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.
More details can be found here: http://rulingclass.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/the-background-d...
[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...
Domain Name: SEIZEDSERVERS.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Solutions, IT
ATTN SEIZEDSERVERS.COM
care of Network Solutions
PO Box 459
Drums, PA 18222
US
570-708-8780
Record expires on 24-Nov-2011.
Record created on 24-Nov-2010.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM 74.81.170.109
NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM 74.81.170.108No, they don't.
The first part of your statement actually points towards "crazy overreach".
But you could interpret this action using all permutations of the imaginable adjectives and nouns:
{crazy, calculated} X {overreach, legal action}
>>
{"crazy overreach", "crazy legal action",
"calculated overreach", "calculated legal action"}
What I don't understand is why / how someone has re-classified good old fashioned copyright infringement as "counterfeiting."
This sort of stuff used to be an FBI matter. What is the justification for changing that, I wonder?
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.
E.g. the system could have the following components:
1) A centralised issuer (CI) of time-stamped certificates for a TLD, which certify someone is the owner of a domain. Certificates are only issued for domains that don't exist yet. The public key is in the certificate, and the private key is kept by the owner.
2) A network of TLD nameserver operators (TLDNSO) for the TLD. TLDNSOs have stable IP addresses which are distributed to client software in advance - and there is a centrally agreed on list. TLDNSOs are geographically dispersed, and spread across many different legal jurisdictions.
3) All certificates from the CI are sent to all TLDNSOs. Certificates without a timestamp that corresponds within a limited threshold to the time the certificate was received are rejected, as are certificates for domains when another certificate for the same domain is held by the TLDNSO.
4) TLDNSOs accept domain resource record (RR) updates - e.g. nameserver records - from anyone, provide they are signed with the private key that only the domain owner has. Likewise for the equivalent of WHOIS details.
5) Domain owners can sign a transfer certificate, which includes the public key of the new owner, and is signed with their private key, and sending the transfer certificate to the new owner. The new owner sends it to all TLDNSOs, who will from then on accept requests with the new owner's key, rather than the old one.
6) Clients can query TLDNSOs using DNS or DNSSEC, or using a new protocol which lets them inspect the certificates from the CI and any ownership changes. Clients using the new protocol query several TLDNSOs in several jurisdictions - there could be a fairly complex set of conflict resolution rules, but one of the most important would be that if two CI certificates were received, more TLDNSOs get queried, and the most frequent answer is the one that is accepted.
This makes most kinds of attacks on existing domains difficult:
1) The CI can be compelled by authorities in its jurisdiction to issue certificates, possibly backdated, but they won't be accepted by TLDNSOs except the ones that can be compelled to accept them (a minority in the case of unilateral government action), because they already have a certificate for the domain. The new CI certificate will be rejected by clients if only a minority of TLDNSOs present it.
2) TLDNSOs can be compelled to remove CI certificates for individual domains, but if only a minority are in any one jurisdiction, clients will get the record from other TLDNSOs.
3) Only the domain name owner has the private key needed to revoke or transfer a domain name. Obviously, the domain name owner can be compelled to reveal they private key (if they have it in that jurisdiction anyway), but that is outside the scope of this document. They could encrypt the key with a secure password and refuse to disclose it - that would be legal in some jurisdictions and illegal in others. By this point, authorities would probably focus on taking down the servers hosting the website rather than the DNS.
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.
In fact, the simplest would be "mirror + backtrack".
If a given site had an earlier dns entry, the alternative dns would point to that earlier entry as the second alternative. If you think the second alternative is "really it", you can make that permanent for you.
It wouldn't solve everything but it would make a variety seizure approach not work well in the short term.
You'd still have trouble if you lost your ip address(es) but this would mean seizure would need multiple points of failure.
Moreover, this would need only a minimum of centralization. A browser plugin to "find hidden/seized sites" might actually be trivial to produce. Name it something catchy. Anyone would to work on this?
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.)
Step 3: Profit?
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.
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.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-shuts-down-29-bittorrent-and-nz...
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.
What I find most scary, though, is the very limited reaction this gets.