Homeland Security seizes music blog domains

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/business/media/14music.html

by stumm • 16 years ago

109 82 16 years ago

nytimes.com

netaddict• 16 years ago

Another reason for developing distributed DNS system http://p2pdns.baywords.com/

Groxx10• 16 years ago

I'd love to agree, but I don't see a way out of what seems to be a fundamental problem with any such system:

How does the system decide who gets domain-X in cases of conflicts? And there will be conflicts, and malicious ones at that, so there must be a resolution technique, and it must not be decided in each case by end-users - they have no way of knowing quickly / accurately enough, and it would prevent the average person from being able to use it. Plus, it could simply be spammed with billions+ of claims, shutting down the usefulness of the entire system, especially if it's first-come first-served.

Meanwhile, if there are any higher-priority deciders, they can be manipulated similar to how DNS hosts are in this circumstance (or certificate authorities, in the https world). So it must be distributed... it strikes me as a paradox.

edit: the only way out being that a distributed DNS could be a mirror of official ones... but what happens when domain-X gets seized, and then sold to another, assuming it's a legitimate purchase for non-phishing reasons? And how do you resolve domain ownership transfers - they look the same as seizures, from a data standpoint, except they don't have a big "Your Gov't Wuz Heer" stamp on them.

joe_the_user9• 16 years ago

Yes, I think mirror+specific alternatives...

In fact, the simplest would be "mirror + backtrack".

If a given site had an earlier dns entry, the alternative dns would point to that earlier entry as the second alternative. If you think the second alternative is "really it", you can make that permanent for you.

It wouldn't solve everything but it would make a variety seizure approach not work well in the short term.

You'd still have trouble if you lost your ip address(es) but this would mean seizure would need multiple points of failure.

Moreover, this would need only a minimum of centralization. A browser plugin to "find hidden/seized sites" might actually be trivial to produce. Name it something catchy. Anyone would to work on this?

A1kmm• 16 years ago

It depends on what your objectives are. If they are to ensure that no single legal jurisdiction can force a domain that has already been issued to stop working by taking actions in that jurisdiction (except via the domain owner), that is easily achievable without major problems.

E.g. the system could have the following components:

1) A centralised issuer (CI) of time-stamped certificates for a TLD, which certify someone is the owner of a domain. Certificates are only issued for domains that don't exist yet. The public key is in the certificate, and the private key is kept by the owner.

2) A network of TLD nameserver operators (TLDNSO) for the TLD. TLDNSOs have stable IP addresses which are distributed to client software in advance - and there is a centrally agreed on list. TLDNSOs are geographically dispersed, and spread across many different legal jurisdictions.

3) All certificates from the CI are sent to all TLDNSOs. Certificates without a timestamp that corresponds within a limited threshold to the time the certificate was received are rejected, as are certificates for domains when another certificate for the same domain is held by the TLDNSO.

4) TLDNSOs accept domain resource record (RR) updates - e.g. nameserver records - from anyone, provide they are signed with the private key that only the domain owner has. Likewise for the equivalent of WHOIS details.

5) Domain owners can sign a transfer certificate, which includes the public key of the new owner, and is signed with their private key, and sending the transfer certificate to the new owner. The new owner sends it to all TLDNSOs, who will from then on accept requests with the new owner's key, rather than the old one.

6) Clients can query TLDNSOs using DNS or DNSSEC, or using a new protocol which lets them inspect the certificates from the CI and any ownership changes. Clients using the new protocol query several TLDNSOs in several jurisdictions - there could be a fairly complex set of conflict resolution rules, but one of the most important would be that if two CI certificates were received, more TLDNSOs get queried, and the most frequent answer is the one that is accepted.

This makes most kinds of attacks on existing domains difficult:

1) The CI can be compelled by authorities in its jurisdiction to issue certificates, possibly backdated, but they won't be accepted by TLDNSOs except the ones that can be compelled to accept them (a minority in the case of unilateral government action), because they already have a certificate for the domain. The new CI certificate will be rejected by clients if only a minority of TLDNSOs present it.

2) TLDNSOs can be compelled to remove CI certificates for individual domains, but if only a minority are in any one jurisdiction, clients will get the record from other TLDNSOs.

3) Only the domain name owner has the private key needed to revoke or transfer a domain name. Obviously, the domain name owner can be compelled to reveal they private key (if they have it in that jurisdiction anyway), but that is outside the scope of this document. They could encrypt the key with a secure password and refuse to disclose it - that would be legal in some jurisdictions and illegal in others. By this point, authorities would probably focus on taking down the servers hosting the website rather than the DNS.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

I wonder if such a system really even needs domains anymore. Would it be possible to scrap domains altogether and use IPs only?

The link structure of the web is almost completely based on domain urls, but I wonder if there's not some way to work around that in a DNS-less/P2P system.

nowarninglabel• 16 years ago

Step 2: Put news coverage of the event behind a paywall

Step 3: Profit?

Groxx10• 16 years ago

Really? It let me through, and I didn't do anything special...

Give http://bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com a try.

edit: people don't like bugmenot links? It has been immensely useful to me for asinine sign-up-walls.

chc2• 16 years ago

NYTimes.com's paywall kicks in after a certain (fairly low) number of pageviews.

rms• 16 years ago

NY Times has required an account to sometimes view free content for more than 10 years now. I got an account back then and it still works.

Groxx10• 16 years ago

>For now the seized domains are in legal limbo. David Snead, a lawyer specializing in Internet cases who is representing the owner of torrent-finder.com, speculated that it might be 30 to 60 days before he would be able to see a seizure order. “The government is providing zero information to help us determine what he is being charged with,” he said. “It’s a black hole.”

That's just plain wrong. Under what rational reason have they seized these without notice, and without declaration of wrongdoing? Is it part of a sting operation, or are they being labeled as terrorists?

If not, it's simply impeding justice, and seems to me to probably be motivated by the desire to have this go through smoothly; if they can wait out the initial surge of internet-interest, and then make weak claims, there won't be as many people scrutinizing them. Plus, this sort of event might just drive a few of the sites out of existence anyway, so their goals are served regardless, just by keeping their mouths shut.

chris11• 16 years ago

What is worse is that some anti-piracy groups are refusing to release the names of sites they are shutting down. Brein recently shut down nearly 30 file-sharing sites and has refused to release info on the targeted sites.

http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-shuts-down-29-bittorrent-and-nz...

tptacek5• 16 years ago

Just a reminder: this isn't a crazy overreach by "Homeland Security". DHS is a very new cabinet department formed, like a beaurocratic Voltron, from a smorgasbord of peripherally-related agencies. One of those agencies was Customs/ICE, which for logical and historical reasons hosts federal anti-counterfeiting enforcement. DHS "acquires" Customs and bam, finds itself in the IP enforcement business.

yummyfajitas• 16 years ago

So we should be thinking about this as a crazy overreach by Customs/ICE rather than a crazy overreach of Homeland Security?

tptacek5• 16 years ago

You could, but this has been part of ICE's charter for a long time. I'm only making the point that this isn't some crazy RIAA subversion of the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security sounds scary, like, "the US Government thinks the RIAA's IP claims are vital to national security!".

No, they don't.

joe_the_user9• 16 years ago

Hmm,

The first part of your statement actually points towards "crazy overreach".

But you could interpret this action using all permutations of the imaginable adjectives and nouns:

    {crazy, calculated} X {overreach, legal action} 
    >> 
    {"crazy overreach", "crazy legal action", 
     "calculated overreach", "calculated legal action"}

And I'd be against all of them!

jdp23• 16 years ago

Let me get this straight. A division of the Department of Homeland Security is shutting down hip-hop blogs to help out the RIAA and you don't see it as a crazy overreach?

Robin_Message4• 16 years ago

I was about to post a comment about "oh look, they overreached with the too-wide anti-terror laws and are using them on music pirate, quelle surprise," so it was useful to know that, except in name and org chart, this has nothing to do with homeland security (and any of the laws associated with the war on terror.) It's a crazy overreach and some Americans need to sort it out, but in some useful senses it has nothing to do with "homeland security".

Lagged2Death• 16 years ago

I can understand the bureaucratic / historical reasons you outline for DHS involvement in anti-counterfeiting.

What I don't understand is why / how someone has re-classified good old fashioned copyright infringement as "counterfeiting."

This sort of stuff used to be an FBI matter. What is the justification for changing that, I wonder?

ebaysucks• 16 years ago

What steps can one best take to get their domain portfolio out of reach of US authorities?

All my domains are at Godaddy (with private registration) right now. (Nothing involving sharing of IP products, but I fear this slippery slope won't end well.)

wmf2• 16 years ago

Since .com/.net/org are controlled by a US company, you'd probably have to use a ccTLD like .ly and make sure to use a non-US registrar.

WiseWeasel2• 16 years ago

Libya would not be my first choice, if I was trying to escape politically motivated interventions from my DNS supplier.

rhizome• 16 years ago

Germany has some of the strongest privacy protection laws, which is part of the reason I use Joker as my registrar. It doesn't get you out of reach of the TLD masters, but for everything else it's good peace of mind.

sammcd3• 16 years ago

Does anyone understand how domain seizing technically works? What are they actually doing?

Whois'ing the domain shows the nameservers are with GoDaddy. Is it so simple that they are just asking GoDaddy to change the site to this image?

I was going to assume that the government used ICANN to point it to their own name servers. Anyway, I'm just curious and would love if someone could shine some light on this.

sammcd3• 16 years ago

Heh, guess you can change the A record of a name without having to update the whois info. All of these domains are just pointed to http://74.81.170.110/

andre2• 16 years ago

since .com/.net/.org are controlled by US companies, is the next step (for blogs/sites such as these) to move to .ru? or some other company not controlled by US companies?

Raphael• 16 years ago

Bingo.

ElbertF• 16 years ago

Ironically some have moved to China (.hk) for their internet freedom.

stumm• 16 years ago

they are not doing it at the Registrar level(by contacting the registrar for the domain and forcing them to update the authoritative name server info to point to NS1.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM, NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM), but rather through the agency who controls the top level domain. In this case, all the “seized domains” appear to be .com and the agency/company who has the ICANN contract for this TLD is VeriSign(which also controls .net TLD).

More details can be found here: http://rulingclass.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/the-background-d...

sammcd3• 16 years ago

Thanks, that is exactly what I was looking for.

dholowiski3• 16 years ago

Registrant: Seized Domains ATTN SEIZEDSERVERS.COM care of Network Solutions PO Box 459 Drums, PA. US 18222

   Domain Name: SEIZEDSERVERS.COM

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
      Solutions, IT                
      ATTN SEIZEDSERVERS.COM
      care of Network Solutions
      PO Box 459
      Drums, PA 18222
      US
      570-708-8780
      
   Record expires on 24-Nov-2011.
   Record created on 24-Nov-2010.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   NS1.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM        74.81.170.109
   NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM        74.81.170.108

Robin_Message4• 16 years ago

Isn't this why the ICANN contract for a TLD should not belong to an American corporation? Logically, it should go a company in Switzerland, who have traditionally handled such things, and continue to be perceived as low in corruption [1] and high in democracy [2], with strong property rights [3]. They tend to be neutral in wars, and are not part of the EU (which is probably a bad idea for an independent TLD.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Property_Rights_I...

dholowiski3• 16 years ago

And it only started a few weeks ago win wikileaks. Turns out it's not a slippery slope, it's frictionless.

acabal• 16 years ago

This is really scary for me, and I'm not even hosting any sort of illegal content.

For me the internet has always been a wild-west kind of place, one of the last places where politics and government and all of the paranoia-driven American madness didn't have a hold. No matter what crazy shit was going on in the "real world," it probably wouldn't touch the fabric of the internet. And today I wake up to find the RIAA using the government as hired hitmen to shut down seemingly harmless sites without any kind of warning or due process.

I know it was bound to happen sometime, and it would be naive to think the government was never involved in the dealings of the internet, but this truly saddens me. Our bought-and-paid-for government is finally making itself known in our last haven.

Has it really come time to move our domains to China, of all places?! And if we move them to a foreign power, who's to say that power won't tomorrow start doing what we're doing now?

I wish I had the money to donate to the EFF; but I don't, and I feel completely powerless.

sabat• 16 years ago

I'm never sure who to fear more: out-of-control government, or the mega-corporations that sponsor it.

mcantelon2• 16 years ago

They're both working for the same thing: the world as one big corporation.

knieveltech• 16 years ago

Rapescan terminals in the airports, domain names seized with no information provided, wtf, did the 4th Ammendment go down for a reboot or something? If so when can we expect it to come back online?

jwr• 16 years ago

The line between what totalitarian regimes (such as China) do to the Internet and what the US government does to the internet becomes thinner and thinner. Think about it — both governments now use their control of the Internet infrastructure to limit access to undesirable content.

What I find most scary, though, is the very limited reaction this gets.

unicornporn• 16 years ago

Past weeks has proved that the DNS system has become a seriously weak point. This must be fixed.

gasull2• 16 years ago

Instead of thinking of alternative DNS systems, why people don't launch these sites in a .onion hidden Tor service?

Homeland Security seizes music blog domains

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