

Senate Panel Approves Domain Name Seizure Bill - J3L2404
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20023238-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

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ck2
Countdown to this being abused the same way DMCA is misused on Youtube to
delete videos that the uploader actually created themselves, but were shown at
somepoint on a commercial TV/news show.

Also a fantastic powerful way for corporations to reverse-hijack domains.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_domain_hijacking>

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jpwagner
tactical counter: chrome/firefox plugin that checks if the domain the user
entered has been seized. if yes, it looks up the real ip address and forwards
the user.

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powrtoch
Forget plugin. Built in, transparent functionality. Naturally, every browser
would have it but IE.

Win win.

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joeybaker
Anybody notice that Dianne Feinstein, the senator of Silicon Valley is on the
list of senators that voted for this?
[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/10291211924/the-19...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/10291211924/the-19-senators-
who-voted-to-censor-the-internet.shtml)

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alanthonyc
Senator Feinstein is my senator. Apparently, she co-sponsorded the bill. This
is her response to me after I voiced my opinion to her office against the
bill:

 _Thank you for writing to express your opposition to the "Combating Online
Infringement and Counterfeits Act." I appreciate knowing your views on this
matter.

America's copyright industry is one of our most important economic engines,
and giving artists and inventors the incentive to produce cutting edge works
is vital to the country. The protection of intellectual property is
particularly important to California, which is home to thriving film, music,
and high-technology industries. I am strongly opposed to theft of copyrighted
works, and I believe copyright owners should be able to prevent their works
from being illegally duplicated.

On September 20, 2010, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the "Combating
Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (S. 3804), of which I am an original
cosponsor. This legislation is carefully crafted to address the growing
problem of online piracy and copyright infringement, and would allow the U.S.
Department of Justice to shut down websites which are "dedicated to infringing
activities." These are sites that, in the bill's language, are "primarily
designed or have no demonstrable commercially significant purpose or use other
than..." selling infringing or counterfeit goods.

Please know that I have been working with California high-technology
businesses and Senator Leahy to improve the bill's language and address the
concerns of legitimate high-tech businesses, public interest groups, and
others. This legislation is currently awaiting action in the Senate Judiciary
Committee, of which I am a member.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your concerns with me. Should
you have additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact
my staff in Washington, D.C. at (202) 224-3841. _

I'm trying to think up a response.

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devmonk
Contact your senators and tell them to just say no to S. 3804:

<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-3804>

[http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_se...](http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_senators.htm)

No good can come of the gov't trying to control what domains can be accessed,
and it won't stop those that wish to do us harm or take advantage of us,
because they'll just use another domain.

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SageRaven
Unfortunately, one of my senators is the infamous Senator Hatch of the Napster
Hearing fame. Besides, I doubt I'd get much traction in the reddest state on
the election map.

Still, things like this make me wonder if the alternative root servers would
gain any traction. Of course, those are not free of their own problems and
politics.

That, or somehow obsolete DNS altogether. I've often thought of setting up a
site _without_ DNS to see if I could get it ranked on the first page or two
with only a bare IP address. I still use a handful of bare public IPs from
places I worked at ten years ago. Surely, if the need arose, people could
learn to memorize groupings of numbers again.

Then again, once IPv6 rolled out in a big way, raw IPs would be a real bitch
to just type in, nevermind remember.

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jerf
This isn't a "red vs. blue" thing, as evidenced by the senators who voted for
this. It's more a "people who want power" (the government) vs... uh... well...
nobody, actually, just people who want power. At best a handful of Republicans
made a feeble twitch towards cutting back the government's power this election
and only time will tell whether that manifests as anything other than an
election platform, when they stand against so many peoplewhowantpower.

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mdkess
In the name of fairness, we should be sure to allow China to seize domains it
finds politically objectionable, and Saudi Arabia to seize domains it finds
morally objectionable.

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wmf
They already do this in their national firewalls.

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nym
This might not be a terrible thing... maybe domain names shouldn't be
centrally controlled in the way they are today.

I for one would love to see a totally new domain name system, in the same way
BitTorrent radically changed how we look at data transfer.

~~~
wmf
Decentralized DNS has been discussed, but it runs afoul of Zooko's triangle.
In such a system, human-readable names would end up resolving to different IPs
for different clients, which breaks everything. You can reduce but not
eliminate the breakage using something like a Levien trust metric.

~~~
mindslight
Distribution of update authority doesn't require decentralization of the
namespace itself. As long as the independent authorities can agree on what
constitutes a valid update (say by requiring the domain-owner's signature),
they'll stay consistent. Meanwhile a corrupted authority will only affect its
own clients.

~~~
wmf
In that case I would be worried about having a quorum of authorities located
in the USA and all "corrupted" by law, thus outvoting the non-censored
authorities.

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mindslight
I'm not talking about any sort of voting, just restricting the inconsistencies
only to answers from the corrupted authorities. If cryptome.org redirects to
thoughtcrime.dhs.gov for DNS servers using US roots, it has the same localized
effect as any current national dns tampering. All uncorrupted authorities
would all continue to agree that the domain hadn't been deregistered because
they saw no signed update from cryptome.org. (And of course an 'authority' can
even be your local upgraded DNS server if you care enough about having
uncensored DNS)

edit: Actually I guess I'm talking about a quorum of 1 for legacy clients
(nationality of chosen root servers), and updated authorities/clients relying
on the total quorum that's easily established before the domain becomes "of
interest".

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devmonk
Related comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918593>

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andyv
Central databases are vulnerable to this sort of attack. I wonder if there is
a way to do a distributed name lookup service...

It could bootstrap by falling back to regular DNS. I supposed the main problem
would be resolving conflicts.

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danilocampos
> to include the Newspaper Association of America, which said the legislation
> was needed because online piracy "undermines the investments that newspapers
> make in journalism."

Can anyone fill us in on how online piracy, specifically, affects newspapers?
Enormous torrents of USA Today, perhaps?

My impression is that the internet at large obviates newspapers altogether, so
I'm mystified. Grasping at anything to turn back the hands of time on their
dinosaur business model?

~~~
wmf
Maybe they want to blacklist news.google.com; I hear it's nothing but pirated
headlines.

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zmonkeyz
Twitter will become the new DNS. Subscribe to their twitter and they'll
broadcast their new IP.

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QE2
Can't seize a .onion pseudo-domain.

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aneth
By my reading, a website would just need to be dual purpose to be protected.
They could sell pirate bay hats and eye patches.

~~~
hartror
Who decides that? Where is the line drawn? What is the appeals process? How
much is it going to cost to appeal (lawyers etc)?

This is censorship and it is a slippery slope, trust me I'm Australian we are
unfortunately all to familiar with censorship. :(

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aneth
I don't mean to say it's ok to pass - just that it seems easy to circumvent:

A Web site is in danger of having its domain seized (or having U.S. Internet
providers encounter a sudden case of amnesia when their customers try to visit
it) if it is "primarily designed" and "has no demonstrable, commercially
significant purpose or use other than" offering or providing access to
unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.

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borism
.ly domains saga instantly came to mind :)

