
Verisign wants power to shut sites down upon law enforcement request - joelhaus
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/verisign-wants-power-to-scan-sites-for-malware-and-shut-them-down.ars
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click170
"Well if ICE can do that, why can't we?"

Someone should head down to their local branch of the Occupy Wall Street
gathering to see if they can convince some people to add this to their list of
grievances.

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bigiain
So, how long until amazonaws.com gets shut down?

 _Boom!_ There' goes maybe 70% of the internet startups in one misguided
"think of the children" swoop...

~~~
wmf
I think VeriSign is smarter than that. The opposite is more likely: EC2 is
"too big to seize".

But startups should be using their own domains, so I'm not sure this is even
an issue.

~~~
bigiain
I bet there were people who thought DigiNotar were smarter then they were
shown to be too...

I do though suspect that Jeff Bezos could throw enough weight around to
resolve that sort of problem. (Could Amazon just buy VeriSign outright if they
needed too?)

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rhizome
The only way this will be avoided is if energy is not wasted on Verisign and
instead is directed toward now allowing the police to make the request without
a warrant.

~~~
rhizome
oops, that should be "not"

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m3luha
Anonymous, Where are you?

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shareme
wait they want to shut down 2600 again?

for those that do not know the back story ..2600 the underground hacker
magazine site was shut down for awhile because Verizon did not like 2600
giving voice to wikileaks volunteers and een interviewing them..

Verizon kept claiming equipment malfunctions..

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bluedanieru
Either we'll have distributed DNS, or within 10 years the Internet isn't going
to exist in a recognizable form.

~~~
wladimir
It does look like the US becomes scarier every day. More and more
extrajudicial powers, secret laws, restrictions on speech, unwarranted
searches/wiretaps and so on. Their "war on freedom" is very successful.

As I've said before, the internet really should stop relying on the US that
much. Too bad Europe and others seem to be asleep in this case. Maybe they
will get it when it is too late. Having what is slowly becoming the world's
only information distribution network in the hands of one government (or, any
government) is a very big risk.

~~~
bluedanieru
Sadly, I think placing 'it' in the hands of an international body like the UN
or whatever wouldn't be any better. In the case of the UN, it would probably
be worse (China and the US would likely veto any measure aimed at opening
things up, and with more political cover to do so).

The only long-term solution that I can see if you're really interested in
online freedom is to remove all the underlying infrastructure from centralized
control in an irreversible way, up to the hardware level as much as is
practicable (global wi-fi is probably not realistic but is a goal worth
striving toward).

I suppose Tor is as good a model as any, just less visible to an end-user. It
isn't enough though, and is still vulnerable.

~~~
wladimir
Well, yes. The ideal situation would be to decentralize everything. Tor-like
over networks could play a role in that.

But my main point is that so much is hosted on US-based (or US-owned) "cloud
servers". And so much relies on US-based services like Skype, Facebook, Gmail.
So that when the they pull the internet switch, for whatever reason, the whole
communications infrastructure is messed up. And they can easily spy in
information stored on their soil.

More and more information and communication is under control by the US. I'm
having a hard seeing how we can 'pull out' of this when it becomes
necessarily. I don't think we such a reliance on China.

