U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’

Original Post: Torrent Freak

he US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner that was placed on their domain.

“Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution,” was the worrying message they read on their websites.

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. 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. All sites were redirected to the banner below.
This banner was visible on the 84,000 sites


The FreeDNS owner was taken by surprise and quickly released the following statement on their website. “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.”

Eventually, on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted and the subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner. However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3 days before the images disappeared completely.

Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners.

One of the customers quickly went out to assure visitors that his site was not involved in any of the alleged crimes.

“You can rest assured that I have not and would never be found to be trafficking in such distasteful and horrific content. A little sleuthing shows that the whole of the mooo.com TLD is impacted. At first, the legitimacy of the alerts seems to be questionable — after all, what reputable agency would display their warning in a fancily formatted image referenced by the underlying HTML? I wouldn’t expect to see that.”

Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet. Adding mooo.com will produce a different image than picking a random domain (child porn vs. copyright), which confirms the mistake.

Although it is not clear where this massive error was made, and who’s responsible for it, the Department of Homeland security is conveniently sweeping it under the rug. In a press release that went out a few hours ago the authorities were clearly proud of themselves for taking down 10 domain names.

However, DHS conveniently failed to mention that 84,000 websites were wrongfully taken down in the process, shaming thousands of people in the process.

“Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano commented.

“DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization,” she added.

A noble initiative, but one that went wrong, badly. The above failure again shows that the seizure process is a flawed one, as has been shown several times before in earlier copyright infringement sweeps. If the Government would only allow for due process to take place, this and other mistakes wouldn’t have been made.

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Malawi To Make Farting In Public Illegal

Original Post: Reuters

By Jetpacker

Tue Feb 1, 2011 3:27pm EST

It’s comforting to know that at least one country in the world has their priorities set straight.

The African nation of Malawi — the country you never knew existed until Madonna adopted a child from there to be used as a fashion accessory — is set to pass a bill that includes new laws intended to “mold responsible and disciplined citizens.”

By far the most beneficial new law is the one that makes it illegal to fart in public.

That’s right, farting in public will no longer be just rude and discourteous to others, it will now be a crime. Which means farting will go on your criminal record.

Finally, a government that isn’t afraid to take on the most diabolical criminals.

Say all you want about armed robbery, there really is no crime more atrocious than crop-dusting in a crowded mall, forcing innocent and unsuspecting people to breathe in the foul gas that’s been fermenting inside somebody’s bowels.

These nefarious degenerates should be locked up for good in a room without ventilation and made to smell their crime for the remainder of their pathetic lives.

Gun-Mandate Bill is Jab at Health Care Reform

Original Post: Outdoor Life

by J. R. ABSHER

The South Dakota state lawmaker who introduced a bill to require firearms ownership for adult residents admits it won’t pass Constitutional muster, but he wanted to make a point about the “individual mandate” included in the health care reform bill passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Barack Obama in 2010.

Titled “An Act to provide for an individual mandate to adult citizens to provide for the self defense of themselves and others,” the bill would require every South Dakota adult 21 or older to buy a firearm within six months of becoming law.

But the bill’s author, Rep. Hal Wick, R-Sioux Falls, and its four additional co-sponsors know the measure doesn’t have the slightest chance of passage and will likely die during committee hearings.

“It’s no more constitutional than the federal health-care law,” Rep. Wick told the Mitchell Republic newspaper this week. “To be honest with you, it won’t pass. It’s unconstitutional.”

Rep. Wick, an avid hunter and firearms enthusiast, said the idea for the measure came to him while discussing the health care bill with friends in hunting camp this past fall. His hunting buddies reasoned that if the government could order people to have health insurance, why couldn’t it mandate they own a firearm?

“I thought, ‘Why not?’ ” Wick said. “It makes just as much sense for South Dakota to make the requirement and provide for everybody’s protection.”

Ironically, less than an hour after introducing House Bill 1237 on Monday, Jan. 31, Rep. Wick learned that Florida District Judge Roger Vinson had ruled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 unconstitutional in its entirety.