
U.S. Government Starts New Round of ‘Pirate’ Domain Seizures - Garbage
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-starts-new-round-of-pirate-domain-seizures-110521/
======
zbowling
These seizures are probably illegal based on 4th amendment issues. No due
process in the seizing.

See this opinion: [http://www.copyhype.com/2011/03/ice-seizures-criticism-
magic...](http://www.copyhype.com/2011/03/ice-seizures-criticism-magic-words/)

Senators were calling for more information on their activity at the end of
last year but I don't remember hearing much more on it.

The interesting part is where international laws come into play. The issue
really hasn't been resolved, but in the mean time, domains continue to be
seized.

And they have been making lots of mistakes like when they took a dynamic dns's
server mooo.com and it's 84,000 subdomains for one account's alleged actions.
See:
[http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities...](http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities/229218959?subSection=government)

What they are doing is twisting an existing law on the books to apply to
domains and playing cowboy off tips by the MPAA and RIAA. Domains getting
taken away without notice or due process. It makes me sick.

~~~
antihero
I guess it's more ammunition to slowly pump into people that are still
ignorant enough to believe that the government has their best interests at
heart.

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steve19
I am really ashamed that I once thought that this asset seizure thing was a
good idea.

Surly, I thought, only bad people like drug dealers would have their mansions
confiscated. Shame on me.

~~~
chopsueyar
At least the drug dealers receive due process.

~~~
ataggart
Alleged drug dealers will get due process for drug charges. That is not quite
the case for the seized assets since "proceedings are brought against the
property itself, not the owner. Hence they often have odd case titles, such as
_U.S. v. Eight Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifty Dollars_ or _U.S. v. One 1987
Jeep Wrangler_." [1]

[1] <http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket>

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bruce511
If nothing else the long term effect of this is simply to harden the internet
infrastructure against govt. interference.

It's sorta like saving electricity. We're mostly pretty inefficient so it's
easy to make instant savings. For example switching from incandescent light
bulbs, putting in geyser blankets, and so on, are all implemented easily,
cheaply, and have an instant material effect. But it's a one time saving. It
delays the inevitable, it bys time, but it doesn't solve the root problem.

In the same way fiddling with root dns servers is easy, quick, and
(temporarily) effective. It's a one-time solution though. If this carries on
then people will simply work around the problem. We're already seeing
alternative root dns servers, alternative top level (non-US) domains and so
on. If the govt. want to waste their effectiveness on such mundane things as
movies and music, then so be it. But every time they do it they just encourage
more and more people to work around the problem. And the solution is likely to
be (already is) more resistant to this form of explicit interference.

The Internet is a genie not going back into the bottle. It is not something
that can be controlled, censored, or governed in the traditional sense. As
music and movie executives come to terms with what the digital part of
'Digital Revolution' really means, the govt is starting to learn what the real
meaning of Revolution is.

The times they are a changin' (again).

~~~
Luyt
Circumventing government DNS seizures with alternative DNS root servers will
only be a temporary stopgap.

It's only a matter of time before the governments will mandate (by law) that
every router should have a way to block certain IPs and MACs, and also offer a
backdoor for government agencies to configure the router; hardware which
cannot comply with this will be outlawed and illegal to operate.

With that in place, government agencies can block any IP or MAC they want,
without having to deal with DNS.

~~~
incomethax
In a world of virtualized services, blocking IP or MAC will also only get you
so far. It's fairly easy to switch servers onto a different IP address, a
different MAC address by simply using a different machine or configuration.

DNS is the most vulnerable part of the stack simply because its the one thing
in the stack that is centralized (loosely speaking).

~~~
Luyt
Is it really that easy? Both my home ADSL as my datacenter servers have
permanent IP adresses, which I can't change. I could change the MAC of the
network interfaces, but not the IP address.

Or do you mean going through a VPN of some kind?

~~~
lsc
>Or do you mean going through a VPN of some kind?

the VPN of some kind is the easy way to do it, yes. Setting up a new VPN
provider is pretty trivial. I could do so tomorrow; all I'd need is one of
those visa prepaid cards to do so anonymously.

But the point is that yeah, sure, the government could mandate that we block
certain IPs but it would be difficult for the government to do and fairly easy
for targets to get around - going after the centralized naming resources is
going to be much easier, and is going to produce much less resistance.

It's true that there have been alternate dns root servers for some time now;
it's not a technically difficult thing to set up. But it is a huge problem of
trust. It's very difficult to design a system that is resistant to
governmental pressure but is still trustworthy enough that when I type in a
site name I can be fairly certain I'm getting the IP address for that site and
not a pretender.

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swaits
Such sites should be moving away from US controlled domains. The writing is on
the wall.

~~~
dc2k08
One of the biggest and oldest swapped everything out to the Isle of Man TLD
recently: .im

~~~
swaits
That's a start, but I'm not sure I'd trust the UK any more than the US.

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gst
The only "registry" today that is secure against such attacks is .bit. It uses
a concept similar to Bitcoin, but instead of "mining" coins you get domain
names.

.bit is not available over the official root servers, to access .bit names you
can:

1) Locally install a resolver for .bit 2) Use one of the nameservers on
<http://dot-bit.org/HowToBrowseBitDomains> instead of your provider's
nameserver 3) Use a domain that mirror's the .bit hierachy to resolve names,
such as bitname.org

The nice thing about .bit is that there is no central authority, but at the
same time the ownership of names is clearly defined.

~~~
eli
Boy am I tired of hearing about bitcoins.

.bit is different from popular domain registries in that your users actually
use it. Also, it's hardly a new idea. if you want to host a web site that
can't be shut down, I'd go with a Tor hidden service:
<https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en>

~~~
gst
The new idea about .bit is that you have a decentralized system able to
securely assign names to different participants. With existing systems the
name is basically the hash of a public key which is not really that easy to
remember or to use.

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Arxiss
O yea, lets bring down [random blog with tv shows that gets read by 10 ppl a
day]. Who cares about 16 top sites... or TBP and WBB.

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Devilboy
So why are they ignoring the big ones? Like for example ThePirateBay is a .org
address which falls under US regulation?

~~~
bigwally
Simply because ThePirateBay uses a domain register that is not located in US.

Most confiscated domains have registered with GoDaddy.

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eurohacker
what are the domain names that American government cant steal - .com . net.
org domains are regulated by the U.S. it seems,

what about .me domains, .to , .in domains - i have heard that .me domain is
also regulated from the US although it is a Montenegro domain

~~~
chopsueyar
It comes down to which specific registrars will listen to the US government
when Uncle Sam tells the registrar to point the TLD dns entries for the domain
to ICE's dns server.

I do not know what happens when multiple registrars update the TLDs with
conflicting information? Is that allowed? Can ICANN intervene and force a TLD
update, bypassing a registrar?

~~~
zbowling
with ICE, they go straight to Verisign with ICANN consent and take the domain
at the root without involving the registers.

The way it works is that registrars for .COM and .NET work with Verisign who
runs on the root name servers for those TLDs. It used to be Internic which was
operated by Network Solutions, which was bought by Verisign but then NS was
later spun back off, but Verisign kept the root name servers. .ORG was given
to another organization at some point to manage.

