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

torrentfreak.com

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

#41

Post by wlievens »

kmfrk wrote: post #24
tibbon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, there are no 'banned books' in the US, but rather ones that are blacklisted by library, teaching and bookstore groups making them difficult to come by. I'm personally unaware of any book that the US Government has banned, although I'm always willing to be wrong :)

Pretty much - recently, a member of the army (or something such) wrote a book with some very sensitive details that caught the government off guard. The government's reaction? Buying all first-edition copies of the book.

Great business model, come to think of it.

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

#42

Post by glhaynes »

tjmaxal wrote: post #36
joeybaker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh… it's semantics, they'd vote against Operation Save our Children if they were voting for the Internet Bill of Rights Act

You and I may know that but your average voter probably doesn't, and they certainly wouldn't two or three years later when it come back up out of context, in a attack ad.

This seems a key failing of our system: people that try to be moderately informed (the best you can reasonably expect - the vast majority can't/won't be political wonks) may end up even less informed in part because the relationship between voting record and the appearance of that record is radically distorted by this kind of thing.

So what can be done about this? It's hard for me to imagine a structural remedy.

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

#43

Post by eli »

"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"

What's a "domain pointer"? That IP address serves up a seizure notice no matter what hostname you request it with.

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

#44

Post by blakeweb »

swombat wrote: post #31

I don't really understand how come, in the lawsuit-happy US, there isn't a class action lawsuit in place already to sue the government for the damage caused by this sort of error.

My first thought when I saw this was that it wasn't possible to bring civil claims against the federal government.

But looking it up, I found the Federal Tort Claims Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTCA) which changed that in 1946.

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

#45

Post by joeybaker »

peterwwillis wrote: post #33
joeybaker wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm… you appear to be right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-commonly_challenge... That brings me to my second question: why don't we have a similar process for websites?

The book Bridge to Terabithia (of which a 2007 film was adapted) was at number 8 on the ALA's list of frequently challenged books because: "The censorship attempts stem from death being a part of the plot; Jess' frequent use of the word "lord" outside of prayer; concerns that the book promotes secular humanism, New Age religion, occultism, and Satanism; and for use of offensive language." Maybe it's better we don't h…

Fair point, but the merits of the book banning system: are that it appears to be relatively difficult to implement or enforce, and that it's restricted to localities instead of a whole country.

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

#47

Post by sudonim »

davidu wrote: post #46

It's not obvious what technical solutions exist that are practical to combat this. I feel like a lawsuit against DHS / ICE and related parties is an unfortunate but necessary step.

Start with that their seizure notices are not 508 compliant. They should be accessible to americans with disabilities.

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

#48

Post by Splines »

yardie wrote: post #8

It's amazing that these operations and bills are intentionally wrapped in wording that makes them politically untouchable. I can see why lawmakers wouldn't want to investigate this. Who wants to be the congressman/woman that went against Operation Save our children ?

They should just stop giving them names to avoid this sort of emotional attachment.

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

#49

Post by dedward »

patio11 wrote: post #12
tibbon wrote: post #2

While there are more important things in life (like being accused wrongly of child pornography), I wonder how that effects their Google rankings to suddenly have your entire domain ripped out from underneath you and pointing to a duplicate content site. Is there any recourse for this action? Seems that this would trigger unreasonable search and seizure.

While there are more important things in life (like being accused wrongly of child pornography), I wonder how that effects their Google rankings to suddenly have your entire domain ripped out from underneath you and pointing to a duplicate content site. My educated guess based on experience working with people affected by dissimilar causes but similar appearance to Google: a massive hit to rankings/traffic within abo…

The problem seems to be (for lack of better information) that sites are shut down pre-emptively with no warning.

I'm all for prosecuting child pornographers, and shutting down their content as quickly as possible - but that should be possible by a court order against the hosting provider.... or if said provider is unreachable / out of jurisdiction, and has STILL had some reasonable attempt at contact to press charges, then sure, go after the domain - but there needs to be some due process behind things rather than just having the federal authorities and DNS layer just whomping things down with little to no oversight.

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