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[Zach Gibbens <infocop411 AT gmail.com>]

or a reason for no government meddling in general

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Jon Hebb <somebodyrocks AT gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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