "steal" our domain rojadirecta.org and rojadirecta.com!

Fast translation to English: US authorities have blocked access to Rojadirecta.org and now also Rojadirecta.com but we continue and we will continue our service on territorial domain names such as Rojadirecta.es (.me, .in, be...).

We are now on: www.rojadirecta.me www.rojadirecta.es www.rojadirecta.in and in many other domains that are not controlled by US authorities.

Do not send e-mails to our dot com account, the new one ends on .in
SPREAD our new address!

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[Chaonici]

I checked to make sure that the site was, in fact, seized before I posted this story.

Assume good faith.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[choongiri]

I don't doubt your good faith, but you didn't check .com (or if you did, you didn't check back to the originating dns servers). It's certainly been seized, whereas the article says it hasn't.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[Maximus633]

Its not just the Summary... TFA has the same remark of domain names.

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[Maximus633]

The full article states that .com was not sized. :-)

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[Ash Vince]

Not on windows, and never used the site before. Rojadirecta.org keeps coming up with the pic of the creepy looking dude in the top left corner and the following text:

US authorities "steal" our domain rojadirecta.org and rojadirecta.com!

Fast translation to English: US authorities have blocked access to Rojadirecta.org and now also Rojadirecta.com but we continue and we will continue our service on territorial domain names such as Rojadirecta.es (.me, .in, be...).

We are now on: www.rojadirecta.me www.rojadirecta.es www.rojadirecta.in and in many other domains that are not controlled by US authorities.

Do not send e-mails to our dot com account, the new one ends on .in
SPREAD our new address!

It sounds like your ISP is just caching the DNS record on its servers and not reissuing the a DNS lookup to the master DNS servers for this site. It probably means someone who shares your ISP did a DNS lookup of Rojadirecta.org before the DHS guys nicked the domain. This will persist for whatever time the DNS Time To Live was set for on the old DNS record. I can't look up what this was from here as the DNS change has already landed on my ISP.

This is why new DNS records are near instant but a DNS change to an existing site can take up to 24 hours to propagate around the world and various ISP's. If you want DNS to change more quickly you can set the TTL on your DNS to 1 second but then your DNS servers get hammered as you are preventing anyone from caching your DNS records for you, so your servers have to respond every time someone goes to your site.

http://www.ntchosting.com/dns/ttl.html

Re:Summary is wrong, as usual.

[gnapster]

If you want DNS to change more quickly you can set the TTL on your DNS to 1 second but then your DNS servers get hammered as you are preventing anyone from caching your DNS records for you, so your servers have to respond every time someone goes to your site.

Also, if you shorten the TTL and your domain then gets seized, all traffic will immediately go to the ICE placeholder rather than some people being able to go to your site for a few hours more. (Those few hours might be enough time for you to get the word out about a new domain name after your old one is seized.)

This never happened under the Bush administration.

[Anonymous Coward]

This never happened under the Bush administration. But anything even a little bit questionable was viciously scrutenized by the media. BUT, the Obama administration seems to get a pass...

This is really bad!!! Why aren't they being held to the same standard the previous administration was held to?

I guess the media will take notice when radio and tv broadcasters are taken down.

Backwards!

[macraig]

Ya got that backwards. ;-)

It's turnover and updating of local DNS caches that allows them to get away with this crap in the first place. The solution is to make those DNS entries static, like perhaps embedding them in the local hosts file or using Treewalk or some DNS filtering utility.

Well, either that or bypass DNS entirely by using URL shortcuts that directly reference the IP address....

Re:Backwards!

[c0lo]

Ya got that backwards. ;-)

Apologies, forgot to grin before/after the posted suggestion.

What Egypt and the US have in common...

[metrometro]

... is a complete lack of due process and the right of appeal in regards to Internet censorship. This is appalling. The entire Western legal code is built on the idea that if you cannot be penalized for something without the right to defend yourself in court. I realize that the seizures are of property and not people, but it's not hard to argue, hey, maybe seizing someone's business and wrongly broadcasting that the owner is a criminal* might negatively impact the owner.

* I'm referring to the case of the hip-hop blogger, who was hyping unreleased material on the request of labels and accused of piracy. I don't know the details of the site in question here.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[bunratty]

What property is being seized? These are just bits on a server being set differently, just as downloading a movie without paying for it is sending bits down a wire. If one is "imaginary property" isn't the other? Or is there a double standard?

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Joe U]

So, duplicating files is the same as forced data
modification?

Seriously, that's your argument?

You're comparing copying a book, vs burning it.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Professr3]

If you're going with the book analogy, it's more like copying a book vs. replacing the entire library catalog with an ICE warning card, in the off chance that SOME of the books are incompatible with ICE's views.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[pugugly]

I hate to be blunt, but the authorities have long since seized the right to abscond with *actual* property - cars, homes, et al based on the mere accusation of a drug related crime. Unfortunately everyone save the Libertarians (and some Liberals, including the ACLU.) went "Well, that's drug stuff - I'm sure they did *something* to deserve it".

From Findlaw

"As detailed in a Frontline report from 2000, federal and local practices regarding property seizure in drug cases shifted in 1984, when federal law created forfeiture funds for property seized by the DEA and FBI, and allowed local law enforcement to share proceeds from the sale of property seized."

You've waited about 25 years too long to suddenly realise "Oh . . . this could apply to *me*?!?" (Good old Saint Reagan - Who'da thunk it? I mean - not counting people actually familiar with his record.). If people don't like this, they're going to have to go back to stopping the actual real property seizures and start pushing back from there.

Pug

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[tragedy]

There is a double standard. I'm not sure why you can't see that the government is the one applying it. They're the ones who _set_ the rules, we expect them to follow them too.

As for whether or not this is property. It's certainly not conventional property directly. On the other hand, this isn't exactly IP, as you seem to think. This has nothing to do with trade secrets, copyright, or patents. There's an argument to made, perhaps, that it's a trademark issue, since they're putting up their own site (with that one image on it). Of course, I'm against trademark applying to domain names unless the page the domain directs to is itself infringing on a trademark (using someone else's trademark to promote products, or represent them as being from that organization). The money that they paid for a registration of the domain for a set time would seem to be a form of property. In any case theft of service is generally treated as seriously as if the property were real property and is probably a felony on this scale. Aside from being theft of service, it's also a denial of service attack. If you didn't notice, the government just went after a bunch of Anonymous members for a denial of service attack.

So any argument that this is somehow ok without a warrant and some sort of judicial process is just wrong.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? There is no "duplication" here. The whole point about copyright infringement not being theft is that the "owner" is not being deprived of anything. It's not as if the government made a "duplicate" of the website, they replaced the content of the website with theirs. The owner of the site is being deprived of his website.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Tiger4]

Careful, their logic buffers will overheat and explode!

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[flaming error]

"Seized" is ICE's term, not GP. What GP explained is that their business site was replaced with a big nasty sign about them being criminals.

If it's "pursuant to a warrant", ICE may as well post the warrant too.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[theskipper]

It wasn't always this way but legally, they are property. See the Zuccarini case (a soap opera in itself):

http://espinosaiplaw.com/wordpress/?p=90

Domains are becoming very valuable assets so how they're treated legally is important.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[metrometro]

Either both piracy and seizing domains without due process are wrong, or neither is wrong. We can debate which is better. But the current arrangement is that imaginary property belonging to the powerful is protected by institutions, and imaginary property belonging to the regular folk is not. And that ain't my definition of rule of law.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[MarkvW]

They have the authority to interdict material illegally brought into the US.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[skywire]

Too bad I don't have mod points at the moment. What an obvious troll. But since the modders seem to have missed the obvious, you have managed to pull off close to the perfect game in trolling: simultaneously making a fallacious argument that you know sounds so lacking in understanding of the concepts involved that the typical slashdotter will roll his or her eyes over it, and pushing the copyright button, yet still being modded up. Congrats are in order for your exercise of trolling skill.

However, for the benefit of modders, I'll pretend that I am also blind to the obvious, and answer the putative argument: The Feds are not copying bits. They are taking ownership of (stealing) domain names from the parties who own them, without due process.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[exomondo]

What property is being seized? These are just bits on a server being set differently, just as downloading a movie without paying for it is sending bits down a wire. If one is "imaginary property" isn't the other? Or is there a double standard?

Ok well when i come over to your house and smash the place up it's ok because im just setting the particles differently.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there is a double standard - I cannot download bits that are owned by major record labels, yet they are able to sick their U.S. government henchmen to possess my property, i.e. domain name.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[c0lo]

What property is being seized? These are just bits on a server being set differently, just as downloading a movie without paying for it is sending bits down a wire. If one is "imaginary property" isn't the other? Or is there a double standard?

The "property" that one bought when paying for a domain registration. No matter how you call it, the situation is now: "I paid for it and is no longer the way I paid for" (seized, corrupted, adjusted, censored... whatever words you use it, the basic fact remains).

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the 4th amendment protects against unreasonable search AND seizure of property. Not that the current U.S. government cares about that

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[c0lo]

Either both piracy and seizing domains without due process are wrong, or neither is wrong.

Niiice... "Piracy without due process" (just kidding)

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[mrchaotica]

If the videos are property then so are domain names, and the Feds are seizing property without due process. If the videos are not property then the Feds have no reason to seize the domain names in the first place. Either way, the domain names should not be seized!

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Anonymous Coward]

Additionally, if I recall, this includes money. They freeze your accounts, etc. Which often times can make it hard to defend yourself in court, when you don't have any access to hire a decent lawyer.

When I learned of this, lawyers on retainer suddenly made sense. I always wondered why you would give money to a lawyer prior to being accused of something, when you could just hire them when the need arose.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The entire Western legal code is built on the idea that if you cannot be penalized for something without the right to defend yourself in court.

The Western Legal system sold itself out long before even the bankers did. It no longer represents anything resembling justice or its supposed philosophical principles. It's a tool of monied and corporate interestsâ"when it isn't being a another soulless bureaucracy.

Looking for justice in the courts is like looking for prudence in a bank manger. You're 40 years too late. The courts don't care about your property or other rights; not unless you've got enough money to pay them handsomely for the trouble of trying the case.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem was people were told this was to go after assets of high level drug dealers..the fancy cars, houses, etc. And who is in favor of drug dealers and mafia keeping ill-gotten gains? As usual, with unintentional consequences, it has turned into: If the police find a joint in your car (and especially if it's a NICE car) whether it's really your car or you're driving your girl/boy friends, they will seize it. Anything that can bring a tidy sum. Even if you're never charged with an actual crime.

The same shakedown has been used with cash. If you carry a large amount of cash police can seize it, without even proof that it was used for illegal business. And being that the majority of paper money in circulation contains traces of drugs already, it's not too unlikely a DEA drug sniffing canine is going indicated a hit.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another bad comparison insulting the US and trivializing others' hardships. Color me surprised.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Wolvenhaven]

Piracy with due process is privateering. Makes sense you can have the opposite.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Anonymous Coward]

The hell? I was five years old! Voting for the new guy didn't accomplish Jack, so what do we do now?

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[rilian4]

Seizure of property is, in theory, protected by the 4th Amendment. The US government has been violating it constantly for decades.

4th Amendment to US Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[alexo]

What Egypt and the US have in common is a complete lack of due process and the right of appeal in regards to Internet censorship

What Egypt and the US don't have in common is the willingness of the Egyptians to riot over what they perceive as oppression.

Also, sentences split between the subject and the body are harder to read, harder to quote and make you look like a twit.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[HiThere]

I don't follow your logic. I tend to consider them both wrong, but for quite different reasons. (And it's different yet again for different meanings of the term "piracy".)

You also seem to be assuming that all wrongs are of the same size. I'd say that when a powerful entity subjugates a less powerful entity, and force is the only argument, then a large wrong is done, though the precise degree of harm is only determinable by considering how much damage is inflicted, there is also the question of "Was it in self defense, or proper defense of another?", which is generally considered to even justify homicide (though some jurisdictions disagree).

Piracy in the sense of copying something that someone else has created, without the use of force, is a minor to trivial wrong, but it can be magnified if it does great harm. It's hard to see how it could be "self defense, or proper defense of another". But it's also very rarely done with the intent to harm.

The two cases don't seem very similar at all to me.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[imric]

Current, hell. The US government hasn't cared since Reagan. YOU haven't cared since Obama got elected, maybe - You may WANT to pin everything wrong with the government on the Democrats, but it ain't gonna work. SOME of us have longer memories than the proverbial goldfish.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[Anonymous Coward]

It gets better.
Many jurisdictions are implementing civil asset forfeiture laws.
This is a twofold attack.

First since it is a civil action, not criminal, you don't have the right to a lawyer. Given they've seized your assets you can't hire one.
So you're fighting to defend yourself without a lawyer at all.

The second is that in civil court they don't have to prove guilt, just prove that it's reasonably possible, a much lower bar, particularly if you don't have a lawyer to defend yourself.

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[arth1]

Do they have the right to determine what should be illegal, or is that still the domain of congress?
Do they have the right to judge whether it was actually illegal, or is that still the domain of the courts?
Does the switching of a DNS entry justify a no-knock warrant because there's a danger of destruction of evidence?
Did the alleged crime actually happen inside a US jurisdiction, or is this the equivalent of foreign nationals using an American directory service to look up each others numbers?
But most of all, whatever happened to "due process"?

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[arth1]

s/goldfish/goldwater/

HTH

Re:What Egypt and the US have in common...

[metrometro]

Noted.

DNS replacement

[Joe U]

Again, it's past time for a DNS replacement.

Not an alternate DNS root, an actual replacement that maps some kind of human readable names to an IP address.

ICANN and Network Solutions have proven that they are happy to hand over domains without a full trial, it's time to replace them.

Re:DNS replacement

[mentil]

You mean like a server setting its IPv6 IP to some kind of hash of its domain name?

Re:DNS replacement

[machxor]

Isn't the point of a temporary restraining order/seizure warrant to stop an action/take something before a full trial has occurred? Under whose laws should a full trial be held? Am I naive in believing that ICANN delegates control of the TLDs?

Re:DNS replacement

[complete loony]

Um, no. IP6 doesn't quite work that way.

But we could implement some kind of distributed hash table.

Re:DNS replacement

[Joe U]

Isn't the point of a temporary restraining order/seizure warrant to stop an action/take something before a full trial has occurred? Under whose laws should a full trial be held? Am I naive in believing that ICANN delegates control of the TLDs?

The problem with the current system it's an instant death penalty when it comes to seizing a domain. It's tough to recover from that, and we should be operating under innocent until proven guilty.

As for whose laws, I've always been a fan of where the server is located, or in the case of cloud computing, where the owner is located.

ICANN delegates to NetSol (and others) for .com and others. ICANN doesn't really register domains directly.

Re:DNS replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, it's past time for a DNS replacement.

Yeah, we should just use IP addresses directly. (I'm serious! What's wrong with looking up IP addresses with a search engine?)

Re:DNS replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? How does a "DNS replacement" fix the fact that US authorities are able to interfere in the operations of US companies? Notice that the Americans screwed with a domain from a US registry, not an international registry. If your "DNS replacement" had an operation in the US that too would be subject to interference by the Americans.

Call me again when the US government manages to mess either with somebody else's registry (e.g. the Finnish .fi or Russian .ru) or with the root. Yeah, it probably seems like they could mess with the root, since the Americans theoretically claim control over it. But try that in practice. Root operators include a lot of serious men with beards who work in military bases and secret government installations around the world. They aren't intimidated by pieces of paper issued by a US court, so if the Americans want to mess with the root they'd best be prepared for a shooting war.

Re:DNS replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

Root operators include a lot of serious men with beards who work in military bases and secret government installations around the world.

So THAT'S where Osama is hiding!

Re:DNS replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

> Not an alternate DNS root,

Good, because that would be very difficult to manage, what with the root oscillating between two servers.

Oh, did you mean ALTERNATIVE? Note that the words are not synonyms.

Re:DNS replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would names have to be human readable? That leaves out a chunk of UTF-8 ...

Re:DNS replacement

[Joe U]

Good, because that would be very difficult to manage, what with the root oscillating between two servers.

Oh, did you mean ALTERNATIVE? Note that the words are not synonyms.

alternate:

4. Constituting an alternative [took the alternate route home]

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alternate

Sorry, please try again.

Re:DNS replacement

[Joe U]

Huh? How does a "DNS replacement" fix the fact that US authorities are able to interfere in the operations of US companies? Notice that the Americans screwed with a domain from a US registry, not an international registry. If your "DNS replacement" had an operation in the US that too would be subject to interference by the Americans.

I'm not into software design, but if I was, I would think about a distributed, highly encrypted network design with control that resides in multiple locations so that the removal requires multiple and conflicting countries to be involved in any take-down. Something like US, UK, Russia, China, Japan, Cuba, Israel and Iran. Then require keys from people in 5 of the countries to override a domain owner.

Call me again when the US government manages to mess either with somebody else's registry (e.g. the Finnish .fi or Russian .ru) or with the root. Yeah, it probably seems like they could mess with the root, since the Americans theoretically claim control over it. But try that in practice. Root operators include a lot of serious men with beards who work in military bases and secret government installations around the world. They aren't intimidated by pieces of paper issued by a US court, so if the Americans want to mess with the root they'd best be prepared for a shooting war.

Yeah, the root still belongs to the US, and seriously, I doubt ICANN would ignore a US court order. Not sure if the US would do it though, it would impact trade.

Re:DNS replacement

[HermMunster]

The purpose of seizure is to ensure that evidence isn't destroyed prior to trial.

1) After the seizures no one has been charged, as of yet.

2) Everyone seems to haver glossed over the fact that in this particular case this site has gone to trial twice and found to be legal twice.

3) There is no evidence that they are protecting from destruction through these seizures. The domain name would continue to exist even if it hadn't been seized. And in this seizure's case, as the site has gone to court twice it is likely that most of the evidence is already in the court record in the venue where the court had jurisdiction.

4) Seizing these sites in this manner is prior restraint.

5) There are serious free speech issues involved in these cases, as there typically is plenty of legitimate free speech ongoing on these sites.

6) The bar for seizures of this sort have a significantly higher bar when the seizures would involve free speech issues.

It's sad to see the judges just rubber stamping these. Hopefully, there'll be a judge or two that come to their senses and begin demanding that the cases involving the seizures be brought before the court in short order.

At least this site in particular has fought for its rights in the past. Hopefully they'll do the same.

And yes, we must consider that the US has been damaging the name/reputation of this known legal site and continues to broadcast it.

Re:DNS replacement

[pongo000]

OpenNIC already does this. OpenNIC is totally independent of ICANN, and can resolve names to IP addresses without consulting the ICANN root zone. They've been doing it for 10+ years, with 40+ servers spread across the globe, both hemispheres. The solution is out there; folks just need to take advantage of it.

Re:DNS replacement

[Joe U]

It's still DNS, which can be spoofed and hijacked easily.

Which means it's exactly the same thing, only with a different company running it.

Re:DNS replacement

[gnapster]

Well, for one thing, the list of things that will break upon the transition to IPv6 will grow by an order of magnitude. Right now, I can have absolute URLs in a web page which point to a domain name. Today, the target of the URL is only accessible via an IPv4 address, but tomorrow maybe they get an IPv6 address, and someday their host drops support for IPv4. When that happens, my link breaks. There are a number of other problems that DNS helps solve, but this is the first that comes to mind.

Re:DNS replacement

[gnapster]

Er, I meant that my link breaks if it points to an IP address, not a domain name (http://74.125.230.116/ instead of http://google.com/). As I think more about this example, the more contrived it feels. Here is a better one: how do you find the IP address of the search engine?

Re:This never happened under the Bush administrati

[TheGratefulNet]

'the media' are lapdogs of the government, both PRESENT and PAST.

what makes you think this is at all localized to one guy or another?

you fell for this '2 party' false dichotomy, didn't you? didn't you??

learn next time that it does NOT MATTER who is in charge. once power is taken, its used by whoever is IN office.

duh.

Maybe there is a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets pull an Egypt and disconnect the US from the internet. Honestly the world will be a better place and we'd have a whole pile of extra IPv4 addresses.

Could we disconnect the US from earth? How much better would life be without the mentality they present... Less lawsuits, less bs on tv...

Re:Maybe there is a solution

[Joe U]

Yeah, let's put Australia in charge!

The thing about the US is that we suck when it comes to free speech. We're still better than nearly every other country on Earth when it comes to free speech, but we suck.

Re:Maybe there is a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The USA is the last of the Western World when it comes to Free Speech and Human Rights. Granted, the Western World represents less than 25% of the 200 countries on the planet, so even being last of the Western World may not seem all that bad.
But then again, the USA now qualifies as a tyranny thanks to the government repeatedly violating the Constitution and Human Rights of it's citizens: (It is rarely referred to as a tyranny publicly in politics and in the media, but it fits the definition of the word). As for the International scene, the behavior of the US government will make the entire country be considered as a rogue state by even Europe. Europe just needs a bit of time to realize how bad the USA has become and get over the shock, but soon it will.

Re:Maybe there is a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still call the USA a tyranny and not get arrested, that's a good sign.

Re:Maybe there is a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

... As an anonymous coward on a site the government hasn't gotten round to blocking yet. The appalling "free speech zones" away from actual events tells you that the USA is already lost. The best thing you guys could do would be defederate. Some of your states would probably be okay as independent countries.

One thing's certain, the USA cannot be trusted any more than China could be to run the world's DNS.

Re:Maybe there is a solution

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still call the USA a tyranny and not get arrested, that's a good sign.

Posted as AC just to be on the safe side.

Re:Maybe there is a solution

[Opportunist]

That's relative. In quite a few tyrannies you could call it that. That's not really an issue. As long as you don't want to change it.

Re:Google is able to stop DNS hijacking?

[Joe U]

Well, in this case Google is bypassing DNS, as people link to the IP address of the site. This is a good thing, it prevents censorship and lets the Internet majority re-establish the site in Google.

Fairs fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean countries with strict pornography or gambling laws can start seizing US sites?

Re:Fairs fair...

[jnpcl]

Just the sites using that country's TLD.

Re:Fairs fair...

[Opportunist]

They didn't even do that. Or did they size the .us domain too?

Re:Fairs fair...

[gnapster]

Actually, http://rojadirecta.us/ is a completely different site! (Based in Uruguay, according to whois.)

Thank you Streisand Effect

[bobdotorg]

Had never heard of Rojadirect.

Now I have another bookmarked site.

Re:Thank you Streisand Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Streisand effect scores another notch.

Re:Thank you Streisand Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Who on /. watches sports?

Re:Thank you Streisand Effect

[Inda]

atdhe.net was also removed, so I was told this morning. I cannot check from this work PC.

myp2p is still going strong.

iraqgoals is still a firm favourite.

SopCast can never die - true p2p

Trawl the sporting forums, there are a metic shitload of these sites.

Re:Thank you Streisand Effect

[RewriteQuran]

Bookmark http://209.44.113.146/

Re:Google is able to stop DNS hijacking?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing that's a trap door link, right? linking to goatse soon? wget http://ow.ly/3Ou1l --02:34:18-- http://ow.ly/3Ou1l => `3Ou1l' Resolving ow.ly... 75.101.155.42, 184.72.246.159 Connecting to ow.ly|75.101.155.42|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: http://bit.ly/gsokC2 [following] --02:34:18-- http://bit.ly/gsokC2 => `gsokC2' Resolving bit.ly... 168.143.172.53 Connecting to bit.ly|168.143.172.53|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Location: http://webwiki.dyndns-wiki.com/ [following] --02:34:19-- http://webwiki.dyndns-wiki.com/ => `index.html' Resolving webwiki.dyndns-wiki.com... 204.13.248.125 Connecting to webwiki.dyndns-wiki.com|204.13.248.125|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: http://img43.imageshack.us/i/screenshot1rx.png/ [following]

ATDHE.net

[doroshjt]

Was also seized. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/01/atdhe-sports-streaming-website-seized_n_817224.html

Re:ATDHE.net

[Gofyerself]

I loved the article, especially: "A spokesperson from ICE confirmed that it was a legitimate seizure and that there is an ongoing investigation into the matter." Shoot first, ask questions later!

Re:ATDHE.net

[Anonymous Coward]

Its already back up. Nice try ICE. (and seriously? ICE? you guys are trying way too hard)

Re:ATDHE.net

[Potor]

ARGH!!!! I loved that site for the EPL and other sports leagues ...

Re:ATDHE.net

[Opportunist]

So if you're working there, you're an ICEman?

It just doesn't have the same ring as "FBI agent"...

Re:ATDHE.net

[IdolizingStewie]

Channelsurfing.net as well

Re:ATDHE.net

[Anonymous Coward]

Within hours of atdhe.net domain being seized it is now back up at its new home -> http://atdhe.me/

Re:ATDHE.net

[Anonymous Coward]

and is back up as atdhe.me

Re:ATDHE.net

[sysadmintech]

I was blown away when I when to ATDHE.net the other day. The funny thing is though I saw the ICE URL, noScript blocked it. I guess the ICE banner isn't very safe. This is totally political lobbied by corps, because Veetle and Freedocast are still running.

Way to go Justice Dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Countdown until the EU starts bitching about USA control of ICANN servers again? Starting... now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_governance#Globalization_and_governance_controversy

Fucking morons. The diplomatic consequences of this will be far reaching and even if we get to keep our queen despite taking these pawns, the diplomatic backlash over the soon to ensue ICANN debate is going to cost the USA billions of dollars over the next decade. How? In lost profit from trade agreements as a consequence of losing our bargaining position.

Let the record show that no one can claim the reprecussions of this were unforseeable. It took me 10 seconds from reading the summary to understand the big picture consequences.

Hopefully this will be the straw that breaks the camels back and causes a public uproar which will put an end to this pro-Corpyright anti-fair use insanity.

Re:Way to go Justice Dept.

[TheCarp]

So what? Honestly, I am here in the US and, do have plenty of reason to enjoy the status quo, but this even pisses me off, and makes me think that it needs to be fixed. I think the best ideas that I have heard have been ideas like bitdns (which is nowhere near even being proof of concept implemented) which gets rid of the entire concept of governance and goes completely to decentralized P2P.

I tend to lean more towards those sorts of solutions. Why create another single point of failure?

Re:Way to go Justice Dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately this is what is going to happen. As the USA and the UN fight over the antique, and IPv4 has officially run out of space, it makes sense we'll be moving away from VHS to DVD in the near future, and it's not necessarily going to be called IPv6 when the need for encryption has made itself so glaringly obvious over the past 20 years.

Re:Way to go Justice Dept.

[TheCarp]

encryption? I don't see how that helps.

Look at bitcoin. No crypto. As I said in a couple of other posts, a DNS system based on a proof of work chain would... be much easier to do without ANY central authority. It means giving up the ability to EVER revoke a domain. However, that is kind of the point. To reduce the any manner of physical coercion (legal or otherwise) as a useful tool.

Some crypto would be used in implementing such a scheme, but, the problem goes far beyond anything that crypto alone can solve.

Think about this... proof of work proofs can be made so hard as to require many systems working in parallel to solve. This is how bitcoin works now. There is a simple agreement that people adding to the block chain (the chain is basically a transaction log) gets some defined number of "coins" (its a function of the block number being added). This is how new money is "minted"... really... just a log entry added to the chain that comes from its position in the chain, rather than some existing "account".

So... all this scheme really needs is to tweak generation so it never decreases the number of coins (and in fact, may increase) and then agree on a time limit. So you transfer "coins" into an "account". Add a new block type that allows you to associate a name that is not currently already taken with an account, and say that all accounts lose coins at a defined rate, and names become available when their current account hits a zero balance.

Sure, there are going to be other details, but its not a bad idea, nor completely off the cuff, this is just my description of a protocol based on some bitcoin forum discussions. I think I like the idea alot, though, I wouldn't say that this variation is particularly fleshed out or perfect.

Might not be hard (and would probably be preferable) to front end it with plain old DNS protocol. Though, there would be something to be said for having everyone hold a copy of the block chain.

Re:Way to go Justice Dept.

[hot soldering iron]

To paraphrase Frank Herbert, in DUNE: "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." A single point of failure is demanded by the political powers that be, so that they can control it. Just like the first royalty were highwaymen, they controlled the people by having the power/will to kill them.

Now, the PEOPLE want an internet that is always up, self-heals, and up-to-date. If one isn't provided for them, they will concoct their own. Witness PirateBox! This is a start, more will come. The technology is coming down in price, and is maturing, getting easier to implement. Smart high school kids can implement VPNs to privately share files, and now can create their own anonymous p2p wifi site with no fear of getting tagged by "the man".

Any bets that at the next hackercon, there will be multiple PirateBoxen floating around? There may be one hidden in the student union of your school right now, or library, or coffee shop...

is youtube covered by this

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that the apply the same rules to youtube and bring that down to.

Re:is youtube covered by this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, read a page or two of youtube comments and ask yourself, do you really want those people turned loose over the whole internet?

Is it the same for all of them?

[Anonymous Coward]

This one.
Caronet:74.81.170.110

WTF Really?

[TheCarp]

It really is pretty bogus that the US has such control over non-.us domains.

This is a pretty good reason to argue for the removal of ALL US hosted servers from root zone files.

There was some interesting discussion in the bitcoin forums about setting up a system similar to bitcoin for DNS, which would assign domains based on proof of work problem solutions. Essentially, generating a block of new unbound domains every time someone processed a block of work, the same way bitcoins are now generated, and allowing the generator to then assign them names and transfer ownership to others.

Would be interesting since it essentially becomes a system of ownership based on consensus amongst working nodes, and there is no way to effect the network by fiat. It has drawbacks, no way to revoke any domain... for any reason. Probably not really workable like that... but given that its just a system of consensus rules built around a proof of work block chain, other agreements on the rules are possible...

Some thoughts anyway,

Re:WTF Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except... .org is a US controlled domain space. You may ask yourself why for a lot of reasons.

Re:WTF Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

.com, .net, .info, .org are US based domains. If you don't like it, you can register under a country level domain.

Re:WTF Really?

[budgenator]

It really is pretty bogus that the US has such control over non-.us domains.

This is a pretty good reason to argue for the removal of ALL US hosted servers from root zone files.

Well a lot of that stems from

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet. The network was created by a small research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. ARPANET

As a result of that and the development of the DNS system the .gov and .mil gTLD refer to exclusively US government and military organizations; the definition of .com, .net and .org as global is a recent development and considering how territorial government bureaucrats are rather surprising.

Re:WTF Really?

[TheCarp]

Though who says DNS is THE name system? If people decide to stop using it, then those definitions don't matter anymore. This is enough to convince me that I am open to possible transitions.

Re:WTF Really?

[budgenator]

There have been alternatives to the traditional DNS hierarchy, numerous Alternative DNS roots have come and gone. I'm sure if you frequent some of the dodgier back alleys of the internet you'll come across some underground DNS servers pointing to services trying to avoid the light of official scrutiny. I'm actually running my own DNS server on the computer I'm running on now, it would be trivial to run a personal TLD for what ever reason.

Re:WTF Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin reminds me of "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" when they make 'Paddy's Dollars'. They did not have a large enough pool of merchants willing to accept Paddy's Dollars and lost everything. I think Bitcoin will have a hard time getting people to sign on. Things have value when we output work in exchange for them. Having nodes do all the work does not make bitcoins seem valuable. If they do not seem valuable they will not be exchanged for credit. Money backed by gold isn't valuable because gold is valuable, it's valuable because it's earned. The gold is valuable because it takes work to find it and process it and because it looks pretty. Bitcoins don't even look like anything!

Re:WTF Really?

[TheCarp]

It is very tempting to think the nodes "do all the work". The nodes work is just the minting cost. By making the cost of minting very high and distributed, they make analogs of counterfeiting hard. Thats really all it is... all that "work" is just the overhead required to make cheating hard.... it has nothing to do with the real value of the "coin".

Bitcoin, like all currency, derives value from its uses. It can currently be used to rent a server, get a domain, and perform several other transactions (including betting on poker and a lottery) You are right in that the real uses need to expand greatly.

The simple fact is, right now, you can't "mine" bitcoins. You can participate, and yes, you might get some bitcoins out of it. However, it takes so much computing power, and so much time, that its just not really worth it to do for most people. Its maybe, worth it to keep the system going, or for people who, for some reason, have spare GPUs to put at the task, but... the primary way of getting bitcoins is.... to exchange them for cash.

Insanity

[hazah]

All I can think to myself is... "These people are fucked. They're fucked and they are fucking us." I just long for the day that we can actually stand up for ourselves, but unfortunately anyone that would speak is drowned out by the uncaring uninformed idiocracy that is spoon fed to the comfortable masses. Sigh, I will not let the dream die though. "Dreamers man.... but I'm not the only one." Bonus points if you can name who I'm quoting.

Re:Insanity

[RavenLrD20k]

John Lennon. Imagine.

Re:Insanity

[cosm]

+1 Bonus Points

Re:Insanity

[evanism]

Preaching to the converted man. Everyone here agrees with you. Our IQ's are higher than the sheeeeple.

Re:Insanity

[hazah]

Nope :). Bill Hicks was quoting John at one of his performances. Close though :).

Re:Insanity

[hazah]

Just have to have my opinions validated once in a while... Sorry for preaching.

cost over the next decade ?

[unity100]

hahahaha . im in the web hosting industry and i can tell you that the internet has started moving away from .com .net .org registrations already.

.com "not controlled by the US"- anyone know more?

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Can the US shut down .org domains, but not .com domains? That's what the article summary seems to say.

If this is the case, is the entity that "controls" .com domains better?

I was about to buy a .org domain but now I have to research this first.

Re:This never happened under the Bush administrati

[Anonymous Coward]

'the media' are lapdogs of the government, both PRESENT and PAST.

Yeah, the media was SOOO in G.W.B.'s pocket. [facepalm]

What time does the nurse bring your meds?

Domains are so 90's

[Greyfox]

Just have Google return IP addresses instead of domain names and I bet you'd eliminate 90% of the DNS traffic in the world today. Perhaps we should just move past it...

Re:Domains are so 90's

[characterZer0]

Virtual hosts.

Or we could just have everybody use Google's DNS servers, then Google decides who has control of a domain.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

That is so 90s!
Hell yes switch back to raw IP.
All you have to remember is 4 tiny numbers.
Talk about a small url!

http://216.34.181.45/
Sweet!

p.s. there will be a quiz,
and the revolution will be streamed!

Re:Domains are so 90's

[monkyyy]

that would still be dns, but google would be doing it, and it would increase as google would have to do it for every domain it brings up and not just the ones ppl click on

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

vhosts were always half-assed anyway. Basically, the client tells the server what host it actually wants with a Host: header. You can have lots of fun supplying odd host: headers to badly written web apps. With IPv6's address space, why bother supporting the host: headeR? Just have another IPv6 address if you want another virtual host.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Opportunist]

Considering how many people do not enter their target in the URL line of their browser but instead in the search line of Google, this is not the worst idea.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

i bet in the future ipv4 domainnames will seem quaint and easily memorizable compared to ipv6 numbers.

It very well could be a status symbol to have an ipv4 domain name in not too many years...

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Midnight Thunder]

Vitlrtual hosts make it easier to deploy a new site since you don't need to have the host respond to yet another IP address. Just add an entry in Apache and there you are.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

> i bet in the future ipv4 domainnames will seem quaint and easily memorizable compared to ipv6 numbers.

2001:900::900:2001 is quite easy to remember, as an example.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

Do that, and you will see plenty of 'shared host' sites stop working.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

You would also break 100% of all name-based virtual hosts...

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

This would work only if there were a 1:1 correspondence of domain names to IP numbers. Most sites use Virtual hosting, where multiple domain names share one IP address. The httpd server determines which site the visitor wants by parsing the domain name requested, along with the IP address.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[HiThere]

That would just make Google a single point of failure. And you may trust them now, but they're already no longer the good guy they were 5 years ago. What will they be in another 5 years.

ANY single point of failure is a bad decision. ANY. I don't care how much you trust them today, tomorrow they could be taken over by the military or hit by a warrant. One requiring that they not admit that they were subject to oversight control.

Monopolies are inherently evil. All monopolies. Some we haven't yet figured out how to do without, but that just makes them necessary, that doesn't mean that they aren't evil. Some are active evils, and are easy to recognize. Others are passive evils, and their evil lies mainly in accustoming those dependent on them to their control. But passive evils can switch to active evils quite rapidly. All it takes is a change in the board of directors.

A true solution won't create a new choke-point. I've heard a couple of proposals, but I can't judge whether they'd accomplish what they claim. But the idea that it should be impossible to revoke a domain name has a degree of plausibility. Think of it as being for the same reason that resources shared by parallel processes should be read-only whenever possible.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

That might work for all the large sites, but I would think that 90% of all domain/host names use namevirtualhosts and are configured on some shared IP address. Therefore, the IP alone will not allow you to surf on those sites.

Re:Domains are so 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

with our current IP4, wouldn't work, most hosts are virtual, meaning shared on one IP address and the browser sends the name of the virtual web server it wants in the header. With IP6, that would be possible if we built things such that each hosted virtual server would get its own ip6 address.

Insane

[Anonymous Coward]

How can an international system like the Internet allow one country to enforce its IP laws on a company in another country? No matter where a DNS registrar is located these domains are meant to be international resources and should be beyond any one country's grasp. It would be one thing if it were an in country company, even then there should be a right of due process, but this is insane. If I were the country with this company, I would file an international grievance. Beyond that, I highly agree we need an alternative to the current DNS system.

4th Amendment

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how's that 4th amendment doing these days? Something like "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

What constitution was that in again?

Re:4th Amendment

[monkyyy]

canada? iran?

Re:This never happened under the Bush administrati

[grapeape]

Dont you mean the government is the lapdog of the media...it sure has seemed that way over the last decade or so.

America, corporate whore.

[unity100]

dont excuse the language - i cant find any stronger words to stress the travesty thats going on here :

america is whoring itself out to a particular industry, while killing another. the internet which was associated so closely with '.com' extension, will not be associated with it anymore. in web hosting industry, customers are already moving away from .com .net .org domains. can you imagine what the impact of this will be ? they will also be moving away from american outlets for hosting, dedicated servers, vpses and cloud, because the place which will register their NON american controlled extension, will naturally be offering deals to them during their domain purchase.

way to kill an entire industry that de facto built internet, in order to whore yourself out to a fading out one, america.

troll ? no. appalled to oblivion maybe. i cant any stronger words to stress the travesty of the situation, really. other than 'whoring' or 'morondom'. really.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[KingMotley]

I don't think the majority of people care that a few sites that deal with questionable material have to go and try and hide in some obscure domain. Perhaps they should just start the .illegal root domain so you can save your crying for more important matters.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[c0lo]

the internet which was associated so closely with '.com' extension

The final deflation of the dotCom-bubble just started. The internet will be fine... until somebody will start seizing the IP addresses.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[unity100]

google "freenet"

Re:America, corporate whore.

[c0lo]

google "freenet"

And be quick... before ICE seizes the freenet.org domain as well.
Alt DNS roots may be another idea.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[unity100]

dns-p2p

Re:America, corporate whore.

[McTickles]

Questionable material?

Dumbass...

Re:America, corporate whore.

[unity100]

morons like you is precisely why they are getting away with it.

it doesnt matter whether legal, or illegal. NO company or business of ANY sort will keep a website on a domain name of a country which snatches it out of people's hands under ANY reason.

again, moron. wake up.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[Anonymous Coward]

[fixed]
Obama's administration is whoring itself out to a particular industry, while killing another. the internet which was associated so closely with '.com' extension, will not be associated with it anymore. in web hosting industry, customers are already moving away from .com .net .org domains. can you imagine what the impact of this will be ? they will also be moving away from american outlets for hosting, dedicated servers, vpses and cloud, because the place which will register their NON american controlled extension, will naturally be offering deals to them during their domain purchase.

way to kill an entire industry that de facto built internet, in order to whore yourself out to a fading out one, Obama.

troll ? no. appalled to oblivion maybe. i cant concieve of any stronger words to stress the travesty of the situation, really. other than 'whoring' or 'morondom'. really.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[unity100]

are you aware that ALL of the tools obama admn. is using to do these, were conceived and hatched during bush administration and rep. term in congress/senate back before 2006 ?

Re:America, corporate whore.

[KingMotley]

It's amazing you can put a single comprehensible thought together. Try learning how to write next.

I can say for a FACT that you are wrong as MY company will definitely be keeping it's domains in the .com, and .net domain roots. I'm happy they are doing this. Now if they can kick off all the hacking, scamming, virus infested domains off .COM, .NET, .ORG people will be less afraid to visit domains in those roots. You on the other hand, feel free to go visit 1underagedgirl2goatsand3midgets. and superpirateworldwithnotrojanswepromise.cn

PS. GiriGiriPHP's site is a great example of a 10 year old let loose on the internet, and how NOT to design a website. Perfect example of a 1980s style table design. Guess that's what happens when the dumbest 10% of the world gets let go and has extra free time on their hands to try and push their poor skills on the rest of the world.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[unity100]

its your company's problem then.

PS. GiriGiriPHP's site is a great example of a 10 year old let loose on the internet, and how NOT to design a website. Perfect example of a 1980s style table design. Guess that's what happens when the dumbest 10% of the world gets let go and has extra free time on their hands to try and push their poor skills on the rest of the world.

so, you have decided the quality of a codebase, based on in what way its website was formatted.

no wonder why your company feels safe with keeping its corporate website on .com domains. you are all incompetents.

i will do you a favor, and drop you a tip : tables, stay where they are, in all devices new and old, in all platforms, in all browsers. they dont shift their place because you change a single float attribute on some random div somewhere on a page that has a lot of visual elements, depending on browser and version and platform and so on.

and no - you cannot make all websites google like and twitter like - in business there are a lot of websites that need to maintain many visual elements in precise places.

and no - customers wont give 2 flying fucks what us, the fad-loving self-righteous programmers, designers and coders think about what is 'hot' 'proper' and not. they want to see something in the exact place in every browser they use. and no, you cant persuade them.

since, compared to a 10 year old 'loose on the internet' you think that

is da hot thing and the only one to be with, im sure you are also a moron who thinks that people should ssh into a nix server with a wheel user first, then su- to root, for 'extra security'.

anyway. this is the last response you can get from me in your endless idiocy (or maybe, youth and naivete). you may learn things the wrong way, in trenches, or, right way, by being logical and practical.

and stay away from girigiriphp code.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[KingMotley]

no wonder why your company feels safe with keeping its corporate website on .com domains. you are all incompetents.

Our coders are competent enough to handle doing pixel perfect designs across all modern browsers. Sounds like you can even handle a simple two column layout without resorting to using tables which is for displaying tabular data sets as a hack for your lack of skills in doing presentation.

they dont shift the ir place because you change a single float attribute on some random div somewhere on a page that has a lot of visual elements, depending on browser and version and platform and so on.

Sounds like you are incompetent and unable to do things the right way.

I will drop you a tip: tables, don't work on older blackberries.

Re:America, corporate whore.

[gnapster]

Video footage of soccer games is hardly questionable material.

Re:Google is able to stop DNS hijacking?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right!!! Mhaaaa

They didn't get the .com eh?

[elashish14]

http://www.rojadirecta.com/. Tell me what you see.

(For the lazy, it's quite similar to the image from TFS.)

Re:.com "not controlled by the US"- anyone know mo

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do so many stupid people post on /.?

Did you even try going to http://rojadirecta.com/ ???
What did you see? That's right.

Re:.com "not controlled by the US"- anyone know mo

[ciaran_o_riordan]

> Why do so many stupid people post on /.?

Because it inspires responses of high technical prowess, such as yours.

You're my hero.

My favorite websites

[areusche]

Most of my favorite websites that are frowned upon by certain government agencies have already begun their transition to other domains such as .me just like Rogadirecta. I hope the others quickly start doing the same.

Re:My favorite websites

[1u3hr]

transition to other domains such as .me

Why would you trust Montenegro to stand up for your rights? All these tiny nations that have turned over their TLD to some company that promotes them due to some accidental similarity with an English word have not the slightest interest in the people who use the domains. They could cancel them all tomorrow, give them to someone else, or if the US leant on them.

I used to think that .com was boring but safe from arbitrary interruption; that's not true now. I don't do anything that's likely to annoy the US govt, but if I did I'd look for a country that was standing behind its TLD, not whoring it out.

Re:My favorite websites

[c0lo]

transition to other domains such as .me

Why would you trust Montenegro to stand up for your rights?.

I don't. But before considering OpenNIC or the like, here why .me has a better level of trust:
- historically, nobody heard about .me domains being seized (not that it cannot happen in the future)...
- ... but .org, .net and .com... continue to happen.

Between .me and {.org, .net, .com} - excluding others - who do you trust better?

Re:My favorite websites

[HJED]

last time I used OpenNIC it started redirecting all dns queries for 'facebook.com' to a North Korean IP address. That's the problem with community based root servers.

Re:My favorite websites

[1u3hr]

- historically, nobody heard about .me domains being seized

It's not that the Montenegro authorities have resisted seizures, its that there hasn't been anything except vanity and novelty domains there. If Wikileaks had been Wikileaks.me, say and Montenegro had stood up for them, that would mean something So far they just haven't been challenged that I know of.

Re:My favorite websites

[1u3hr]

- historically, nobody heard about .me domains being seized (not that it cannot happen in the future)...

Historically, no one has heard of .me domains being used for for anything except vanity sites. If they had Wikileaks.me and let it stand in spite of pressure, say, that would be something,. But no one cares about the sites that are there now.

Between .me and {.org, .net, .com} - excluding others - who do you trust better?

Why "exclude others"? There are hundreds of TLDs, I would leave tiny countries like .me way down if I was choosing one.

Just wondering...

[acalltoreason]

Is this even legal?

Re:Just wondering...

[Chaonici]

"I will make it legal."
--Darth Sidious

Re:Just wondering...

[HiThere]

Probably not, but what repercussions will happen to the ones who violated the law?

Since there aren't any, it's being illegal is of no import.

P.S.: Is there even any effective way to challenge it? If so, I haven't heard of it. (And notice that I didn't say successfully challenge.)

But why do I still get "slow down, cowboy"?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... "Ads Disabled. Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!" box that you get for spending far to much time here without subscribing.

I get that.

But I also still get "Slow Down, Cowboy!"

Seems odd. I'd expect the "disable ads" option to be intended to encourage people whose postings are considered valuable and well-considered to post more of them. But the one-per-five-minutes limit for such people (who can often compose postings quickly) seems to work at cross-purposes to the option. So I'd have expected the limit to go away with the offering of the option.

Re:But why do I still get "slow down, cowboy"?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to be based on the theory that most people can't type with more than one finger, and probably also can't use both brain cells at the same time. I agree it is not very helpful and should go if your Karma is very good.

It also goes wrong a lot - perhaps confused if you are logged in on two devices at once?

Re:But why do I still get "slow down, cowboy"?

[arth1]

It's also quite irritating if a typo went past your initial eyeballing, or the 3.0 design ate one of your URLs which it is wont to, and you need to post a correction. Before you're allowed to do so, you get slammed and modded down.

SOP

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately this is becoming the next wave of Internet and the law in America. In the works are laws that will give our government the power to "cut off the Internet", limit what you can say on it, what you can see on it. It already has the "right" to monitor every cell phone conversation from every citizen with out a warrant or reason. Obama is speaking out of the other side of his mouth when chastising the Egyptian government for doing what he and his congress is trying to do right now to Americans Internet and communication services.

Re:SOP

[0123456]

Obama is speaking out of the other side of his mouth when chastising the Egyptian government for doing what he and his congress is trying to do right now to Americans Internet and communication services.

Don't be stupid. Obama would only shut down the Internet to protect you from bad people.

Re:SOP

[RavenLrD20k]

Not exactly "His" congress, but a congress cut of much the same cloth. One can still hope that he will use his Veto power when that bill hits his desk. Then we will see exactly where Obama stands in relation to the security outlined in the Constitution regarding this issue. However, don't forget that congress can still overrule the Veto if there's a strong enough backing. Our current congress: A testament to the Sheeple of the United States. I voted. My candidates lost. And even if they won, I'm of very small faith that any of them would have done anything better for this country than who's in office now.

Can I vote for a new office to clean up this sad state of affairs? Say...Emperor?

Re:SOP

[azalin]

Like... us?

Re:SOP

[HiThere]

You're talking about the man who voted for FISA while he was running for president. For him to veto such a bill would strain my credulity.

No, there is due process.

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> What Egypt and the US have in common is a complete lack of due process and the right of appeal in regards to Internet censorship. This is appalling. The entire Western legal code is built on the idea that if you cannot be penalized for something without the right to defend yourself in court. I realize that the seizures are of property and not people, but it's not hard to argue, hey, maybe seizing someone's business and wrongly broadcasting that the owner is a criminal* might negatively impact the owner.

Wrong. The US has both due process and a right to appeal. Comparing the situation in the US to that in Egypt is overgeneralizing in a way which is both incorrect and insultingly trivializing the troubles in those parts of the world that do not have US rights.

In the US, in terms of due process, the warrants are seized based on a warrant, as they say on the "well-known" graphic. That means someone in a judicial capacity has approved the seizure.

If that power was misused and the warrant is bad, you have a very strong case for a lawsuit against the government for violating your constitutional rights. (Google "section 1983 lawsuits")

In terms of a right to appeal, you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself in court. You are entitled to appeal if the court gets it wrong--or even if they get it right.

And you are entitled to petition Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the President.

Re:No, there is due process.

[b0r0din]

Of course you're welcome to defend yourself in court, against lots of lawyers and monetary interests (because court victories are mostly bought nowadays) and leave yourself at the hands of a 50-yr old jurist who probably can't figure out how to plug in his friggin toaster.

Power is always misused, but in terms of law, well let's just say that the US government is way behind on real justice anymore. The law is written to protect the corporate interests.

Copyright and patent law is broken. It's totally broken. And corporate lobbyists with money and very specific interests want to make sure no politicians challenge their little cabal of self-preservation. And politicians happily accept this money and there's very little you can do about it.

I'm increasingly despondent at the state of our country right now, when stuff like this is actively happening, when our own government wants a kill switch on the Internet. It saddens me that we even need 1st amendment rights, but Jefferson's insistence of their inclusion was apparently the right choice. I know we're talking about specific sites here, but now we're getting into some serious territory here, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, CENSORSHIP. When the government is seizing sites like this, you know some businesses are just going to move offshore to avoid exactly the same problem. It'll happen quicker than you think.

Re:No, there is due process.

[camperdave]

That means someone in a judicial capacity has approved the seizure.

So what's to stop them from having a judge on the payroll to rubber stamp warrants?

Re:No, there is due process.

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Nothing at all, and that generally is what they do. But if someone rubber-stamps a warrant where there was no probable cause, you not only are likely to get the evidence excluded, you can sue the government for having violated your rights. So your pre-seizure due process may be mostly a formality, but if it's not done right, there are consequences.

Re:No, there is due process.

[Anonymous Coward]

If that power was misused and the warrant is bad, you have a very strong case for a lawsuit against the government for violating your constitutional rights. (Google "section 1983 lawsuits")

In terms of a right to appeal, you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself in court. You are entitled to appeal if the court gets it wrong--or even if they get it right.

And you are entitled to petition Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the President.

Fat lot of good those rights are doing. The US is still descending into a fascist police state.

Re:No, there is due process.

[the_arrow]

And you are entitled to petition Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the President.

Even non-US citizens?

Re:No, there is due process.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really Due Process? What about against vaccine companies? What about TSA/DHS/Viper abuse?

Do tell us where the fuck to go to get due process you stupid motherfucker. I hope your fucking account gets junked you fucking idiot.

Re:No, there is due process.

[anyGould]

Wrong. The US has both due process and a right to appeal. Comparing the situation in the US to that in Egypt is overgeneralizing in a way which is both incorrect and insultingly trivializing the troubles in those parts of the world that do not have US rights.

It is wrong people to compare the two, but not for the reason you're thinking. Egypt blocked off it's *own* country, which is undeniably inside it's realm of control. (It's their country, they can do what they want there). The only people really affected by Egypt's internet outage were Egyptian citizens.

The US efforts are multi-national - they're pushing their rule of law into other countries. The site discussed is in Spain. It's been found to be non-infringing in their court of law. By seizing the domain name, the US is showing a few simple truths:

1. They can't be trusted with control over the "generic" domains (.com, .org, etc).

2. They believe that the US rule of law extends everywhere they can reach, and that other jurisdictions are subservient. (Contrast: if .com was controlled by China, and they decided to "seize" microsoft.com or google.com, do you think the US would quietly twiddle their thumbs?)

In terms of a right to appeal, you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself in court. You are entitled to appeal if the court gets it wrong--or even if they get it right.

And you are entitled to petition Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the President.

And how much of a chance does a non-citizen have of getting their day in court, do you think? (Remember, this is a foreign country, getting rooked around just because a quirk of history gave the US control over the top-level domains)

Re:No, there is due process.

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Yes, even non-US Citizens. Congress and the President are much less likely to *care*, but you can still petition.

Re:No, there is due process.

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> And how much of a chance does a non-citizen have of getting their day in court, do you think? (Remember, this is a foreign country, getting rooked around just because a quirk of history gave the US control over the top-level domains)

We're not talking about a traffic court here, we're talking about a US Federal District Court. It will still be a little unfair for a foreigner, but it won't be a fly-by-night local parochial institution. Convince them the law is on your side, and you'll win whether you're a foreigner or not.

A non-citizen will of course face obstacles because they're a non-citizen, and it will be a harder case because someone can be painted as a big nasty foreigner stealing American Intellectual Property. But the outcome is by no means predetermined. The bigger problem is the expense and time associated with going to trial in a foreign legal system thousands of miles from where you live.

Re:No, there is due process.

[HiThere]

1) You didn't say anything about how muich this is likely to cost. Or what happens if you don't have that kind of money.
2) You didn't say anything about how long this is likely to take.
3) You didn't specify how one goes about appealing this, and demonstrating that one has standing.

FWIW, victims of this approach usually look at the costs of attempting to recover their property, and how long it's likely to take, and just write it off. Guilt or innocence are irrelevant, when the costs of defending yourself are more than you can afford.

P.S.: It's quite frequent for the impounded items to disappear with no official trace from the police evidence "locker". (Naturally cars aren't kept in a literal locker.) And in at least one state they are officially sold to finance more "police" activities. (Sorry, I'm not certain that it's a state, it could be a county or a city. I want to flag this Illinois, but I can't remember the original source, so I'm not sure.) But criminal charges aren't even necessarily ever filed. Or they may be filed and dropped, but the property continue to be held.

The details of this kind of thing tend to only come out when someone fights through the courts successfully to reclaim seized property, only to find that it's no longer available. Naturally this is a news story....but usually on page 5, so few people notice it.

Re:No, there is due process.

[Yakasha]

Wrong. The US has both due process and a right to appeal. Comparing the situation in the US to that in Egypt is overgeneralizing in a way which is both incorrect and insultingly trivializing the troubles in those parts of the world that do not have US rights.

Tell that to Jose Padilla, Anwar Al-Awlaki, and every gay US Citizen waiting for their marriage certificate, equal taxation, and deployment orders.

While you're waiting for them to pickup the phone, take a look at 18 U.S.C. 981 (b)(2). No warrant needed.

Re:No, there is due process.

[gnapster]

Holy crap, take a chill pill. I, too, think that due process here is dubious, but the fact remains that I woke up this morning with mod points, and now wish I hadn't burned through them so fast.

Re:No, there is due process.

[RogerWilco]

Wrong. The US has both due process and a right to appeal. Comparing the situation in the US to that in Egypt is overgeneralizing in a way which is both incorrect and insultingly trivializing the troubles in those parts of the world that do not have US rights.

Guatanamo Bay?

Re:This never happened under the Bush administrati

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, the media was SOOO in G.W.B.'s pocket. [facepalm]

Excuse me, you stupid fucking anonymous coward, but you might want to google the name "Judith Miller" and after that "the run-up to the Iraq War + media".

Then never come back here until you've spent some time thinking about what a dumb clown you are.

Seaze Away...

[Anonymous Coward]

And can I have the IPv4 address?

Seriously asshole

[djdevon3]

Seriously? You really had to post that link. What a dick. GTFO.

This keeps the US safe

[d6]

This keeps the US safe from the terrorists how exactly?

Change the name to 'The Department of Homeland Security and Corporate Enforcement' guys

Re:This keeps the US safe

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer to call it RSHA.

Re:This keeps the US safe

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the US doing this kind of thing that causes people to fly planes in to towers.

Correlated?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF has Copyrights to do with Homeland Security?

ICE jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know why U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is in the business of seizing domains? They should just stick to making suspected immigrants disappear in undocumented detention centers.

Re:ICE jurisdiction?

[breser]

ICE hosts The National IPR Coordination Center. The vast majority of their work is related to tracking down counterfeit goods that come in from other countries. Thus the reason why ICE hosts the coordination center. However, a variety of law enforcement agencies participate.

http://www.ice.gov/iprcenter/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intellectual_Property_Rights_Coordination_Center

This sounds familiar

[grilled-cheese]

Didn't the same thing happen to torrent-finder not long ago.

Mod parent troll

[Chaonici]

Link is a goatse site

Re:Mod parent troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Ban it for a while...this is not 4chan!

deliberately fracture the DNS

[evanism]

The DNS isn't free of political interference. So it is time to fracture the DNS away from the current regime.

It would seem that entire countries are on the verge of locking the entire system down anyway (Australian monitoring and NBN, Egypt, US Kill Switch) so why not anticipate it and use IPv6 as the ultimate mass obfuscation tool.

Build 90,000,000 "registers". Each machine or Ethernet card gets 16.9 bazzillion IPv6s allocated to it. "Register" X-gazillion of them with each of the Tor-like registers. The original registration is "deemed" to be authoritative and given a super huge uber crypto key with which to package up all the others for propagation and allow updates. Change of an arbitrary and previously "registered" domain, like example.com is propagated out and lives, essentially, forever. If a "register" is removed, or the example.com deleted, it loves on as a permanent undead/ghost.

As you can see, it is just the first off the cuff/top of head, but it permanently gets rid of registrars, governments, tripup-abilitiy, etc. The only way to take it out is to get the machine. Cloud it out to N-thousand cloud providers and make it indestructible.

Please free to critique. We need more and better ways to defeat a government who is no longer FOR THE PEOPLE.

Re:deliberately fracture the DNS

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it funny how the real abuses of power only started once a democrat entered the white house and apointed RIAA liars to the justice department.

Re:deliberately fracture the DNS

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just free from political interference, but

1. China (inadvertently) redirected traffic using DNS
2. The DoJ is legally redirecting traffic using DNS

I can't trust the DNS servers to give me correct information, so I'll have to make my own DNS. With blackjack. And hookers.

Re:deliberately fracture the DNS

[imric]

You are insane. Maybe you looked the other way because it was 'your team' before and they can do no wrong?

Re:deliberately fracture the DNS

[hardcache]

Your definition of the abuse of power is different from my own. Reagan: Iran Contra Affair - drugs for weapons Bush: Warrantless Wiretapping, Torture, Kidnapping and Detention, Abuses of the Patriot Act, Abuse of The Freedom of Information Act, Spying on Quakers, PETA, Greenpeace, ACLU, and the Arab American Anti-Defamation Committee, Abuse of the Material Witness Statute, Denying Academic Freedom to professors with different ideologues from the administration. Obama: Listening to the interests of business his administration shuts down sites that provide access to stolen property by using a provision of law that arguably allows the government to do exactly that which they are doing.

Jursidiction?

[Loki_666]

What the hell does the Department of Homeland Security have to do with copyright infringement anyway? Or is the department of fatherland homeland security allowed to do whatever it likes?

How?

[Meneth]

Never mind legal, how is it even technically possible to seize a domain without forcing the registrar?

A quick bit of research indicates that Afilias, an Ireland-based company with offices in Pennsylvania, is the top-level operator of the .org domain. They would be able to take over any .org domain they choose (or are forced to).

Re:How?

[gnapster]

Afilias is the registry operator of the TLD, not the registrar. They keep the authoritative list of domain name registrations. My hypothesis is that ICE went through GoDaddy, who was the registrar for both rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org.

Re:How?

[Meneth]

Except GoDaddy says they didn't even know about the seizure. Of course, they've been unreliable in the past, so they might be lying.

Re:This never happened under the Bush administrati

[Anonymous Coward]

Lose the sarcasm. Mass media LIED so that Bush Jr. seemed less criminal. Why isn't this common knowledge by now? For example, the BBC was executing a scripted 9/11 reporting sequence. How else could they have predicted WTC7 collapse?

(For the record, WTC7 was a building in New York that fell behind schedule, waiting for a plane that resisted a hijack attempt.)

Re:This never happened under the Bush administrati

[jpapon]

This never happened under the Bush administration.

So you're saying no website ever had their domain name seized under the Bush administration?

Seriously?

Nevermind that something like this pales in comparison to the Patriot act...

Re:Update

[Isaac Remuant]

Right now, both sites have been seized (I just tested) and the term rojadirecta on Google links to the IP in it's second result.

There's a message in the webpage that reads:
"Authorities from US "steal" our domain names rojadirecta.org and also rojadirecta.com!

We are currently in: www.rojadirecta.me, www.rojadirecta.es, www.rojadirecta.in.

Don't email the new .com, the new mail ends with .in.

Spread our new uncontroled (by the US gov) addresses."

Cookie hijacking?

[MtlDty]

When they hijack a domain like that, I presume they could then read the cookies of the visitors and from that potentially identify users? All this without any judicial oversight at all? Scary stuff.

Re:Cookie hijacking?

[gnapster]

When this was first announced, I remember looking at the source for the web page ICE was serving, and there was javascript that did, indeed, do some kind of logging. But the page that is being served now does not seem to have this payload.

Of course, that could be because this time I was surfing with wget, and before I was using Chrome. But I cannot imagine ICE going to that kind of trouble (Detecting the client and serving a different page) to conceal the logging.

I wonder....

[lazlo]

I wonder if that "well known image" is copyrighted?

So if I put it on *my* site, I'd be infringing their copyright.

And then they might take over my site.

And replace it with the same thing.

Hmmmmmmm.

Re:Google is able to stop DNS hijacking?

[Anonymous Coward]

*Sigh* I fell for it, knew I should have looked at the headers first.

Re:This never happened under the Bush administrati

[alexo]

Then never come back here until you've spent some time thinking about what a dumb clown you are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWweqP_ZWbg

Funny that they aren't accessible

[jimktrains]

It's funny that the site is just an image and not section 508 compliant. Can something be done about that? Can they be sued for not following the law?

Also, I'd like to see the warrants for all this but I don't have the time or money to follow through with a FOIA.

Did anyone else...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else expect that "well known image" to be goatse?

Re:Did anyone else...

[imric]

Yes.

Re:This never happened under the Bush administrati

[j_edge]

Wrong again, the government and mainstream media are both arms of the corporatocracy.

US government is still seizing domains

[Chaonici]

I figured this wasn't worth posting as a whole new story, so I figured I'd add a follow-up comment on this one.

The US government has seized several more domain names since I posted this story. A list:

* HQ-streams.com
* HQ-streams.net
* Atdhe.net
* Rojadirecta.com
* Rojadirecta.org
* Firstrow.net
* Ilemi.com
* Iilemi.com
* Iilemii.com
* Channelsurfing.net

These sites appear to be related to sporting event streaming, and by a marvelous coincidence, the Super Bowl is this weekend.

Source: http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-seizes-sports-streaming-sites-in-super-bowl-crackdown-110202

Do we know what this is really about?

[hardcache]

A site dedicated to providing access to stolen goods is and should be illegal. Imagine if what you did in your career was suddenly stolen and distributed by thieves. Your company would no longer hire and be forced to downsize and cut costs. In my company 20,000 people would lose their jobs if thieves opened shop and provided our stolen goods. That is 20,000 families being wiped out or impacted - lower salaries, fewer career opportunities, layoffs, and stagnant growth or declines. It is really a horrible thing to do when you think of the millions of unemployed today.

Re:Do we know what this is really about?

[St.Creed]

Whether or not the site infringes on copyright is still under discussion, and so far they've won two legal victories. But the main issue is not that someone is enforcing the closure of a website through the courts. It is that apparently, all those over-broad powers given to the Department of Homeland Security are not used for Homeland Security, but enforcing copyright rules even when the judge rules otherwise.

Even worse, they didn't even receive a warning. Nor did the registrar. So they couldn't even argue this in court. If you don't consider that a problem, please do the unspeakable and actually try to read the article. It helps to understand the issue.

Feeding the Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the US doing this kind of thing that causes people to fly planes in to towers.

Yes, because Killing oneself, several thousand innocent people, and causing millions of dollars in property damage is of course the ONLY way to protest against something, or cause change in governmental policies. This is ESPECIALLY true in a closed and stifled society as exists in the U.S. /Sarcasm

Duh...

[mevets]

This isn't about royalties for some pansy singer or hollywood sodomite. This is about FOOTBALL - real American stuff. These sports-is-just-for-enjoyment evil-doers need to be stopped before they destroy all that is great about America. If you can't see that, well maybe your demonic nickname should be seized too.

How Slashdotters Could Fix This

[Anonymous Coward]

Might a-smarter-than-I slashdotter simply figure out a way to create a list of seized domain names by the DHS, the ip address of the real site and then make that googleable and queryable so as to mitigate the stupidity of this misguided and morally questionable program of the US govt? It would be really cool if a script monitored google or the like to auto-update the list every time the DHS seizes another domain name... And maybe a browser extension that recognizes the "notice of seizure" page DHS replaces it with, then automatically searches said db for the relevant ip and even provides a button to take you there via the ip address? Ideally of course this should be done by someone outside the US and hosted/dns'd etc outside the US...no idea if this would be illegal for a US citizen to do, but if it was hosted/dns'd in the US they'd probably be able to eff with it. Of course, IDEALLY, the US gov't would recognize that this is a stupid overreaction to copyright infringement issues, particularly where the only "infringement" is providing links to something else... but the first ideal seems realizable while the second would require a sane Act of Congress. Not holding my breath, despite Sen. Wyden's good intentions. And one even might make the project break even selling banner ads on the site...

Re: What has music piracy got to do with the DHS?

[Anonymous Coward]

The seizure banner says it is illegal to pirate movies and music..., But why is that enough to use DHS authority to seize domains?

Re:.com "not controlled by the US"- anyone know mo

[gnapster]

And you, in turn, are my hero. I come to slashdot for the wit and class.

As to your original question... I see on InterNIC's web site that three players are discussed: VeriSign Global Registry Services, Public Interest Registry, and Afilias. I don't really understand their roles, but I believe that verisign is responsible for .com, .net, and .edu domains while Public Interest Registry is in charge of .org. This is what I discern when I run whois queries on (for instance) rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org, respectively. However, what I also notice is that the two domains have godaddy.com as registrar.

I cannot tell from these articles if the DHS is approaching the registrar (GoDaddy) or the authorities (VeriSign & Public Interest Registry). Or maybe they are approaching InterNIC, who has oversight over these companies, or even ICANN itself. Maybe this has been covered somewhere else. I'm sure that if the warrants were made public, it would be clearer. Thing is, I recall (when this domain seizure trend first appeared) that GoDaddy was mentioned, and I think it would be very interesting to see a list of the various registrars for all the domains which have been seized up to this point.

Hum. Just looked a little harder, and it seems that none of the domains in this story were GoDaddy. But it still seems reasonable to me that the DHS might go to the registrar rather than some higher authority.

I don't know how much of that you already knew. Some of it is new research, for me. Food for thought.

DDoS attack

[b0s0z0ku]

How long before someone nails the server hosting the banner, leaving Homeland Security with a fat bill for bandwidth?

Re:.com "not controlled by the US"- anyone know mo

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Thanks.

I guess the lesson is to diversify - get a .com or .org, but also get a national domain or two, and mention each domain somewhere on your webpages. Not a big mention, but just something so that if one gets seized, enough readers will know to just change s/\.org/\.ie/ in each domain.

[Ciaran checks this strategy....]

Actually, that might not work so good either. RojaDirecta also had a .me, .in, and .es. The last two aren't working :-/ The .me still is.

I wonder if the US govt has control over all domains by some way, or if the USA had to send take down requests to the local authorities in India and Spain.

When their .org and .com disappeared, they focussed on their .in. They must have thought that was the surest one. I'll check again in a few weeks to see if .me is good or if it also disappears in the near future.