Slashdot Mirror
JotForm.com Gets Shut Down SOPA-Style
itwbennett writes "In a post on the company blog, JotForm.com cofounder Aytekin Tank alerts users that 'a US government agency has temporarily suspended' the jotform.com domain. He explains that it is part of an 'ongoing investigation' of content posted to its site by a user. Although which user and what content haven't yet been disclosed, there is speculation about forms used for a phishing attack on a South African bank. JotForm hosts over two million user-generated forms, and uses software to block fraudulent accounts (65,000 so far), so you can see there's plenty of opportunity for mischief."
this involved a court order.
It works for me...
A lot of people haven't heard of Slashdot. Would that make it right if it were taken offline on the arbitrary say-so of some government functionary?
Dog is my co-pilot.
away from the authority of a shoot first ask questions later country.
It was my understanding that in the United States, law enforcement (of any kind) is obligated to use the "least intrusive means" they reasonably can to effect an arrest or seizure.
In cases like this, blocking the domain name is so obviously the opposite of "least intrusive", I wonder if they have grounds to prosecute under 18 US 242. I know I would consider it, if this were done to me or my company.
A legitimate business was shut down globally for an unknown length of time because one of their customers was doing something wrong. Instead of working with the company to stop it like, oh, I don't know, every other internet business ever, they shot first and asked questions later.
It's the incompetence we've all come to expect from law enforcement that either don't understand or don't care about the consequences of their actions as soon as a computer's involved.
First they came for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I didn't like Julian Assange or approve of Wikileaks' methods, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for MegaUpload. I'm not a computer pirate, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came after JotForm. I hadn't even heard of JotForm, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came after me and my blog. There was no one left to speak up....
Does this
They host two million forms created by 700,000 users, so plenty of people have heard of them.
Did you say "insightful" or "inciteful"?
Even if the owners are not guilty of negligence, which it appears they are not (65K forms removed), this sort of arbitrary, no-warrant, no-subpoena, no due-process can absolutely ruin a business.
There is no way the Feds can make up for this; CIO's will say, "Well, I guess we shouldn't use them - we might not have access to our data."
Check your premises.
Let's not say "some government" when it's always the US government.
Please mark .com as depreciated.
And people wonder why we have a 2nd Amendment....
It's there to protect the 1st.
I thought this was EXACTLY the worry that Facebook, Google, Wikimedia, etc. had. The worry was that a user posting "problem material" could get an entire site pulled without a court order. It looks like this is EXACTLY what happened here. (Though I am still unsure if a court order was made or not. It seems like there was no court order.)
And how many CIO's will say, pull our forms from them - we can't guarantee access to our data?
It just takes once to do massive damage to reputation. And for data management / cloud companies, reputation of perfect availability of a user's data is absolutely everything.
Lose that, and you're done.
Check your premises.
I think you meant deprecated, and .com is not the only one.
It's always the US government because the US government is in complete control over the DNS for the entire planet. If that is what you mean by shut down.
As for blocking, not only the US government does that. It is immensely popular in a lot of countries to do so, and most notably, TPB is being blocked by BREIN recently.
If anything the current DNS system, along with the root servers, needs to be marked as deprecated and replaced with something else.
All the talk of what happens when your data is in the cloud and the business is sold or shutters itself, here is another example. Not only do you have to worry about your dates security and availability for those reasons, now the feds can shut down a service you may use for god knows what important aspects of your business, but you can bet your perfectly legal and confidential business records are now available to the feds sans-warrant. Yeah, cloud computing is the end-all be-all. Think again, get the buzz words out of your head, and your head out of the 'cloud'.
Silence is a state of mime.
A lot of people haven't heard of Slashdot. Would that make it right if it were taken offline on the arbitrary say-so of some government functionary?
Remember, this is the slashdot audience you are addressing - you could get answers of 'Yes', 'No', '[CENSORED]' or some reference to an old television show.
Agree, though, this is only a little island, like so many others. Were it suddenly to become known to certain flash-mob types it could suffer it's very own Slashdot Effect.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Let's not say "some government" when it's always the US government.
Which government do you mean? The grand and glorious one of "We The People" or the one pwned by 1%?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is news because it means that any cloud or SaaS site that businesses or non-profit orgs depend on can be shutdown with no recourse for the innocent users. This shows that it is not just users of file sharing sites like MegaUpload (that may live on the edge) that are in danger, but any site (with only the best intentions) but with many users,( some possibly violating the sites usage terms) is at risk. I for one used JotForms for several small sites where the application was not critical, but it could have been. When Intuit (quickbooks online) or Sales Force sites are suspended, it will be no more tragic than this is for some non-proffits and small businesses. I have empathy for the owners and users of the 2 Million or so innocent forms, and so should at least a few slashdotters IMHO.
I would like to add, "A lot of people haven't heard of Slashdot. Would that make it right if it were taken offline on the arbitrary say-so of some government functionary..." and based on the actions of a minority of users? Jotform actively tried to keep illegal activity away. This is no Megaupload.
Here, let me introduce you to regulatory capture.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Copyrights, patents and all other government regulations and money counterfeiting and taxes and laws and wars that go beyond what the authorised by the people via the Constitution to the government are all tools of the totalitarianism.
Sure, YOU may believe that some of what government is pushing is good, so YOU may believe that there is a line that will not be crossed, and you will get something for nothing from the government. You think that government will stop its abuse of power once that abuse helps YOU and it will not be taken further.
Of-course you have to be a fool to believe that.
Just like in the previous SOPA story and every story - I have a perfect metaphor for this I think: government is a noose on the necks of the people.
There is another part needed to hang somebody - a noose and a chair to drop one off it.
Debt can act as that chair.
But so can regulations and laws and taxes and all of this stuff, including copyrights and patents. I am using economic hanging as a metaphor, of-course eventually there will be actual hanging (NDAA and drone strikes against anybody on the planet without a trial), again, governments do not stop abusing their power half-way. They do not stop only where it is convenient for YOU.
You can't handle the truth.
1) Upload infringing content to site.
2) Alert copyright holders (or their "AAgents") to infringing content.
3) Wait until site gets shutdown.
Seems like you could wrap a business model around this as a gun-for-hire...
What is interesting to me is that large websites, such as Facebook and Youtube would probably get a second look by GoDaddy or whatever law enforcement agent dealt with this case. tiny websites with no users are not a threat to anyone and fly under the radar. The way things are set up, the companies who get hurt the most are growing companies with good products, exactly the type we want to help our economy!
We're only getting one side of the story so it's impossible to tell if there was reasonable cause for what appears to be a search of the database. Per updates from JotForm the suspension has been lifted.
A legitimate business was shut down globally for an unknown length of time because one of their customers was doing something wrong
Suppose someone used a Toyota automobile as getaway car after robbing a bank. Certainly you don't think that Toyota should be allowed to continue operating if their products are being used in this way?
So what you want to see is news reports of someone shooting government officials for cutting off the DNS for his website?
Let's not say "some government" when it's always the US government.
Please mark .com as depreciated.
I don't know, the UK seems to be getting into shutting down websites too.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Let us shoot the government, using INTERNET BULLETS
Short answer: YES
Goddamn right.
I'm a U.S. citizen, and I'm so fucking sick and tired of the shit my government is doing lately, particularly this shit. Since we obviously can't vote our way out of this crap (since all players are bought long before they even get their fucking name on a ballot), what's next? Half the people in this country don't even care that their rights are being shit upon and just want to go watch NASCAR or Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The rest are split between the people that still have faith in their government (although I can't see how, not anymore) and those that think the whole fucking thing is FUBAR and gave up long ago.
This country is going to end up in civil war again. If I were a foreign business that had any type of connection to the United States, I would get the fuck out ASAP.
First they came for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I didn't like Julian Assange or approve of Wikileaks' methods, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for MegaUpload. I'm not a computer pirate, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came after JotForm. I hadn't even heard of JotForm, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came after me and my blog. There was no one left to speak up.
And then they kicked down my front door, and I had no way to tell anyone.
Check your premises.
Not really. It's the same problem of law enforcement taking the kill 'em all and let God sort them out approach. They had the option of asking an apparently legitimate business to kill the few accounts that were a problem, but instead went directly to the nuclear option, exactly what SOPA sought to enable on a larger scale.
BS!
They took down the whole domain, instead of the form(s) in question. They caused grief to some part of the up to 2 MILLION legitimate business users. The company made it clear they were fully willing to cooperate. Yet this agency just disregarded that and shut down the whole domain. Calling it SOPA-style may not be an exact comparison, but it is by the means SOPA is well know to have tried to advance ... by defying due process.
When the police close down a store due to a robbery, it is just that one store that is closed and this is done while the police are on scene actually investigating.
What actually happened would be the brick and mortar equivalent of the police having the store's electricity cut off (so they can't function), and their store front boarded up (so no one can see the store signs), and then when asked about why this is done, telling the store own they'll get around to looking into it in a few days.
It it only fortunate that jotform.com did have another domain name that this agency probably just didn't realize was usable. Given that they were able to activate the jotform.net domain, it's clear the actual servers were not seized. So there wasn't even an investigate (as in trying to look for other forms that may be at issue).
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Well, which is it? It sure looks more like malice to me. Now, will you argue I should follow Hanlon's razor and just attribute it to stupidity? It's one or the other.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Go Daddy has a history of pulling registrations without notification to domain owners. Remember seclists.org and familyalbum.com? Those domains were redirected because of third party complaints. The complaints were not even made by law enforcement. The GoDaddy TOS expressly allows them to suspend service at their discretion and they do it at the first sign of trouble.
I'm not defending GoDaddy in the least, but people doing business with them should be aware of their history and policies.
Where would we be if Wheel had hid her round rock in a cave instead of showing everyone how it rolls?
Can you please explain that statement with a car analogy?
vi +
SOPA/PIPA would have allowed takedowns without due process.
Which is exactly what happened here.
Check your premises.
So that would be pretty much the entire government of the US (and Canada where I live) then?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
This country is going to end up in civil war again.
Probably not. I doubt one region of the country is so enamored with the federal government that it would be willing to take up arms and battle the rest of the nation to defend it. The first civil war was fought over states rights, among other things, and there was a pretty clear line between the industrial north and the agricultural south. Our present day issues are not so much a battle of conflicting ideologies and regional economies, but the increasing oppressiveness and financial abuse of the common man by the ruling elite. Yes, that old chestnut. So this is less likely to turn into another Civil War (or War Between the States, if you will), and more something resembling the American Revolution, if anything.
You drive a taxi for a living.
While carrying your passengers to an important meeting, you are pulled over. The officer takes the tires off your vehicle without telling you why, and only returns them when a large crowd of people start muttering and taking pictures.
Unfortunately, the same crowd also uses your taxi service - or used to, until they discovered that they cannot rely upon your ability to get them from point A to point B because J Random Law Enforcement Official might take your tires again, and they'd be stuck until he decided to give them back.
Check your premises.
The issue is about the lack of due process. SOPA/PIPA just want to make due process totally defunct (without following the Constitutional amendment process).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What evidence do you offer that there were another 65K malignant accounts/forms? Or is this just speculation to support a draconian action by an increasingly intrusive and rights-oblivious government?
Furthermore, one might well argue that any sort of free and/or anonymous services should be shut down by your logic. That includes email, blogs, websites, social media accounts - after all, any and all of those could be used for unethical ends.
Check your premises.
A government should fear it's people, a people should not fear it's government. I'll let you figure out where that paraphrasing comes from.
Om, nomnomnom...
So I can only hope that maybe this news gets them more noticed to compensate them for the losses incurred as a result of a domain registrar and/or US agency (allegedly the Secret Service) that fits somewhere between malicious or stupid (depending on which way Hanlon's Razor swings). Unfortunately, the service they provide seems to be more oriented to small businesses rather than to the geeks that would be reading this at Slashdot and other techie sources.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As pissed as I am about the anti Government freakout by the libertards on the internet, THIS is what SOPA would do. Unilateral shutdown of sites someone doesn't like.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Yeah - if they can shut down this site like this without anything resembling due process, what's to stop them from shutting down Azure or AWS because someone says that a customer has pirated music or the plans for a WMD somewhere in those clouds?
Check your premises.
> Please mark .com as depreciated.
Depreciated, as in has lost value...
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they rarely are.
The problem with ongoing investigations, particularly with international ongoing investigations, is that transparency can work against you in big ways. So I really think that the outrage at the US Federal Government is really kind of baseless at this point. They made a request and... Godaddy complied.
However, it's pretty goddamn clear GoDaddy doesn't give two shits about their customers. They should be ashamed of what they do.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You are pulling numbers out of thin air. Jotform actively pulled fraudulent accounts. They didn't turn a blind eye to it.
You are assuming computers have psychic mind powers to determine the intent of people using the service. The company was running a Bayesian phishing filter, but even this wasn't perfect. What do you expect them to do?
That has nothing to do with the fact that an entire website was nuked off the face of the internet without any judicial oversight whatsoever.
If I get stopped and searched for no reason whatsoever, when the cop decides to let me go because he had no reason to stop me in the first place, should I just say "Well, he let me go, so all's well that end's well"? Come on. That's retarded.
There's a reason why we require court orders before police are just allowed to do whatever they fuck they want, and situations like this are precisely why.
The content industry claimed that we needed SOPA/PIPA to take down these horrible sites or they'd lose millions upon billions upon trillions and zombies would rise from the grave (or some such... I tend to lose track of their doomsday scenarios if Technology X isn't stopped). We don't have SOPA and yet MegaUpload and JotForm.com were taken down just fine. This is, of course, putting aside whether or not MegaUpload or JotForm *SHOULD* have been taken down. Clearly, though, they have the capability to take sites down as they see fit so why do they need it codified in law?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Think again. I doubt enough people are so upset with the Federal government that they have a snowball's chance in hell of making any headway against it. So what's it going to look like? Orwell's "boot stomping on a human face, forever."
There is an "or" in there that makes all the difference. What it actually says is:
"... or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens..."
So it actually applies to:
"... the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States"
OR to:
"... different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens..."
So it's deprivation of rights OR discrimination. And while IANAL, I have looked up cases and that is how the court has consistently interpreted it.
I get to know all kinds of websites I've never heard before.
Remember that 1/3 of our nation was against the revolution and 1/3 didn't care. A small, vocal minority can change history.
You know the MPAA takes down legit videos on YOUTUBE that do not even infringe on its content. Google admitted this but they were powerless to stop them or else they would sue and no longer would partner advertising with them.
This and other stories of the FBI simply taking servers with data on them from ISPs away and shutting down businesses whose lives depend on it is SCARY. You do not just take a factory away because someone might have smoked some weed in the parking lott. That business will be dead within 48 hours long after the investigation.
This is insanity and shows that the MPAA/RIAA/Feds were planning SOPA style raids like this all along and just were hoping to get this ruber stamped to prevent outrage and any legal challenges.
http://saveie6.com/
Mostly just the conservatives. They've been trying to reenact Laisseiz-Faire ever since the 1930s when we threw that broken shit out for causing a depression.
Fast-forward to now: they caused another depression (by repealing Glass-Steagall in 1998 and removing most of the other regs when George Dumbya Shrub and the republican congress were doing things unchecked 2001-2007), and they're currently trying to blame the depression they caused on the black guy.
Clearly not from someone who has a command of the apostrophe.
The possessive form of "its" has no apostophe; you only use "it's" when forming a contraction for "it is"
Examples:
The dog will sleep well tonight after it spent all day chasing its tail.
It's [it is] never a good idea to order pineapple on your pizza.
And people wonder why we have a 2nd Amendment... It's there to protect the 1st.
One might take that attitude more seriously, if the last decade's expansion of (US) government snooping and whittling away at civil liberties had resulted in an uprising. But I didn't hear a peep out of the 2nd Amendment fans when the "Patriot" act was passed, I didn't hear squat from the gun nuts when government agents were swarming across the country violating laws in the aftermath of 9/11, and I didn't see "right to bear arms" partisans telling the government that if a single person was detained by the government without charges and access to the courts, there would be serious trouble. I didn't see militias marching and saying "an injury to one is an injury to all" when workers' rights were attacked in Wisconsin, or immigrants were attacked in Arizona. Near as I can tell, mostly the people who like to talk about the 2nd Amendment don't give a crap if oppression is carried out in the name of patriotism, or attacking anybody who's a different skin color, language speaker, or religion than themselves. Because if not, where the hell were they, when they were needed?
JotForm now seems to work from Canada.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
This would be like the cops shutting down an entire block of storage units because someone was storing illicit drugs in one of the units.
If this site was being used for phishing scams the right thing is to notify the owner of the site and ask them to remove the content in question (and to provide copies of that content to the appropriate law enforcement agency if necessary)
"Extremely" compared to what/who?
How about stop providing a free service for scammers? Charge a dollar or two and let the criminals find some other naive startup to exploit.
This coming from a person who refuses to even sign up for an account at slashdot, let alone pay slashdot any money.
I guess you are admitting to be a scammer.
I hope you get thrown in prison for your internet scamming!
I also don't know what planet you live on, but here on Earth, criminals can afford a few dollars.
In some ways, I agree with your point.
But I've since re-imagined the War between the states since we had the "Tea Party" march on Washington so that Wall Street tycoons could get more tax breaks. Oh, and so that history books wouldn't bring up inconvenient facts of history about the founding fathers -- because delusional hero worship is so very healthy...
I now think that the South was NOT REALLY fighting for states rights. The Civil War was really a class war. The 1% who had slaves, wanted the rest of the workers who had to compete with slave labor to say; "Hey, you Northern oppressors -- we want to import cheap goods and not have to buy American, because we can't compete by selling good not made by slave labor."
The Slave Masters wanted everyone in the South to say; "WE are being harmed by the North economically" -- when really, slavery probably reduced wages for MOST Southerners.
>> So if there is another civil war -- it will be between the people fighting for the Common Good, and those people who are convinced that they are destined to be a CEO.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
It's not just JotForms. Google is now the leading site being exploited to host phishing pages. Google has reasonable defenses against phishing for their "sites" product. However, Google doesn't seem to have those protections on their document and spreadsheet products. Here's a fake login form hosted by Google. That's been up since 2010. Here's a fake login page hosted as a Google spreadsheet. Google allows unlimited HTML in a spreadsheet, which means it can be abused in this way. We have a full list, if anyone is interested.
"formbuddy.com" and "surveymonkey.com" can also be abused in this way. Formbuddy seems to kick phishing pages off quickly. Surveymonkey, not so good at this.
If you offer free hosting, and don't have aggressive anti-phishing controls in place, you will be pwned.
Right on the money. I wish I had mod points to give you.
The Lost Cause may seem romantic, but anyone who doubts that the Civil War was really about slavery needs to read the declaration of secession:
They had to do some pretty disgusting things against the third that didn't care, the legislatures were controlled by the third that did care and there was somewhere for the third who didn't care to go.
Also there was a lot of money to be made by getting out of British domination. eg land speculators who were pissed at the tyrant wanting to treat all his subjects equally as well as the laws favouring the established British businesses. Some very articulate people with presses on the side of those who cared as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
August 1-2, 1946, in Athens, Georgia.
No, they broke into the local armory for their weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
and they're currently trying to blame the depression they caused on the black guy.
To be fair, having a black president and having our credit rating subsequently drop doesn't exactly help Obama's case.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
A state is a monopoly on violence exercised over territory. I'll let you figure out where THAT paraphrasing is from (Hint: it's from someone who didn't own slaves).
And way to quote Dick Analfroth, grandparent. What are we gonna do? March to the doors of the "government" and start shooting government employees because they handled an online identity theft case indelicately? Hint: before you start whipping your libertarian dick out, make sure there's a reason to, and maybe also make sure it's big enough that you won't be embarrassed.
Are you fucking kidding?
1/3 is a small minority?
"But this one goes to 11!"
It's always the US government because the US government is in complete control over the DNS for the entire planet
that's just what Americans want the rest of the world to think
http://www.isoc.org/briefings/020/
http://www.root-servers.org/
There is one nuance missing: the random law enforcement officer takes your tires because some random company said one of your passengers did something they don't like and claim that by providing their transport, you are facilitating their 'infringing' activities.
Am I the only one thinking that temporarily migrating from the suspended .com to a .net domain is probably the most stupid thing they could do? Seriously, switching from one controlled TLD to another on the same "jurisdiction"...
It's not uncommon for sites to get hacked (one every 3.5 seconds is the current rate), and in some cases this is so they can host a phishing form (which is why the US government took down JotForm.com).
Given this draconian approach to removing some phishing forms, and given that's it's tough to completely stop hackers, it's clear that this could happen to any site, or to cloud services that host your content under a shared domain (maybe even Tumblr or Pinterest).
The only protection is not to host sites with US-based registrars.
I would hope that EU-based registrars for .com etc should be safer from this sort of action - can anyone confirm? Failing that you could go for a country domain.
Actually, it would shut down all toyotas on the road everywhere too. Fun times.
Briliant! Charge a dollar or two for a service companies on non US domains provide for free... .com .net etc. as their primary domain and be free from that madness for a little while (or forever if other countries say "Duck you" to the US's repeated try at imposing ACTAs to everyone).
No, what will happen is that people will stop using
I am not a number, I am a free man!
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Except that the credit rating agency explicitly said that the reason they reduced the credit rating was because of the grandstanding Republicans did against raising the national debt limit.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Cause last time I checked, it didn't. What the hell is this?
What happens if you say "I do not consent to a search of my person" - dont they have to provide just cause then?
All this can go on Freenet and SOPA / PIPA / CHUPA PINGA style legislation can go pack sand. Freenet isn't susceptible to some of the legal attacks so far presented, hence why there is nasty shit there always. But as a medium for free exchange of information, it is bar none, due to that inability to be censored! Sad that more don't hook up. But SOPA / PIPA and the shutdown of file sharing sites will insure that Freenet gets more users.
http://freenetproject.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
WARNING: Offensive content will also be found on Freenet. You'll know which, as they don't hide themselves. Don't browse to those sites...
I know! I get so angry when....wait. Keeping Up With The Kardashians is still on the air?
It might look like cruel move, but in these times fast reaction like this is the only way to protect the artists. Of course, these filthy pirates are now crying all kinds of bullshit like that they didn't host files but forms, but we all know that the site was used mainly for piracy.
Well there was a little thing called the "civil rights movement" in the '60s and '70s. You may have heard about it.
The civil rights movement was a non-violent direct action protest organisation.
The people using guns were the authorities, not the civil rights protesters.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you're not on the side of labour unions and immigrants (and who said anything about them being illegal?) you are on the side of the power elite, and your talk about defending freedom with your guns is just bullshit.
You're part of the problem, not the potential solution.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Surfin' in the CSA (Corporate States of America)!!!
Surfin' in the CSA (Corporate States of America)! Yay!
Since we obviously can't vote our way out of this crap (since all players are bought long before they even get their fucking name on a ballot), what's next?
If you're not interested in pre-bought politicians, don't vote democrat or republican. Vote independent, libertarian, green. Talk all of your friends into voting for yourself. Anything but voting for the plutocrats.
If at all possible, find candidates that are interested in real campaign finance reform.
The thing about car analogies is that every single time you make one, there will ALWAYS be a backseat driver ;)
Check your premises.
The passage I quoted is actually from a 1852 document, "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." I think it's representative, but I was wrong to describe it as the declaration of secession and I believe it's important to correct the error.
And they came for Massey Energy, which instead of a criminal trial is receiving a (tax deductible) fine.
And they didn't come for Union Carbide ... not their jurisdiction, sorry.
And they came for the meat packing plants ... they took the undocumented workers, and left the MRSA and O157:H7 E. coli in place.
And they came for San Diego Gas and Electric for causing a 200,000 acre fire, and decided the ratepayers (not the stock holders) will pay the fine.
Jotform's webforms made it easy for script kiddies to launch their 'own' phishing attacks. Whether or not jotform was involved with many of the actual dollars lost to phishing, they were extremely visible because any annoying person could use jotform to cut and paste together an attack.
Places like Youtube have had way more than 5000 fraudulent accounts. Jotform got hurt because they're not big enough to make GoDaddy think before pulling the DNS plug, but too large to fly under the radar. This is an example of how our legal system helps huge corporations with lots of power while growing startups get bit.
So what you want to see is news reports of someone shooting government officials for cutting off the DNS for his website?
Yes! That might finally make some of those narrow-minded censors thinks about their actions.
And they came for Union Carbide. I don't leak toxic gas so I didn't speak up.
You mean, you never enjoy a nice serving of tacos and beans?
You do not just take a factory away because someone might have smoked some weed in the parking lott.
But you do limit bars' opening hours because a couple of people, who might have been patrons, fought in the parking lott...
Can you please explain that statement with a car analogy?
Two people smoke a joint in their small red Toyota IQ while being parked sideways in a forbidden spot.
Police notice, and ticket all red Toyota IQ's of the county!
Your country is moving to an oligopoly, where the large organizations will run the country, and run your lives. The USA democratic beliefs of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, will be historical dreams that are to be ignored. Forget your constitution, it only gets in the way of the wealthy companies
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Take note of this: "...the Secret Service still isn't talking, returning a bland and meaningless statement to press requests: 'We are aware of the incident and we're reviewing it internally to make sure all the proper procedures and protocols were followed.' "
When the company contacted the Secret Service, asking why their site was down, "the agent told me she is busy and she asked for my phone number, and told me they will get back to me within this week".
To date they still have no explanation and no court order concerning the take-down of their site. Even if there were a court order, there is zero reason not to contact the business and provide them a chance to cushion the effects for their legitimate customers. This sort of behavior is irresponsible. Clearly, court orders, due process and formal procedures are for wimps, not the elite *drum roll* Secret Service.
I hope JotForm can afford to file a court case over this. This sort of thing can do immense damage to a company's reputation, and someone in the Secret Service needs a slap upside the head.
In any case, as others have observed, any serious Internet company needs to avoid all TLDs controlled in the USA. Sure, register a .com address, but use it to forward to your real site, hosted under a different TLD - and make it clear to users that the non-.com TLD is the correct one.
Unrelated to the Internet, but nonetheless relevant: About 10 years ago I was with a small European company that was marketing a new ERP system to small companies. Our attorney told us flat-out: do not sell to anyone in the USA. The legal system is so screwed that it just isn't worth the risk - the laws are impossible, the customers sue at the drop of the hat, etc, etc. To underscore this, any sort of legal or liability insurance we looked at specifically excluded coverage for business transacted with US customers. It appears that things have only gotten worse...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Perhaps because raising the national debt limit instead of reducing spending is fiscally irresponsible?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The bill that ultimately "repealed" the Act was brought up in the Senate by Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and in the House of Representatives by Jim Leach (R-Iowa) in 1999. The bills were passed by a Republican majority, basically following party lines by a 54–44 vote in the Senate[15] and by a bi-partisan 343–86 vote in the House of Representatives.[16] After passing both the Senate and House the bill was moved to a conference committee to work out the differences between the Senate and House versions. The final bill resolving the differences was passed in the Senate 90–8 (one not voting) and in the House: 362–57 (15 not voting). The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999.[17]
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act
You mean the bill passed by a bi-partisan support and signed into law by a Democrat president?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Hasn't this already happened before. There is but one post that has ever been removed from /.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Whether it is or not, that's not the primary thing that prompted the downgrade:
--Standards and Poor's, quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_government_credit-rating_downgrade,_2011
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Except that the credit rating agency explicitly said that the reason they reduced the credit rating was because of the grandstanding Republicans did against raising the national debt limit.
This is what I responded to. The whole problem was that neither party could agree on what to cut. Both parties were stubborn, and then near the end, the Repubs did not want to raise the debt ceiling, which is the proper course, the spending should be lowered, not just spend more money. Both parties are just as guilty for using "political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy", but it was the Repubs who tried to say no to raising the debt ceiling, as that is the wrong thing to do when spending is so high.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?