ICE freezes 84,000 innocent domains
p2pnet view P2P:- US government taxpayer funded corporate copyright cops ICE (short for Immigration and Customs Enforcement) have suffered a major melt-down.
The largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE has been having domains said to be involved in varying degrees of ‘piracy’ & porn closed for, and on behalf of, corporate interests, not the least of whom are: Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music; and, Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures.
In their newest op, the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice yesterday “announced the execution of seizure warrants against 10 domain names of websites engaged in the advertisement and distribution of child pornography as part of ‘Operation Protect Our Children’—a new joint operation between DOJ and DHS’ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to target sites that provide child pornography.”
Well done. Although they somehow missed a couple of the most egregious porn helpers.
Google search and Microsoft’s Bing search.
Sadly, ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center also blew it with one of the domains they did target, says TorrentFreak, going on >>>
As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However, somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a large DNS service provider was seized.
The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS, was suspended at the registrar level. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well.
FreeDNS owner posted Freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the issue sorted as quickly as possible.
On Sunday the domain seizure was reversed and “the subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner”, says the post, adding:
“However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3 days before the images disappeared completely.”
When we went for a look at mooo.com at 10:36 am Pacific, all we saw was “No website has been configured for this address”.
Stay tuned.
Google search – Google Search: major porn engine, January 27, 2011
Bing search – Bing Search: major porn engine, January 2, 2010
TorrentFreak – U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’, February 16, 2011
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
World War III will be a global information war with no division between civilian & military participation ~ Marshall McLuhan
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February 16th, 2011 at 4:17 pm
The police could go arrest the people who filmed and put the kiddie porn online, but noooo.. that would make too much sense. Instead, customs is censoring the websites and now we can pretend the child molesters have gone away!
February 16th, 2011 at 7:27 pm
One wonders why the feds havent yet located osama bin laden or even those behind the 9-11 attrocities but that seems too hard so bypassing due process of law and hijacking domains for publicity must seem like a good plan to them.
February 17th, 2011 at 12:50 am
@Quartz:
I’m absolutely convinced that bin Laden died of kidney failure (or similar) in December 2001, and that this is being kept from the public, for a few obvious reasons that have nothing to do with good intention.
February 17th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Hmm I did suspect things are not as they may seem for some years now, the white washing by politicians of patriot act abuses simply puts off the day when US citizens can call their homeland agin “the land of the free”, however this is no anti US rant I support my fellow human beings and remember every day they too are not happy with rights abuse and violations of law orchestrated by a select group of bad apples.
Let us have hope and work collectively towards restoring both faith and trust in each other, thats something the politicians cannot steal, unless we let them