Senate Panel Approves Domain Name Seizure Bill | Hacker News Reader

Senate Panel Approves Domain Name Seizure Bill

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52 pointsJ3L240430 comments

Countdown to this being abused the same way DMCA is misused on Youtube to delete videos that the uploader actually created themselves, but were shown at somepoint on a commercial TV/news show.

Also a fantastic powerful way for corporations to reverse-hijack domains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_domain_hijacking

tactical counter: chrome/firefox plugin that checks if the domain the user entered has been seized. if yes, it looks up the real ip address and forwards the user.

Forget plugin. Built in, transparent functionality. Naturally, every browser would have it but IE.

Win win.

If the purpose of a domain name is to find the assigned IP, how would you find the "real ip" ?

Unless there is a centralized database but then who is the authority in that case so spammers don't change it at will? Ironically you'd be creating your own alternate domain/tld system to compete with ICANN.

Anybody notice that Dianne Feinstein, the senator of Silicon Valley is on the list of senators that voted for this? http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/10291211924/the-19...

Senator Feinstein is my senator. Apparently, she co-sponsorded the bill. This is her response to me after I voiced my opinion to her office against the bill:

Thank you for writing to express your opposition to the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act." I appreciate knowing your views on this matter.

America's copyright industry is one of our most important economic engines, and giving artists and inventors the incentive to produce cutting edge works is vital to the country. The protection of intellectual property is particularly important to California, which is home to thriving film, music, and high-technology industries. I am strongly opposed to theft of copyrighted works, and I believe copyright owners should be able to prevent their works from being illegally duplicated.

On September 20, 2010, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (S. 3804), of which I am an original cosponsor. This legislation is carefully crafted to address the growing problem of online piracy and copyright infringement, and would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to shut down websites which are "dedicated to infringing activities." These are sites that, in the bill's language, are "primarily designed or have no demonstrable commercially significant purpose or use other than..." selling infringing or counterfeit goods.

Please know that I have been working with California high-technology businesses and Senator Leahy to improve the bill's language and address the concerns of legitimate high-tech businesses, public interest groups, and others. This legislation is currently awaiting action in the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which I am a member.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your concerns with me. Should you have additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact my staff in Washington, D.C. at (202) 224-3841.

I'm trying to think up a response.

Contact your senators and tell them to just say no to S. 3804:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-3804

http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_se...

No good can come of the gov't trying to control what domains can be accessed, and it won't stop those that wish to do us harm or take advantage of us, because they'll just use another domain.

Unfortunately, one of my senators is the infamous Senator Hatch of the Napster Hearing fame. Besides, I doubt I'd get much traction in the reddest state on the election map.

Still, things like this make me wonder if the alternative root servers would gain any traction. Of course, those are not free of their own problems and politics.

That, or somehow obsolete DNS altogether. I've often thought of setting up a site without DNS to see if I could get it ranked on the first page or two with only a bare IP address. I still use a handful of bare public IPs from places I worked at ten years ago. Surely, if the need arose, people could learn to memorize groupings of numbers again.

Then again, once IPv6 rolled out in a big way, raw IPs would be a real bitch to just type in, nevermind remember.

This isn't a "red vs. blue" thing, as evidenced by the senators who voted for this. It's more a "people who want power" (the government) vs... uh... well... nobody, actually, just people who want power. At best a handful of Republicans made a feeble twitch towards cutting back the government's power this election and only time will tell whether that manifests as anything other than an election platform, when they stand against so many peoplewhowantpower.

The problem with doing this via IP is it somewhat ties you to your hosting provider. I believe it's somewhat difficult to find places that will let you bring your own IPs.

In the name of fairness, we should be sure to allow China to seize domains it finds politically objectionable, and Saudi Arabia to seize domains it finds morally objectionable.

They already do this in their national firewalls.

This might not be a terrible thing... maybe domain names shouldn't be centrally controlled in the way they are today.

I for one would love to see a totally new domain name system, in the same way BitTorrent radically changed how we look at data transfer.

Decentralized DNS has been discussed, but it runs afoul of Zooko's triangle. In such a system, human-readable names would end up resolving to different IPs for different clients, which breaks everything. You can reduce but not eliminate the breakage using something like a Levien trust metric.

Distribution of update authority doesn't require decentralization of the namespace itself. As long as the independent authorities can agree on what constitutes a valid update (say by requiring the domain-owner's signature), they'll stay consistent. Meanwhile a corrupted authority will only affect its own clients.

In that case I would be worried about having a quorum of authorities located in the USA and all "corrupted" by law, thus outvoting the non-censored authorities.

I'm not talking about any sort of voting, just restricting the inconsistencies only to answers from the corrupted authorities. If cryptome.org redirects to thoughtcrime.dhs.gov for DNS servers using US roots, it has the same localized effect as any current national dns tampering. All uncorrupted authorities would all continue to agree that the domain hadn't been deregistered because they saw no signed update from cryptome.org. (And of course an 'authority' can even be your local upgraded DNS server if you care enough about having uncensored DNS)

edit: Actually I guess I'm talking about a quorum of 1 for legacy clients (nationality of chosen root servers), and updated authorities/clients relying on the total quorum that's easily established before the domain becomes "of interest".

Central databases are vulnerable to this sort of attack. I wonder if there is a way to do a distributed name lookup service...

It could bootstrap by falling back to regular DNS. I supposed the main problem would be resolving conflicts.

> to include the Newspaper Association of America, which said the legislation was needed because online piracy "undermines the investments that newspapers make in journalism."

Can anyone fill us in on how online piracy, specifically, affects newspapers? Enormous torrents of USA Today, perhaps?

My impression is that the internet at large obviates newspapers altogether, so I'm mystified. Grasping at anything to turn back the hands of time on their dinosaur business model?

Maybe they want to blacklist news.google.com; I hear it's nothing but pirated headlines.

There actually are popular torrents of e.g. The Economist. I'm sure there are also websites "liberating" content from behind paywalls as well.

Hopefully they mean all the spammy little blogs that exist purely to wrap AdSense around cut & pasted articles.

Maybe they are thinking of charging for their content as London's Time currently does. Although I do not know of any site which provides the content of The Times for free, there is no reason why people would not start doing so where all newspapers to start charging for content.

So maybe they are indeed preparing for a certain sort of internet balkanisation.

Twitter will become the new DNS. Subscribe to their twitter and they'll broadcast their new IP.

Can't seize a .onion pseudo-domain.

By my reading, a website would just need to be dual purpose to be protected. They could sell pirate bay hats and eye patches.

Who decides that? Where is the line drawn? What is the appeals process? How much is it going to cost to appeal (lawyers etc)?

This is censorship and it is a slippery slope, trust me I'm Australian we are unfortunately all to familiar with censorship. :(

I don't mean to say it's ok to pass - just that it seems easy to circumvent:

A Web site is in danger of having its domain seized (or having U.S. Internet providers encounter a sudden case of amnesia when their customers try to visit it) if it is "primarily designed" and "has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than" offering or providing access to unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.

.ly domains saga instantly came to mind :)

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