Comment by zbowling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zbowling | Hacker News Reader

I've never been a fan of ICE's technique of seizing domains. I don't think they should have the authority to do that. And then updating them and redirecting to their page that the domain was seized and potentially tracking the IPs of those that visit the site. It really bothers me that they have the authority to do that in the first place.

They have already got in to some hot water when they seized a dynamic dns domain that was hosting thousands of subdomains (only one was accused of pedophilia trafficking). They wildcard redirected the domain to an IP that hosts a page saying that domain was seized because the site was hosting pedophilia. Pedophilia labeling was strung across a lots of personal sites, church websites, and radio station websites in the processes. It took days for them to revert it and have all the DNS records propagated but the damage was partly already done as it labeled innocent parties as pedophiles without due process.

Not sure who is doing oversite of the DHS/ICE's efforts here. Probably best not to buy .COM/.NET domains, especially if you register it with US address in the WHOIS.

I saw someone point out that DHS's seized domain page isn't very accessible due to just being an image.

I noticed that the image is always named something generic like banner2.jpg and there's no other uniquely identifiable information in the HTML. I think they do it specifically to make it very difficult to Google Search for seized domains.

Violation of government accessibility requirements. Oh and it's horribly compressed (150k+ IIRC), text stored on a JPEG (PNG is so much better for graphics), not hosted on a CDN, lacks etags so there is no caching, and the background image of the "seized" text in red is just as bad. Wasting my tax money on massive bandwidth drain to host the page and wastes my bandwidth caps to load it. Makes me angry.

> Violation of government accessibility requirements.

I've always wondered if they could be sued for that.

I'll throw in a few bucks if you want to try.

IANAL and don't have the time to arrange something like this or I would def try.

PS: I would throw money someone's way to do this too.

It may violate the ADA, but the lack of accessibility only prevents a visitor from benefiting from the DHS's message, not a site that they would otherwise use without trouble (as is done for IRL ADA complaints). Even if someone could get in front of a judge with this, I'm sure the DHS has absolute immunity for stuff like this.

If they can't see, they can't be told what this image says on the page, the only image on the page. Imagine if there were important information in it or something other than just a warning.

Imagine if there were important information in it or something other than just a warning.

Sure, but there isn't. :)

Don't think they'll find anyone willing to contribute design effort. No graphic designer would want to add this page to their Design Portfolio.

If I did graphics design, I would have no problem with it -- heck, I would even tell people about it :)

Unless some other smartass is doing it too, it was probably me. Every time one of these domain seizures comes up I point out that the page you're redirected to isn't accessible to Americans With Disabilities. Petty? Maybe. It would be nice to force their hand once in a while.

> I think they do it specifically to make it very difficult to Google Search for seized domains.

You are willing to give them more credit than I am.

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