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[Jon Hebb <somebodyrocks AT gmail.com>]

Just saw this today... truly a good read and more of a reason to push
free alternate DNS systems, as well as the .p2p movement.

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net> wrote:
> This is a repost of the article at
> http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/
> Any more bone-headed moves like this, and we're going to get another flood
> of people trying to migrate away from anything controlled by the US
> government...
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week.
> The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly
> announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and
> child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the
> targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites
> were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.
>
> As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again
> seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last
> Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner
> that was placed on their domain.
>
> “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of
> child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first
> time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine,
> forfeiture and restitution,” was the worrying message they read on their
> websites.
>
> As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a
> seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the
> domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However,
> somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a
> large DNS service provider was seized.
>
> The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider
> FreeDNS. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result
> of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully
> seized as well. All sites were redirected to the banner below.
>
> [http://torrentfreak.com/images/C3_Banner_2011_02.jpg]
>
> The FreeDNS owner was taken by surprise and quickly released the following
> statement on their website. “Freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type
> of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the issue sorted as
> quickly as possible.”
>
> Eventually, on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted and the subdomains
> slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory
> banner. However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3
> days before the images disappeared completely.
>
> Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small
> businesses. A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to
> promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and
> upset many of the site’s owners.
>
> One of the customers quickly went out to assure visitors that his site was
> not involved in any of the alleged crimes.
>
> “You can rest assured that I have not and would never be found to be
> trafficking in such distasteful and horrific content. A little sleuthing
> shows that the whole of the mooo.com TLD is impacted. At first, the
> legitimacy of the alerts seems to be questionable — after all, what
> reputable agency would display their warning in a fancily formatted image
> referenced by the underlying HTML? I wouldn’t expect to see that.”
>
> Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding
> “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not
> dropped the domain pointer yet.
>
> Although it is not clear where this massive error was made, and who’s
> responsible for it, the Department of Homeland security is conveniently
> sweeping it under the rug. In a press release that went out a few hours ago
> the authorities were clearly proud of themselves for taking down 10 domain
> names.
>
> However, DHS conveniently failed to mention that 84,000 websites were
> wrongfully taken down in the process, shaming thousands of people in the
> process.
>
> “Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too
> often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released
> on the Internet,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano commented.
>
> “DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down
> websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from
> further victimization,” she added.
>
> A noble initiative, but one that went wrong, badly. The above failure again
> shows that the seizure process is a flawed one, as has been shown several
> times before in earlier copyright infringement sweeps. If the Government
> would only allow for due process to take place, this and other mistakes
> wouldn’t have been made.
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>



-- 
Best Regards,
Jon Hebb
Hebb Networks

www.hebbnetworks.com
Cell: 304.680.6777
Office: 304.906.4390