Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

[GreyGeek]

U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More
reads the title of the article. At the bottom it give a partial list of sites that were shuttered. While they could easily obtain warrants for blocking the DNS entries of that many sites at once:

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he explained.

Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.

... I doubt they had the manpower to visit each site and take physical control. So, ICE is hijacking DNS server entries upstream from the ISPs. IF the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" passes I except to see a LOT of sites, including FOSS, go dark as corporate powers wage war using their political cronies/goons, after having failed to compete in the market place.

IF all they do is block or redirect DNS entries the prudent thing to do is to add the IP address - host name combinations of sites you want to remain in contact with in your /etc/hosts file. That way your hosts file acts as your own "DNS server" for those sites.

[Detonate]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

I just posted this related link in another thread.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20023915-93.html

[woodsmoke]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

Nice posts GG and Detonate.

I posted that this would happen in a now defunct forum about four years ago and was jeered at, the first inkling was the whole ShoutCast and SomaFM thing, that is why there are Now adverts on those places and if the adverts do not produce "enough" money for the RIAA then they will be shut down also.

The RIAA used as "an excuse" the data from a PAID music stream site in Europe as the "norm" for how much streaming music was worth. This, of course, was bogus, but the power is in the money. The guy from SomaFM testified at the RIAA hearing in congress and was basically told, ok...you get a year and then you pay up big time or are shut down.

I again posted that this would happen at another forum, now defunct, over a year and a half ago and basically was told it would never happen....yet again.

I posted about a paid radio station that was offshore from the U.S. that some people said they wanted and couldn't get when it could be received in Europe. I checked around a lot and found an obscure article wherein the guy said that he could not stream into the U.S. because of a blocking of ISPs on the basis of the physical placement on the earth.

I commented that if "they" the RIAA et.al. could keep this OUT of the U.S. by physical ISP placement(yes the ISP is in Buenos Ares for all I know, but it is "for" a place in the U.S.) ... and that he could be kept out of the WHOLE of the U.S. until the correct "financial arrangements" could be made then there could be an RIAA wall built around the U.S. and the rest of the world would laugh.

I was told then that well, there will always be some way around it.

I posted again in another forum maybe 3 months ago and was told it would never happen.

So.... I guess that the "other way" will be to stream your music through your phone...until the phone is blocked by...

the GPS on your phone which is in the ...U.S.

Pirate Bay is not Soma FM or Shoutcast but the nose of the camel is now under the tent.

And now we have "the national interest" involved.

I wonder when Microsoft will say that it is against the National Interests to allow the torrents that carry .isos which COULD............... harbour..... SPYWARE..... from being moved either into or within the U.S.?

As an illustration of how what would never happen actually happening consider this:

WHO would have EVER thought that "imminent domain" which used to be used to take(after paying) property to build a school, or library or road ...............would be used to take property from a private entity not for "the government" but for ANOTHER private entity that the "government" deemed to be in the "city's interest"....


woodsmoke

[Detonate]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

More and more government intrusion in our lives every day. And the internet will not be an exception. The tell us what we can eat, they tell us we have to have those crappy cfl light bulbs, and they tell us we have to have a toilet that always has to be flushed twice to work, even though the intent was to save water, the list goes on and on. It is no wonder the people are starting to rise up against this kind of mindless intrusion into our personal liberties.

[Detonate]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

More news on the subject.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20023918-93.html

[Detonate]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

Another thing that amazes me is that they have no problem shutting down sites like these but they can't shut down Wikileaks.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

Detonate.

Now THAT one had never occurred to me! thumbsup!
woodsmoke

[Snowhog]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

Another thing that amazes me is that they have no problem shutting down sites like these but they can't shut down Wikileaks.

Wikileaks isn't hosted in the U.S. It would take the cooperation of the hosting countries government and that of the U.S. to shut them down.

[skunk]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

Another thing that amazes me is that they have no problem shutting down sites like these but they can't shut down Wikileaks.

Probably because there is no corporate profits involved

[kyonides]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

Another thing that amazes me is that they have no problem shutting down sites like these but they can't shut down Wikileaks.

Wikileaks isn't hosted in the U.S. It would take the cooperation of the hosting countries government and that of the U.S. to shut them down.

That means they need to get some help from Sarkozy's french government...
It's interesting how easy it is now to download the logs from that website...

[Snowhog]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

It's interesting how easy it is now to download the logs from that website...

Not really. They want the public to know. That's the whole point of Wikileaks.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

Ya know, this whole wikileaks thing just raises all sorts of questions.

a) "knowledge" as opposed to "people killed either in the field or with a black umbrella"
b) Is the U.S. SO POWERLESS that they can't "twist an arm" in another country to get this blocked?
c) Is the present admin SO AGAINST whatever admin was before them that they are willing to risk people being killed for the greater "abstraction"...
d) Was the PAST administration SO CLUELESS as to have this to where a twenty year old in the whatever branch of U.S. military had access to this information?
e) is this a confluence of events which REALLY IS beyond the capabilities of "whoever" to either block, in the case of the U.S. government or to CONTROL, as in the guy who hides in peoples living rooms so that he won't be killed.
f) Does this guy NOT realize that by releasing "whatever" that some government in BUM@#$%istan won't keep track of him and when Al-queda/anarchists/taliban/WeatherUnderground get SUFFICIENT control of this or that government that they would NOT put a million dollar kill order out on him?
g) the various iterations of all of this are just fascinating...

and I hope that all who read this will not have a near or dear person killed because of "whatever" from "either" or "any" of the paranoiac ways of looking at things. Really.

woodsmoke

[Detonate]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

I find it hard to believe that we do not possess the technology to block the site no matter where it is located. Russian crackers can mount denial of service attacks on major US sites with impunity but we can't do that to Wikileaks?

[garethd]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

Another thing that amazes me is that they have no problem shutting down sites like these but they can't shut down Wikileaks.

Wikileaks isn't hosted in the U.S. It would take the cooperation of the hosting countries government and that of the U.S. to shut them down.

That means they need to get some help from Sarkozy's french government...
It's interesting how easy it is now to download the logs from that website...

Wikileaks is hosted in Sweden

[skunk]

Re: Recent actions by ICE gives cause for caution ...

If we had a real free press in our own country there would be no need for wikileaks