U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
There isn't even an alt tag on the giant images with text.
Now Im just sayin' but if they're using stupid loopholes to seize these domains, couldn't they be sued under the americans with disabilities act?
They've got piwitracker and google analytics running on a page that just serves up one image.
In comparison, looking back at some domains that were previously seized by ICE (and verified by the NYTimes blog), they're all pointing to 74.208.15.160 without any weird NS changes or on-page analytics. (see http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/in-anti-the... and http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1006/100630losangeles.htm)
1. Yesterday we reported on the site rapgodfathers.com which was seized and pointed to the same landing page (+ analytics).
This was confirmed by the owner (plus another source) and a search warrant from a US district Court. See http://torrentfreak.com/music-linking-site-raided-by-dept-of...
2. Today reports came in on more sites. We've known the owner of torrent-finder for a few years and spoke with him about what happened.
He confirmed that ICANN was involved and that Godaddy knew nothing about the actions. He also told us some more information that we were told not to post in public. Combined with yesterday's raid the story added up.
3. About the analytics... My guess would be that the hosting company put that there, but it may also be the authorities.
4. Dozens of sites are involved in this, all with different owners.
A hoax seems to be impossible. But then again, we're just simple bloggers, and thought we had enough info to back the story. If anyone disagrees, please say so.
If the hosts file manager could also work as a dyndns type utility, then servers could change IPs at random and the user would be none the wiser.
(Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_animals )
On the other hand take a gander at the Great Seal of the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-GreatSeal-Obverse.svg
The eagle isn't doing anything especially menacing like the British lion is. It holds arrows to represent preparedness for war, but also an olive branch to represent preference for peace. I'm not familiar with the symbolic meaning of the elements of the British Royal Coat of Arms: does it contain any equivalent to the American olive branch?
Also, I suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Dragon
The British Royal Coat of Arms, which is the say the coat of arms of the Royal family does not have anything equivalent to olive branch. Rather, it's a coat of arms to depict the 'linage' of the United Kingdom. The triple lion represents England and is form Richard the Lionheart's Coat of Arms, the single lion represents the Scottish crown, and then harp Ireland.
Remember, coat of arms were originally meant to be more or less unique identifiers for armored noble men. The British (and many other European coat of arms) are direct results of centuries of Royal Families merging, changing, redesigning their heraldry. Their message/symbolism can be 'constructed' as much as history allowed them to be. The Great Seal (and coat of arms) of the United States was designed. A few people sat around and decided what to put on it and what it would represent. The closest to that happening in 'old Europe' would be the royalty trying to figure out which third cousin (only half joking) to marry, or what land to invade and exactly which method to use to join the coat of arms.
Seriously, I think that in heraldry is interesting stuff. An attempt at a system that codifies a which relationship between visual and written display. In case you never knew, every piece of heraldry has a written description that describes the piece of heraldry 'precisely'. That is to say that if you follow the rules, then any drawing that satisfies "Or a lion rampant within a double tressure flory-counter-flory Gules" (Scotland) -is- the Scottish coat of arms (in theory anyways). For example "Or a lion rampant" means golden lion in the rampant position. Doesn't matter how you draw the lion, as long as its recognizable as a lion.
http://www.zdnet.com/news/blog-site-shut-down-after-potentia...
No commercial and centralized system is safe from censorship/seizure.
If you're willing to do Evil to monetize it, you might even get to resell sex.com and a couple of expensive domains. Or just explain to investor that one day, when you'll be big enough, you'll be able to do it. Also, you'll be able to decide how fast you respond to requests according to whether the domain's owner subscribed to your "premium" service.
TL;DR: brace yourself for libertarian cyber-mayhem.
But it's a slippery slope... Once you fragment the DNS like that, it's hard to go back. And then we're put in a position to make editorial judgements of which version of the domain to follow which we prefer to not be in. So we don't, for now.
There's a lot more thinking about this subject that I and others have discussed, but fragmenting the DNS is not the ideal answer. Making ICANN independent of the US is, however, of critical importance.
Really I think OpenDNS has some merit but I'd hate for the DNS system to become so fragmented that the whole fabric of trust that we've built towards domain names would be up for grabs. The consequences of that happening are beyond my technical expertise to estimate but my gut says it can't be good.
They could probably make it difficult enough for you that you would change your mind. When the full force of the government you're operating in comes down on you, it's hard to stay in business. This is why the "solutions" tend to come from P2P groups. It's harder for the government to go after individuals (many of whom are in different countries) than a single organization.
I use OpenDNS and I do appreciate that you are thinking about it.
Your flagship 'features' are all based on NXDOMAIN poisoning and intentional censorship in your nameserver by default. You're doing more than anyone else to fragment DNS all while having the chutzpah to market it as 'open'.
Are you seriously telling me that you think OpenDNS could ignore a criminal search and seizure warrant from a US federal judge, even though your servers appear to be physically in the United States?
Several other domains also appear to have been seized
including 2009jerseys.com, nfljerseysupply.com,
throwbackguy.com, cartoon77.com, lifetimereplicas.com,
handbag9.com, handbagcom.com and dvdprostore.com
If the US only seizes domains of their own citizens that's somewhat OK for me.
If the US also sizes domains of other nation's citizens I guess in the future I'll only use domain names outside the jurisdication of the US. But if that's the case I wonder why they haven't taken down PirateBay yet.
.ly domains were being seized by their government even though the domains were being operated by American companies.
What gives the US "jurisdiction" is that it's nominally controlled by VeriSign and thence ICANN, which is a US quango, so owners of .com domains are in a legal relationship with a US entity. Outside the US, people have been known to get quite worked up about this arrangement, and there have been serious suggestions that ICANN should cede control (or transfer directly) to a UN body. Whether interference as in this case is legal in international law is, as far as I know, untested.
The TLD which was originally intended for use by US commercial organisations was .co.us, which nobody seems to bother with.
I've also noticed the same recently while reading a TechDirt article. If only they were more objective, it would really lend to their credibility.
I write for TorrentFreak and while I agree that we have our own look on things, we do check all facts carefully, possibly more than the average 'news' outlet.
Please back up your untrustworthy claim or stick to the bias one.
I don't mind critique at all, but it's frustrating if people call it untrustworthy when we spend hours every day checking facts and gathering sources.
As you say, you do have your view on certain things. My feeling is that that extreme view, in many cases, makes me wonder the actual facts. Maybe 'untrustworthy' was a bad term to use.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/technology/27torrent.html
However, for future reference, yes. The government would easily contract out something like this. There is a virtually no limit to what the government would contract out. For example, some of my co-workers work on the no-fly-list database/content repository.
There's very little that the government does in-house these days.