UK seizes rnbxclusive.com, owners arrested, website visitors threatened | Hacker News Reader

UK seizes rnbxclusive.com, owners arrested, website visitors threatened

dajaz1.com

40 pointssehugg14 comments

The source of this news is amusing - as they allude to in one sentence of the linked article, their own domain was siezed by US authorities for over a year, and eventually given back after legal wrangling.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/breaki... gives a horribly biased overview of the events behind the dajaz1 seizure.

I guess I'm not too familiar with what happened, are there any "unbiased" overviews of the events? I doubt the feds would give any information period.

Well, you can read what the RIAA thinks about it, along with an informationless non-statement from ICE: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111209/03385017020/ice-ad...

Or you can read the almost-totally-redacted FOIA document dump: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/03264917079/freedo...

The court case is under seal, so I can't point you to any relevant court documents. Heck, even Senator Wyden raised a fuss about it: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/wyden-domain-seizur...

I don't have much reason to doubt the accounting of events described in the TechDirt article -- although it does contain a fair amount of editorializing.

If the government would remove the seal and speak up instead of remaining mum, we'd have another side to the story, and maybe we could eliminate this perceived "bias".

Which parts are biased? Things like whether or not the government allowed the domain owner to contest the extensions should be pretty easy to verify. I'm sure that the lawyer probably has some record of a number of the communications he/she had with the government.

I realize that there's a bit of hand-waving with respect to 'holding people responsible,' but most of the things in that article that are verifiable are pretty damning of the government if they are true.

How did this domain seizure work? I understood it when it happened in the US since they own .com and are the jurisdiction for registrars like godaddy.com, but how does this work from the UK?

Apparently they just ask the registrar. Here is a blog post about it. http://blog.dominicsayers.com/2011/02/11/uk-police-can-turn-...

With cooperation from Rackspace.

   Domain servers in listed order:
      NS.RACKSPACE.COM
      NS2.RACKSPACE.COM

The domain resolves to 83.138.166.114 which hosts a takedown page within Rackspace's UK datacenter.

The placeholder page looks fake to me. Any confirmation from SOCA?

I don't know a lot about SOCA, but I agree that the amateur, bullying tone of the page reads more like the work of an interested party than of a police agency.

I agree. I mean think about it...

Imagine locking people up for 10 years for downloading an unlicensed music file.

I thought SOCA was the serious organised crime agency. Weapons, rackets, gangs, people trafficking are on a different scale from downloading music files for personal use...

This ZDNet blog apparently got confirmation from SOCA: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/uk-authorities-take-down-a-...

... back in 2010 (should be the end of the full title)

dajaz1.com is very much alive and prospering right now.

This article is dajaz1 writing about a different hip-hop site in the UK which was recently seized by the UK authorities, not the seizure of dajaz1 in 2010-2011.

I think there's some confusion here. dajaz1.com was seized back in 2010 by the US government, but the title is about a different site/domain that has recently be seized by the UK government. Not only seized, but the admins have been arrested, something that did not happen in the case of dajaz1.com.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com