
Homeland Security seizes music blog domains - stumm
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/business/media/14music.html
======
Groxx
> _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
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...](http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-shuts-down-29-bittorrent-and-nzb-
sites-101215/)

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

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
grandalf
So you're saying that you think it would be perfectly reasonable if the FDA or
agriculture department happened to be tasked with enforcing music piracy
prevention ?

Joking aside, I guess this is part of the problem with naming departments
cutesy Orwellian names like "Homeland Security".

~~~
tptacek
I think it's not an indication that the government thinks the RIAA's problems
are homeland security concerns, and would prefer not to be baited into
discussing anything else I think about it.

~~~
joe_the_user
Who,

... on this deep thread,

... that you started,

... ever claimed this?

~~~
amadiver
While no one ever claimed it, tptacek was correct in assuming people were
thinking it. Or, at least, a person was thinking it.

I'm really glad to see a possible explanation for why Homeland Security would
be cracking down on music blogs. While I don't agree with the DoHSs actions, I
now have a foothold in understanding the situation. It may or may not be
correct, but as a fairly logical interpretation of the scenario, it'll
suffice.

I'm disappointed to see your fairly dramatic response (though I like the
elipses and poetic linebreaks :) ) and 'yummyfajitas's pat response earn
collectively more upvotes for delivering far less information (no offense).

~~~
joe_the_user
To me, jurisdictional questions around the particular authority claimed by ICE
to censor the web are interesting only in relation to the larger political
decision _to_ censor the web.

Tptacek focuses on only the first question and righteously refuses to look at
the latter question. He "prefer not to be baited into discussing" the
substantial question here. What I consider an important and disturbing
development: _the US government effectively taking up the authority to censor
websites sans any conviction of web master for anything_ (sure they "file a
lawsuit" but they do NOT have to actually convict or _even serve_ the
webmaster in question. It's the effective negation of free speech whatever the
ostensible argument).

I thus think the various responses are appropriate. I've disagreed with Yummy
on plenty of other issues but he decodes the _misdirection_ in the GP well
here.

~~~
tptacek
You found me out. It's all part of my evil plot to make HN'ers care about
intellectual property. Curse you!

~~~
joe_the_user
I suppose this is teaching people about intellectual property...

...how some intellectual property, that owned by large corporations, is so
important that other intellectual property should be confiscated by fiat to
protect it!

------
acabal
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.

------
sammcd
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.

~~~
stumm
_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...](http://rulingclass.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/the-background-
dope-on-dhs-recent-seizure-of-domains/)

~~~
Robin_Message
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Property_Rights_Index)

~~~
gst
Why not just register a .ch domain then?

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

------
netaddict
Another reason for developing distributed DNS system
<http://p2pdns.baywords.com/>

~~~
Groxx
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.

~~~
SkyMarshal
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.

~~~
qjz
Many common services (HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, and _especially_ DNS, if you
think about it) are provided by daemons that don't really care much about the
domain name of the machine they're running on. For example, you can configure
your web server to deliver pages for www.example.com, and it will, as long as
that domain is in the HOST: header of the request. No DNS is required, you
just point the request at the web server's IP address.

The obvious problem is that, to my knowledge, you can't embed a HOST: header
in a URL to fetch that resource from an arbitrary IP address (something like
<http://HOST:www.example.com@192.0.2.144/>).

Like HTTP, SMTP servers will gladly accept messages for domains it is
configured to handle. But it also depends on DNS to get MX (or A) records to
deliver to domains it doesn't handle. It's trivial to support email addresses
that use IPs instead of domains (like bob@192.0.2.144), but such addresses are
less portable than using domains and also create conflicts because two users
cannot have the same name, even if they operate in different realms. Besides,
they're butt-ugly and harder to remember than domains.

tl;dr: Using IPs only creates problems and DNS is a HUGE part of the solution.
Any replacement will have to solve the same problems.

~~~
nzmsv
DNS, URIs, and application-level protocols such as HTTP and SMTP work
together, but that doesn't mean they are the same beast. The reason for the
existence of URIs is to provide identifiers for resources. DNS makes these
human-readable. Applications in turn use these facilities.

When the user types <http://www.example.com> into the address bar, it's the
web browser that figures out what to do next. Which is: realize it needs to to
a HTTP request. Where to? Not an IP, ask DNS. Now connect to the IP address.
But an HTTP server can host multiple domains, so include the host name in the
request (that's the Host header). The web server then looks in its
configuration, and sends the right page back. Note that the HTTP headers are
specific to the application protocol, and are irrelevant both at the DNS and
URL level. It just happens to be the same string :)

------
ebaysucks
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.)

~~~
wmf
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.

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

~~~
stoney
No, but if you had a .com and .ly version of each domain/site then you could
probably be reasonably confident that if one got seized the other would be ok
(I'm assuming that the US and Libya are sufficiently far apart politically
that they are unlikely to collaborate on this kind of thing).

~~~
WiseWeasel
Libya is so corrupt, they'll seize whatever domain your government (or
competitor, nemesis, etc.) pays them to seize.

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3: Profit?

~~~
Groxx
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.

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

~~~
Groxx
Aaah, did not know that. They do this to all free accounts, I assume?

Know if they're one of the ones which do Google referrals? I can never
remember who does and who doesn't.

~~~
chc
Yeah, they exempt Google-referred visitors from the wall.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I'm not sure I understand why they exempt Google refers.

Can someone provide an explanation of why it's beneficial for them to exempt
Google but not other links?

~~~
whatusername
easy. They want Google to index that content and they want to show up in the
search index. At one point I think some sites tried showing one thing to
Google-bot and a pay-wall to the rest of the Net. But Google realised that was
a terrible experience for users -- I've googled somethign and now when I go to
the page that google recommends to me - I can't see what I'm looking for.

So Google effectively laid down the law -- If you want to show up in Search
Results -- then users who have found you via Search need to be able to read
what you are showing..

