Gizmodo Goes Crazy, Reality Isn't What It Seems | Hacker News Reader

Gizmodo Goes Crazy, Reality Isn't What It Seems

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55 pointsJSig20 comments

> they seized domain pointers within their jurisdiction. A nearly-entirely-symbolic exercise,

This guy obviously has no clue about the realities of web publishing. How are ordinary users supposed to find the sites without the domain pointer? For most users, taking the domain name is the same as shutting the site down.

seizing a domain is like seizing your cellphone # and saying it's ok because someone can still contact you using your email address(that forwards to your phone)...which they don't know

And here I thought the entire outrage was due to the fact that the U.S. court system really shouldn't have jurisdiction over generic domain names and therefore shouldn't be able to do this sort of thing, regardless of the U.S. law-compliant process they follow.

He brings out a good point: there was a warrant. While I'm not convinced that this is strictly... right, it does seem at least some level of due process was followed.

I'm not even sure there is a legal framework for shutting websites and internet infrastructure down.

It reminds me a little bit of Sterling's Hacker Crackdown - there is still an electronic frontier.

They had court orders. That means they had due process of law

I don't think court orders automatically mean justice was served. Accusation was levied, and execution was carried out.

On issues that deserve outrage, Denninger's rants are second to none. On issues that don't, he's good at explaining why. And he's got a solid track record of discerning the difference.

really? I've been following the guy for a while and think he is sometimes an idiot. For example, if there are court orders: where are they? Unless he saw the court orders, he just made them up. I could give you a bunch of things he was wrong about. He has a forum where be bans people who disagree with him. He was right about foreclosure gate and others such as the financial bailouts, but totally wrong on his deflation argument and wrong about gold. He was so wrong about gold that he deleted the precious metal area of his website from public viewing.

Regarding the court orders, ICE confirmed that today. I don't know how he got verification of that over the weekend, but he's good at digging around and finding stuff like that.

I'm not sure which 'deflation argument' you're referring to, but he has been arguing since 2006 that deflation would be the natural result of the financial crisis, even when Nouriel Roubini himself was arguing inflation (Roubini quickly reversed himself).

He was completely correct on that, it's deflation that the US Government and Federal Reserve are trying to prevent with massive stimuli and QE1/2. So far they've been successful, but at such a great cost there's no telling whether it's sustainable, or whether Bernanke can wind it down and gracefully exit eventually. Denninger argues no, b/c there's too much bad debt, and credit

Regarding gold, his fundamental thesis is that the data doesn't support the widely-held belief that gold is a good hedge for inflation or deflation, but it does appear to be a good hedge for geopolitical instability. He's posted data that disprove the former notion, which I'm not about to go try to dig up.

Gold has risen over the past ten years, but that time period was characterized by both currency instability, currency inflation, debt deflation, and geopolitical instability in the MidEast and somewhat N.Korea. Good luck trying to extract any causation out of that correlation. Till then, there's nothing to disprove his gold thesis.

He made parts of his website private to keep out the 'moonbats', conspiracy theorists, and 'collapse of the American Empire' cheerleaders, who tend to be most active in precious metals forums.

Whether he had an ulterior motive to hide being wrong about gold, I can't speak to that since I don't follow gold, or his gold forum very closely. Have any evidence of that accusation?

What an absolutely useless headline.

If there's no due process, it's not constitutional, period.

A warrant issued by a judge is due process.

Edit: I'm not saying it's fair, just that it's allowed by the constitution.

But the named domain's owners were not notified or provided the opportunity to even defend themselves! That's not due process.

Oddly enough, if police get a warrant to search your house and seize something that's considered evidence, they don't tell you in advance that they've done so or that they're coming to execute the warrant.

In other words, due process doesn't mean "nobody's allowed to do anything until every side has had its fill of argument".

Except that this case is completely different from that in every way? This isn't evidence -- this is a rendered judgement of sorts.

It's a process. It's not "due process".

Uh, what. The outrage, at least from where I'm sitting, is that these takedowns, if ICE's total cost is distributed accordingly, cost the American taxpayers millions of dollars. For something that as the author has pointed out, is largely futile.

No one has mentioned that in any of the articles I've read, or the comments on HN (though, again, I haven't read all of them). Citations, please?

Sorry, trying to get a handle on the barrage of headlines after thanksgiving and, previously, two weeks out of the country (and offline). "ICE's total cost" is what? Meaning the breakdown of their budget as it relates to the takedown of the sites?

They had United States court orders. But DNS be subject to US court orders?

Things aren't generally subject to court orders, people (including the legal construct of "corporations") are subject to court orders. In particular, people in the US who run DNS systems are subject to court orders.

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