U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29

by Uncle_Sam • 15 years ago

430 152 15 years ago

torrentfreak.com

tibbon6• 15 years ago

While there are more important things in life (like being accused wrongly of child pornography), I wonder how that effects their Google rankings to suddenly have your entire domain ripped out from underneath you and pointing to a duplicate content site.

Is there any recourse for this action? Seems that this would trigger unreasonable search and seizure.

w1ntermute2• 15 years ago

> Seems that this would trigger unreasonable search and seizure.

Oh, I think that boundary was crossed a long time ago. It's more a problem of the US government not giving two fucks about its own Constitution.

tibbon6• 15 years ago

I don't know the entire process well, but wouldn't that be something that you'd presumably file in Federal District court and start there? Once/if it hits the Supreme Court, I don't think the government could really ignore it could they?

snsr• 15 years ago

This is clearly an example unreasonable seizure, and it seems the DHS exists solely to perform unreasonable searches.

This trend towards outright censorship is a worrying one. While I can't speak to the content of any of the sites in this round of censorship/seizure, the DHS certainly seems to be acting outside their mandate.

tibbon6• 15 years ago

As a supporter (and someone who voted for) Obama, I'm frustrated by his lack of comment/participation on this subject. There's no way he can think this is constitutional.

smokeyj• 15 years ago

Unreasonable search and seizure doesn't exist, take for example the patriot act which was just extended. The constitution and bill of rights is what they teach little kids, no one takes that junk seriously.

CWuestefeld3• 15 years ago

The (sunsetting portions of the) PATRIOT Act were not just extended. The bill cleared the House, but hasn't yet gone through the Senate.

There's still time to call your Senator and see if he gives a damn.

patio11• 15 years ago

My educated guess based on experience working with people affected by dissimilar causes but similar appearance to Google: a massive hit to rankings/traffic within about 48 hours, and recovery to a fraction of normal several weeks later.

I doubt that one can easily convince a judge that loss of Google rankings is a cognizable harm under tort law, but given that an agency of the US government just called you a child pornographer on your own property, if there isn't a sovereign immunity defense you will hardly need to justify what a high ranking on Google is worth to receive damages.

dedward• 15 years ago

The problem seems to be (for lack of better information) that sites are shut down pre-emptively with no warning.

I'm all for prosecuting child pornographers, and shutting down their content as quickly as possible - but that should be possible by a court order against the hosting provider.... or if said provider is unreachable / out of jurisdiction, and has STILL had some reasonable attempt at contact to press charges, then sure, go after the domain - but there needs to be some due process behind things rather than just having the federal authorities and DNS layer just whomping things down with little to no oversight.

anigbrowl12• 15 years ago

I doubt that one can easily convince a judge that loss of Google rankings is a cognizable harm under tort law

Considering how many sites have analytics these days, being able to show a strong correlation between a big blow to your traffic and a decline in revenue would (I think, IANAL) be very good evidence. Instead of asking the judge to imagine the possible ramifications, you'd be presenting solid data whose admissibility the judge could make a quick decision about.

jimmyk2• 15 years ago

Yes, there is recourse. IANAL, but as far as my understanding goes, the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances includes the right to sue the government, or at least to file a suit against the government in court.

CWuestefeld3• 15 years ago

You can file suits until the cows come home. It doesn't matter because of "sovereign immunity" (see http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Sovereign+Immu... ).

Basically, the government is immune from lawsuit unless it chooses to allow you to sue it. And this is the presupposition, so they don't need to justify it.

You've got only two defenses against this: (1) The right to vote; and (2) the right to keep and bear arms.

yardie• 15 years ago

It's amazing that these operations and bills are intentionally wrapped in wording that makes them politically untouchable. I can see why lawmakers wouldn't want to investigate this. Who wants to be the congressman/woman that went against Operation Save our children?

joeybaker4• 15 years ago

Meh… it's semantics, they'd vote against Operation Save our Children if they were voting for the Internet Bill of Rights Act

tjmaxal• 15 years ago

You and I may know that but your average voter probably doesn't, and they certainly wouldn't two or three years later when it come back up out of context, in a attack ad.

jdp234• 15 years ago

or the PATRIOT Act ...

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

Or the "Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2007"

The more detailed title: "To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes."

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h3997/show

It's only when you read the text you discover things like tax credits for low sulfur diesel fuel, tax subsidies for small business, and a $700 billion bailout for the financial services industry.

jdp234• 15 years ago

Thanks everybody for the upvotes!

For the latest on the PATRIOT Act, please see http://bit.ly/feb16news

Bossman2• 15 years ago

Heh. The Patriot Act was the biggest in recent history. Remember how little debate there was when the entire Congress was afraid of looking weak after 9/11? You'd think some of them would go back and read the bill and have second thoughts, but it looks like 10 years later, we're going to renew it again.

Splines• 15 years ago

They should just stop giving them names to avoid this sort of emotional attachment.

GHFigs• 15 years ago

Even in the absence of an official title a bill will be given an equally glittering nickname by the opposition.

GrandMasterBirt• 15 years ago

How about a better question: Why is this allowed in the united states? This is an absofuckingloutely clear violation of the due process in our constitution. Yes save the fucking children, but do it properly. We see the abuses that arise from improper giving of power. I guess people are waiting until basically we live in communist russia where you got to bribe cops to not give you speeding ticket, impound your car, and throw you in jail, because they felt like breaking some balls. And then you get to sit in a nice abusive prison cell for a few months awaiting trial.

Sure it sounds like paranoia, but the government will never turn to a giant powergrab overnight. It will always be gradual, slowly taking power until its too late.

mcantelon• 15 years ago

>the government will never turn to a giant powergrab overnight.

They've learn through history and the wisdom of the public relations industry: consolidate power gradually and using numerous pretexts. I'd guess the power consolidation has an end vision in mind: one doesn't spend the kind of effort they've spent without a goal.

scelerat• 15 years ago

Worth repeating: due process. It's important.

code_duck2• 15 years ago

The government has been doing things like this for ages. Like they say, "you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride". In this case, they might close down a website and you can get it back after due process, but not before your business and good name has been ruined. Same thing would happen if they walked into your business and arrested you for something.

If you want a more modern problem, look at drug forfeiture. They regularly take physical property and cash from people who are often not charged with crimes or even arrested, and even worse, distribute the cash and proceeds from sale of the items seized among the law enforcement agents themselves.

Personally, I had a vintage car seized because of a situation with a college roommate unrelated to me. I was not arrested or charged with a crime, they said my car was cool and maybe they could use it for drug investigations, and just took it! After 16 months of stalling, they gave it back, for a fee of $1000. My car sat in the sun in an impound lot all that time, and required $4,000 of work before it started again.

anigbrowl12• 15 years ago

What, specifically, is a violation of due process? According to the story, ICE mistakenly included mooo.com in the domains they were seizing. Since that site functions as a DNS provider, the 84,000 subdomains hanging off it had their names resolved to the IP address with the scary law enforcement warning. That's a bad thing, of course, and I'll come back to that aspect of it - but it's not a violation of due process.

Let's back up a little. There are sites that host child porn or support a traffic in counterfeit goods, and part of ICE's job is to shut that down. Every country has a customs service, and the US is no exception. Art. 1 sec. 8 of the Constitution begins 'The congress shall have power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States [...]' and later in that same section, 'to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States [...]' A1S8 is also the source of authority to act against counterfeiters (of currency), to define and act against piracy, and various 'Offenses against the law of nations.'

So there's nothing unconstitutional about the existence of an agency such as ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement are among the specific enumerated powers granted to Congress, and Congress can in turn delegate those powers to agencies that it creates. This is why some kinds of customs activities can be conducted without reference to the judicial branch - no warrant is necessary for inspection of cargo at the border for collection of customs duties, and the various other enumerated powers in that section combine to give the government fairly wide latitude to poke around in people's baggage and so on too. It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that all nations assert the power to decide what may be imported, whether to protect their domestic agriculture or to prevent the spread of things like child pornography. Of course such power can be abused to support despotism too, but that's an issue of governance, rather than some inherent flaw in the law itself - just as a computer and the software it runs can be used for worthwhile or nefarious purposes.

Now when it comes to seizure of websites, ICE is exercising its power (as delegated) to regulate commerce, both foreign and interstate. For this, they do need to get a warrant. Here's an example of a warrant in template form: http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/FormsAndFees/Forms/AO109.pd... I am not sure if this the same warrant that would be used for a domain name seizure (IANAL) but if not then it will be quite similar - the principle is basically the same as impounding a boat or cargo container. Child porn is certainly subject to forfeiture, and if it's being trafficked across state or national borders, then all ICE has to do is show the court the website, the fact of its illegal content, and request the warrant be issued. And that's exactly what they do - there's no fourth amendment violation.

As for due process, that isn't abridged either in this situation. If the warrant was correctly issued, then the court is already satisfied that contraband exists. When it's executed against the listed websites, their domain names are seized and fall into the custody of ICE who has them redirected to their warning page. If one of the domain owners disagrees - say, because he does host porn but had a statement on the website that all performers are over 18 and he has documentary evidence on file - there is an opportunity to argue that in court. The warrant is not the end of the process; the government puts the seized property into evidence and a civil trial is held; if the government wins, then the domains become the legal property of the government.

Often in customs enforcement, counterfeit goods or money are seized but nobody is caught. The trial is still held; if you look at court calendars you'll see entries in federal district court every week for cases with names like 'United States v. $250,000 in cash,' or 'United States v. 100,000 capsules of a controlled substance,' or 'United States v. 5603 counterfeit handbags.' The US attorney describes the issue of the warrant and the seizure, displays the seized material or documentary proof of where it is stored, nobody shows up to contest the government's claim upon it, and the government wins and takes ownership of it (if it's money) or destroys it (if it's drugs or counterfeit stuff). I always like to imagine an actual heap of cash piled up on the defense table with its own lawyer in cases like these, but that doesn't happen :) Anyway, they will do the same thing as regards these seized domains that had child porn, and likely nobody will show up to claim them as their property - because unless they had ironclad proof that it was not child porn and so a legal mistake has resulted, then they'd be arrested for the criminal act of trafficking in such material.

With mooo.com, ICE made a technical mistake - but they made this mistake while they were in the process of executing a legitimate warrant. they have not any point claimed that mooo.com or any of its subdomains were involved in illegal activity. If they did so, then it would be weeks or months before the matter was put to trial. That the mistake was reversed within hours tells you that mooo.com was never listed on the search warrant in the first place. I'd bet money that the mistake actually occurred at a computer console - as the seized domains listed in the warrant had their DNS altered, the operator miscounted and pasted the ICE IP address over the next entry in the list, which happened to be mooo.com. Why? Because I have made that sort of mistake many times, and so has anyone else who uses a computer.

It is not acceptable, but it is understandable - whereas there is no evidence at all for the picture that's being painted of corrupt authoritarians abusing the helpless public. Imagine the scene: a technician sitting at a console, while some uniformed ICE officers clutching a crumpled warrant in their sweaty hands stand behind her, drunk with power. The technician says 'well, all done officers.' 'Wait! Wait! What is that other site, that m-o-o-o dot com?' 'Oh, that's just the next entry in the DNS database, officer - totally unrelated.' 'Well, I'm on a roll - take that one out too.' 'but, officer, that's not-' 'Silence! Obey, unless you wish to live out your life in a federal prison surrounded by the scum of humanity! I can totally do that, you know. Now, zap it!'

Really? You find that more plausible than a simple screwup, of the kind we have all experienced and which was quickly corrected? Come on.

I repeat, it should not have happened. ICE has a responsibility to use its enforcement powers carefully and accurately, and failed to do so here. Because mooo.com happened to be a DNS business, ICE's mistake did not just affect one site but mooo.com's 84,000 customers as well. And their mistake didn't simply result in those sites being inaccessible for a few hours - they resulted in those sites (and by implication, their owners and operators) being publicly identified as traffickers in child pornography.

That is a very serious charge, easily enough to wreck a person's reputation or even put their life in danger. When the government says such a thing about a person, even as a mistake which is quickly corrected, many people think no more but accord that accusation the same weight as a criminal conviction. With so many people affected, it's probable that at least a few of them have already been fired from their jobs, or received a visit from their local child protection services, or had their spouse file divorce papers. All those results would be radical overreactions to the sight of ICE's web page, but an official government seal and the words 'child porn' will be enough to provoke that in some viewers - it's literally something that people do not like to think about, and so people do not bother to question the immediate emotional response they feel. 10 years ago in the UK, a bunch of uneducated vigilantes ran a doctor out of her home - they misunderstood her job title of 'paediatrician' on her clinic door to mean 'paedophile,' assumed she was a sex offender, and vandalized her house. Imagine how much more damning an official government warning of actual crime must look to anyone unfamiliar with the DNS or the legal system. You'd be better off being accused of murder than a sex crime; even if you were falsely convicted, you would be able to survive in prison while you appealed. Convicted child abusers usually have to be isolated for their own safety inside prison, and are marked for life outside.

ICE's carelessness seems seriously negligent, and since so many people were affected a class action lawsuit against the agency seems very probable. Suing the government is more complex than suing a private party because the government has immunity from some kinds of liability, so I do not know what technical path the lawsuit might take. But for the government to slap a 'child porn warning' on 84,000 or more people at once, even if it was 'only for a few hours, and only on the internet,' is about as bad a screwup as you can make. With 1, 5, or 10 people it might be feasible for ICE to write some humble letters of apology and offer a settlement to mitigate their trouble, but with tens of thousands a trial is the only efficient solution.

But this was not a failure of due process - it's just another example of internet's multiplier effect. In this case, technology allowed a technical error to affect 84,000 websites at once. The problem here is not the law, but the fragility of the domain name system.

jhancock• 15 years ago

The U.S. government has had the ability to seize property for quite a while. The earliest I recall it happening is with drug related crimes. These laws were passed in the '80s allowing officers to seize not just drugs, but all your property and bank accounts prior to trial. This has been argued in court many times and our judges have upheld the feds ability to make such seizures.

The IRS has quite a few powers that seem to violate due process as well.

As to your comment about living in "communist russia" and dealing with corrupt cops...I'm pretty sure what you described happens daily in Atlanta and LA.

Democracy belongs to those who show up and pay up.

byrneseyeview2• 15 years ago

I think the rule should be that the people who vote against it get to collectively vote on a name. This would be a pretty cool game theory case study, actually.

jokermatt9992• 15 years ago

Then you'd end up with every bill having a name like "The Job Killing Health Care Bill". It would just be biased from the other side. That might be good in this case, but when a bill you want to pass comes along, and gets renamed into the "FCC is taking over your internet and will burn sites like Hitler burned books", it may seem less attractive.

johnfn• 15 years ago

Those kind of names are like linkbait titles on HN. :)

bonch• 15 years ago

Sure can't wait for "net neutrality." What could possibly go wrong in having politicians determine what fair traffic is rather than letting sysadmins manage the bandwidth on their privately-owned networks as they wish?

joe_the_user7• 15 years ago

Note that these are operations that haven't waited for any new bills to pass.

As has been debated here previously, these actions are based on importing the draconian "civil forfeiture" device from the drug war into a "war on counterfeiting" or whatever they would call it.

Some have argued that this wasn't a big expansion of US state power.

Indeed, this is not technically an expansion of legal power. It is certainly a expansion of effective powers. It's so not much that someone just put a knife in US rule of law. It's more someone grabbed the wound already opened by the "war on drugs" and ripped it a fair bit wider. I don't know to what degree civil forfeiture" found been found constitutional by the courts. Regardless, in my opinion, it makes a mockery of basic justice in the US (specifically, innocence until proven guilty and the right to face your accusers).

joeybaker4• 15 years ago

I can think of two questions I'd love to see a journalist track down:

1. What's the legal process for banning a book?

2. If it's not equally as hard (or harder) for the government to take down a website, why?

tibbon6• 15 years ago

From my understanding, there are no 'banned books' in the US, but rather ones that are blacklisted by library, teaching and bookstore groups making them difficult to come by. I'm personally unaware of any book that the US Government has banned, although I'm always willing to be wrong :)

joeybaker4• 15 years ago

hmm… you appear to be right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-commonly_challenge...

That brings me to my second question: why don't we have a similar process for websites?

kmfrk3• 15 years ago

Pretty much - recently, a member of the army (or something such) wrote a book with some very sensitive details that caught the government off guard.

The government's reaction? Buying all first-edition copies of the book.

mryall• 15 years ago

Presumably those "books" with child pornography in them aren't allowed to be sold in the States. As someone who doesn't live there, I'm curious: how is that enforced?

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

I'm personally unaware of any book that the US Government has banned, although I'm always willing to be wrong

One of Wilhelm Reich's books was banned by the FDA in 1956. (Man, is that a strange story....)

But in the general case, your point holds.

joe_the_user7• 15 years ago

There are set procedures for banning books in particular.

There have been books banned in the US, however.

US went to court to censor The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence for its use of classified materials.

US FDA went to court and had Wilhelm Reich's books banned as "labels" for his orgone blank. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

So altogether, the procedure for banning books and banning websites is similar - in the sense that both approaches use "obscure clauses" and twist the meaning of free speech and due-process to suit their goals while covering up their effect.

The one good thing is that free speech still has popular support here.

tomjen32• 15 years ago

I have said this before I will have to say this again until we can get a good answer:

What the fuck is the government waisting time doing this crap when they have a war on terror to fight? Concentrate on what is necessary for the war effort, dammit.

aw3c2• 15 years ago

The solution to terror is not war, but understanding and working towards a future where all mankind can live peaceful and happily. Not exploiting each other and respecting each other's believes and religion.

ajays2• 15 years ago

Of course war is not a solution to terror! Everyone knows that.

The "war on terror" is a convenient windmill to keep tilting against. It'll keep this country in a perpetual state of war; making it easier to deny the individuals' rights (while the rich folks get tax breaks, the corporations get more powers).

Why doesn't anyone (democrats, repubs) bring up 'war on terror' when the taxes are being discussed? Because they know that that is not the desired goal of this so-called 'war'; it is to make it easier to govern, and keep the citizens down.

This is what you get for voting R or D, people. STOP voting along party lines.

axod• 15 years ago

I assume you're being sarcastic.

How about the government concentrate on reducing the massive debt or getting a decent healthcare system setup?

Waging war and pointless internet censorship aren't high on my list.

marshray6• 15 years ago

DNS is bad enough, but you really want these people in charge of your healthcare too?

tomjen32• 15 years ago

I am not as much being sarcastic as I am trying to deny the government the use of the term "the war on terror".

If they worked the war like the US did in WWII, they would become so unpopular that the war would be over in a week.

swombat• 15 years ago

I don't really understand how come, in the lawsuit-happy US, there isn't a class action lawsuit in place already to sue the government for the damage caused by this sort of error.

blakeweb• 15 years ago

My first thought when I saw this was that it wasn't possible to bring civil claims against the federal government.

But looking it up, I found the Federal Tort Claims Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTCA) which changed that in 1946.

jusfacts2• 15 years ago

That bill was passed after the b-25 crash on the empire state building in 1945 to allow for exceptions to soverign immunity in only very specific and sometimes hard to define cases. In 1947 there was the texas city disaster where 581 people died. The largest industrial accident in us history. Under the FTCA legislation the case was taken all the way to the supreme court where they ruled the government wasn't liable for claims of damages.

benihana• 15 years ago

I have a great idea: Let's give these people more power!! You know, for like, Net Neutrality and stuff.

webXL• 15 years ago

That was my first reaction, too. What could possibly go wrong?!

While I can't definitively say the free market is more intelligent than the USG, at least its actions aren't backed up by force.

callahad• 15 years ago

This is one of the reasons I host my DNS outside of the US. Hopefully there would be a few more hurdles to jump over before a mistake like this could happen.

__david__• 15 years ago

But it wasn't the DNS providers for those domains, was it? I'm pretty sure they got it changed on the master .com dns. So unless you mean you avoid all the US top level domains, you are still vulnerable.

eli• 15 years ago

"Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet"

What's a "domain pointer"? That IP address serves up a seizure notice no matter what hostname you request it with.

AlexTahan• 15 years ago

Yes they have wildcards set up, but the server displays a copyright warning on random names you try. The server displays a child porn warning when you add mooo.com.

74.81.170.110 reallyfakehostname111.com 74.81.170.110 mooo.com

See the difference?

davidu3• 15 years ago

It's not obvious what technical solutions exist that are practical to combat this.

I feel like a lawsuit against DHS / ICE and related parties is an unfortunate but necessary step.

sudonim• 15 years ago

Start with that their seizure notices are not 508 compliant. They should be accessible to americans with disabilities.

davidu3• 15 years ago

I'm talking about technical solutions, perhaps in the DNS.

TillE• 15 years ago

Don't use domains subject to US law. That means COM/NET/ORG.

davidu3• 15 years ago

See COICA. Makes your point moot. Next idea? :-)

spoiledtechie• 15 years ago

It begs the question, is anyone currently building an OPEN DNS?

marshray6• 15 years ago

I know of people and groups who are talking about it, the kind of folks who actually do stuff.

The problem is that the single point of failure in this system is the registrar operating in some legal jurisdictions. Registrars do provide a useful service some large percentage of the time.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

Oh geesh. What an awful story.

I worked as a subcontractor for a vendor servicing ICE back when it was INS. Nobody that I knew was very impressed with the quality of service that INS was providing, either internally or externally. Changing their name to make them sound better and then putting them in charge of something like this is just, well, very sad. (I don't mean to disparage an entire agency. All I have is my personal experience)

nkassis• 15 years ago

Having dealt with the INS and then the Dept of Homeland Security. The changes were for the worse. I get that they wanted to integrate all the agencies now making up the DoHS for better information sharing but there is a point when departments get so big that it just doesn't function anymore. They should have kept them smaller to remove the bureaucratic cruft.

nicpottier• 15 years ago

Am I the only one that is amused that the site they redirect to serves a single gigantic GIF totally 205K in size?

It is also exactly 1024x768, which seems even sillier, I guess people browsing child porn run their browsers in full screen mode all the time?

http://74.81.170.110/

danohuiginn• 15 years ago

which, incidentally, goes against every accessibility law in the book.

chopsueyar• 15 years ago

Interesting point.

No Section 508 compliance.

5th amendment violation - taking property without due process

Libel - falsely accusing a domain name owner of peddling kiddie porn

Any others I am missing?

nightpool• 15 years ago

Maybe they were thinking people wanted to use it as their background?

graywh• 15 years ago

I'm not sure I could find a working monitor that small...

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

I feel much better about the Internet Kill Switch now.

marknutter• 15 years ago

Am I right in assuming that even if a domain name is seized, the IP address will still work? If this is true, couldn't there just be a hosted index of all IP's and their associated domain names so that people could get to these sites by referencing this information? Hell, it could even be a browser plugin, so that if you type the domain name in and it happens to have been seized, it will be redirected to the proper IP address. Is this feasible?

th• 15 years ago

DNS is really just a huge peer-to-peer network with a few central nodes, so this shouldn't be too difficult. You can already use an alternate primary nameserver, such as Google's 8.8.8.8. You'd just need your alternate nameserver to maintain a different cache than all of the other servers.

marshray6• 15 years ago

It's distributed, but not really peer-to-peer. It's almost completely hierarchical.

dustingetz• 15 years ago

doesn't matter if nobody uses it.

russell_h• 15 years ago

Many (most?) web server configurations require a 'Host' header specifying the domain to be accessed (which allows multiple domains to be hosted on a single IP).

So in a lot of cases just typing the IP into your browser won't be enough, but thats pretty easy to work around. The greater difficulty is ascertaining where a domain should point to once it has been seized. One solution is to grab the old records from a DNS cache, but then there is no way to update them should the IP ever change.

polynomial• 15 years ago

Is there some reason I can't select just the title of this article without also selecting half the elements on their page? Ugh.

alecco• 15 years ago

If affected you should do this ASAP: http://torrentfreak.com/google-helps-seized-bittorrent-site-...

It seems .com is no longer safe for business on top of being ridiculously expensive for no good reason and already filled with domain squatters.

incant• 15 years ago

So does this render DNSSEC effectively moot? It's not much good for authentication if the government can change the authoritative name servers for any .com/.org/.net domain and then sign that change.

But perhaps I don't understand how DNSSEC works. It seems unlikely that its designers would ignore that concern.

Edit: Or were they only concerned cache poisoning? There's been much talk of using DNSSEC to authenticate websites and even people. If I'm understanding DNSSEC correctly, it seems terribly misguided, even worse than the idea of "government key escrow".

marshray6• 15 years ago

My understanding is that DNSSEC neither helps nor hurts in this scenario. It mainly enforces the accuracy of the registration database, which in this case is being modified at the request of DHS.

code_duck2• 15 years ago

It sure would be nice if the government just didn't know about the internet.

knieveltech2• 15 years ago

Back when the government didn't know about the internet it was very nice. Then a bunch of folks decided this could be a great new method for selling stuff, distributing porn, etc, and now you see where we are.

bugsy• 15 years ago

Wow, it's not just that they shut them down, but the US government put a big label on all the sites for all the users to see which basically says it was a child porn site, even though it wasn't, it was all some sort of error and most of the sites were small business sites doing normal ordinary things.

Their customers are going to assume that the government would have done some sort of investigation, got a warrant, there was a trial, etc, so they will believe that the claims are true. Some people might be angry enough that they track down the owners of the site or business and kill them.

What has happened is criminally negligent and outrageously dangerous. But the out of control government is not responsible for any of its actions, therefore these abuses will not only continue, but get worse.

U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’

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