These seizure notices are not 508 compliant. Isn't the government obligated to make all websites under their control accessible to people with disabilities?
There isn't even an alt tag on the giant images with text.
Now Im just sayin' but if they're using stupid loopholes to seize these domains, couldn't they be sued under the americans with disabilities act?
Regardless of the legal and other issues here, this looks like a hoax or hack. The nameservers are now pointing to ns[1,2].seizedservers.com. However, doing a whois lookup on seizedservers.com reveals that it was registered only this past Wednesday!
2. Today reports came in on more sites. We've known the owner of torrent-finder for a few years and spoke with him about what happened.
He confirmed that ICANN was involved and that Godaddy knew nothing about the actions. He also told us some more information that we were told not to post in public. Combined with yesterday's raid the story added up.
3. About the analytics... My guess would be that the hosting company put that there, but it may also be the authorities.
4. Dozens of sites are involved in this, all with different owners.
A hoax seems to be impossible. But then again, we're just simple bloggers, and thought we had enough info to back the story. If anyone disagrees, please say so.
So, who's getting started on that alternative DNS system? Until a formal infrastructure emerges, it can probably be cobbled together with a combination of BIND servers and browser plugins, I'd imagine...
Not necessarily. China at the very least pays lip-service to the idea that they are cracking down on piracy. Most Chinese piracy is small time or organized crime, so they can just bust a few people and say that they have 'cracked down.' With something as open as a webserver, it would be hard for them to not take it down to save face in international diplomacy.
Well, I would cry foul if ICE was taking them down for 'counterfeiting,' but once they were arrested, none of the charges included counterfeiting. [i.e. the 'counterfeiting' classification is just a rouse to get jurisdiction.]
What I want to know - was the registrar involved in this, and acting on instructions from US authorities, or acting on instructions from ICANN, or was the domain record actually modified at a higher level than the registrar had control over (is that even possible?)
At a higher level. Yes, that's definitely possible - the .com nameserver tells resolvers where to find the nameserver for domain.com. Try 'dig @l.root-servers.net www.google.com' sometime.
I realize that it's technically possible - but what I'm wondering is if icann (or someone else) actually did this without involving the registrar, or if the registrar simply complied with some kind of order.
Believe me, I don't want to sound anti-American at all but... what's up with that adored eagle? Thirty thousand nuclear warheads are enough to keep us scared.
It's just a national symbol; most countries have something similar. Also, the US nuclear weapon stockpile is down to about 5,000; hasn't been 30,000 since the 1960s.
I won't bother to look up the current number: 5,000 is scarry enough, but I stand corrected. On the other hand, do you have a reference to a list of similar menacing national symbols?
The eagle isn't doing anything especially menacing like the British lion is. It holds arrows to represent preparedness for war, but also an olive branch to represent preference for peace. I'm not familiar with the symbolic meaning of the elements of the British Royal Coat of Arms: does it contain any equivalent to the American olive branch?
Not exactly an expert on heraldry, but I'm fairly fascinated by it.
The British Royal Coat of Arms, which is the say the coat of arms of the Royal family does not have anything equivalent to olive branch. Rather, it's a coat of arms to depict the 'linage' of the United Kingdom. The triple lion represents England and is form Richard the Lionheart's Coat of Arms, the single lion represents the Scottish crown, and then harp Ireland.
Remember, coat of arms were originally meant to be more or less unique identifiers for armored noble men. The British (and many other European coat of arms) are direct results of centuries of Royal Families merging, changing, redesigning their heraldry. Their message/symbolism can be 'constructed' as much as history allowed them to be. The Great Seal (and coat of arms) of the United States was designed. A few people sat around and decided what to put on it and what it would represent. The closest to that happening in 'old Europe' would be the royalty trying to figure out which third cousin (only half joking) to marry, or what land to invade and exactly which method to use to join the coat of arms.
Seriously, I think that in heraldry is interesting stuff. An attempt at a system that codifies a which relationship between visual and written display. In case you never knew, every piece of heraldry has a written description that describes the piece of heraldry 'precisely'. That is to say that if you follow the rules, then any drawing that satisfies "Or a lion rampant within a double tressure flory-counter-flory Gules" (Scotland) -is- the Scottish coat of arms (in theory anyways). For example "Or a lion rampant" means golden lion in the rampant position. Doesn't matter how you draw the lion, as long as its recognizable as a lion.
A roaring lion rampant is supposed to be menacing, but the British lion is a bit disney cartoonish. I don't know the symbolic meaning of the components of the coat of arms - it seems to have been through a lot of revisions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_coat_of_arms_of_the_Unite...
Time to apply for a YNews startup offering uncensored DNSes :)
If you're willing to do Evil to monetize it, you might even get to resell sex.com and a couple of expensive domains. Or just explain to investor that one day, when you'll be big enough, you'll be able to do it. Also, you'll be able to decide how fast you respond to requests according to whether the domain's owner subscribed to your "premium" service.
TL;DR: brace yourself for libertarian cyber-mayhem.
Well, we at OpenDNS could make this work for all our users today. And I think we're large enough that they wouldn't just seize our domain.
But it's a slippery slope... Once you fragment the DNS like that, it's hard to go back. And then we're put in a position to make editorial judgements of which version of the domain to follow which we prefer to not be in. So we don't, for now.
There's a lot more thinking about this subject that I and others have discussed, but fragmenting the DNS is not the ideal answer. Making ICANN independent of the US is, however, of critical importance.
Looking forward to the first DNS service run by a phisher... why take the long way around when there is a much shorter one.
Really I think OpenDNS has some merit but I'd hate for the DNS system to become so fragmented that the whole fabric of trust that we've built towards domain names would be up for grabs. The consequences of that happening are beyond my technical expertise to estimate but my gut says it can't be good.
What? You're practically sledding down that slope!
Your flagship 'features' are all based on NXDOMAIN poisoning and intentional censorship in your nameserver by default. You're doing more than anyone else to fragment DNS all while having the chutzpah to market it as 'open'.
whois 208.67.222.222
OrgName: OpenDNS, LLC
OrgId: OPEND-2
Address: 410 Townsend St, Suite 250
City: San Francisco
StateProv: CA
Are you seriously telling me that you think OpenDNS could ignore a criminal search and seizure warrant from a US federal judge, even though your servers appear to be physically in the United States?
And I think we're large enough that they wouldn't just seize our domain.
They could probably make it difficult enough for you that you would change your mind. When the full force of the government you're operating in comes down on you, it's hard to stay in business. This is why the "solutions" tend to come from P2P groups. It's harder for the government to go after individuals (many of whom are in different countries) than a single organization.
I use OpenDNS and I do appreciate that you are thinking about it.
I wonder what process ICE go through to have a .com redelegated. Since Verisign operate the .com registry they would have to be involved at some point along the line.
I'm sitting a little confused here. The WHOIS for torrent-finder.com lists an address in Egypt. But comments that I've seen so far express anger, but are explicitly tempered by the fact that this is happening within the US and we haven't crossed any lines yet. Didn't we just cross lines?
Several other domains also appear to have been seized
including 2009jerseys.com, nfljerseysupply.com,
throwbackguy.com, cartoon77.com, lifetimereplicas.com,
handbag9.com, handbagcom.com and dvdprostore.com
The interesting question is if all those domains belong to US citizens.
If the US only seizes domains of their own citizens that's somewhat OK for me.
If the US also sizes domains of other nation's citizens I guess in the future I'll only use domain names outside the jurisdication of the US. But if that's the case I wonder why they haven't taken down PirateBay yet.
A common misconception, that. .com is not a country-code TLD. It was never intended for use by one country; it's explicitly a generic top-level domain, for use by international organisations.
What gives the US "jurisdiction" is that it's nominally controlled by VeriSign and thence ICANN, which is a US quango, so owners of .com domains are in a legal relationship with a US entity. Outside the US, people have been known to get quite worked up about this arrangement, and there have been serious suggestions that ICANN should cede control (or transfer directly) to a UN body. Whether interference as in this case is legal in international law is, as far as I know, untested.
The TLD which was originally intended for use by US commercial organisations was .co.us, which nobody seems to bother with.
While I do respect the fact that this sounds terrible, I cant help but point out the fact that torrentfreak's news reporting has always been extremely biased, in many cases rendering the information they provide in their posts as untrustworthy.
Bias is something totally different than being untrustworthy.
I write for TorrentFreak and while I agree that we have our own look on things, we do check all facts carefully, possibly more than the average 'news' outlet.
Please back up your untrustworthy claim or stick to the bias one.
TorrentFreak is well written and well research; its story selection is different to other more mainstream news sites. Much like al jazeera, this makes it an extremely useful and valuable news site. I do wish for a more mainstream name though! It always seems slightly embarrassing referring people to an authoritative piece on 'TorrentFreak.com'
Ernesto, I also like TF, dont get me wrong, I do read it and enjoy it every day.
As you say, you do have your view on certain things. My feeling is that that extreme view, in many cases, makes me wonder the actual facts. Maybe 'untrustworthy' was a bad term to use.
In this case, the evidence that this is a hoax makes me feel that the government had no involvement in this.
However, for future reference, yes. The government would easily contract out something like this. There is a virtually no limit to what the government would contract out. For example, some of my co-workers work on the no-fly-list database/content repository.
There's very little that the government does in-house these days.
