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Comment by in_vestor | Hacker News Reader

ELI5 why the gov doesn’t just seize the servers.

You have to know where something is to seize it. Operations over international lines are hard to do. They likely have a series of bouncers/reverse proxies before the "main" back infrastructure. It is also likely that they rotate their bouncers regularly, different datacenters, countries, etc

Don't the proxies just point back to the main infrastructure? How do the site operators deal with bandwidth usage and QOS and all the edge vps/proxies?

Generally, something like a nginx reverse proxy is pretty performant. The opsec gains come by rotating the infrastructure you run on. If you had something like a ingress -> middle -> backend, and then regularly changed hosts, by the time someone is able to get a court order to seize the ingress, you've already moved on and they need to start the process over.

In terms of system hardening, since the outer machines are almost bare, they are hard to hack. Attempting to attack the backend server isn't easy either (assuming the the webadmin knows what they are doing. Things like blocking outgoing traffic and configuring the system to not leak the backend server's IP)

> ELI5 why the gov doesn’t just seize the servers.

Because “the government” is not a single unitary global institution.

...yet

How could it be? Why would countries like China, Russia, or Thailand align with the US on that subject when they clearly have no interest in doing so? Being overly cynical sounds good to some people, but it does not result in an accurate understanding of how the world works.

The desire for control will unite even philosophically disparate governments. Pay attention.

In the real world, the opposite is happening right now.

I understand your interpretation of a one word response as idle cynicism for its own sake. Truly though, the history of civilization is one of ever-consolidating power, roughly correlated with technological advance. There are of course local exceptions (both in the geographical and temporal sense) to the overall trend, but barring a massive technological setback, I really don't see how we won't eventually end up under the rule of a single government.

Because you can buy an infinite number of globally located, cheap, disposable front end VPSes starting at $1 a month or less that hide your critical infrastructure.

The servers can easily be duplicated in infinite numbers.

Which government? Where are the servers located? Whose jurisdiction? Are all the servers in the same place?

It seems the US Postal Inspection Service has some sort of judical powers over domains especially, possibly related to DNS root through ICANN being rooted in the US.

Can you elaborate on this?

I'm possibly wrong about the Postal, just searched for seizure news involving them and there seemed to be many and made more of a leap than seems warranted, I guess they just do ops and the seizures are via DoJ/FBI... But in any case ICANN is well known to control DNS and is a US org.

Interesting. It does seem like they are involved, but I do not think the USPIS has jurisdiction over cyber crime unless it invoices mail, although they can participate in inter-agency operations.

> Cybercrimes are crimes committed through the Internet or using computer devices. These crimes almost always intersect with the postal system. That’s why the Postal Inspection Service is committed to protecting the public from criminals who steal digital information for financial gain, revenge, or even political advantage.

> These crimes almost always intersect with the postal system.

I don't understand this part at all.

https://www.uspis.gov/tips-prevention/cybercrime

Neither does anyone else: "In order to preserve operational effectiveness, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service does not discuss its protocols, investigative methods, or tools," and "In sum, not much is known about iCOP" - https://www.snopes.com/articles/393823/usps-icop/

One of the first articles that brought this up: https://news.yahoo.com/the-postal-service-is-running-a-runni...

there are plenty of cases of .com and .net domains being seized by US federal court order, the registrar locks the ability to login to admin the domain, sets new authoritative nameservers, government persons publish a new authoritative zonefile for it, government puts up a one page like "Seized by FBI" on their own httpd somewhere.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=.com+doma...

They're not in a country that wants that to happen.

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