US government mistakenly shuts down 84,000 websites

[Kouen Hasuki]

The US Government once again seized several domain names this week, but this time it made a mistake. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch (ICE) took down websites related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then had the domain registries in question point to a server that hosts a warning message.

Unfortunately, one of the targeted domains, mooo.com, belonged to the DNS provider FreeDNS, and as result, 84,000 websites were mistakenly taken down. These sites saw the following message on their website, according to TorrentFreak: "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." The FreeDNS owner 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."



This happened on Friday, and on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted. The subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner, but since the DNS entries had to propagate, it took up to three more days before the images disappeared everywhere.

Source: Here

ya see this is why Immigration and Customs should mind there own buisness and worry more about the border Jumpers like... the job there supposed to be doing

[Kermit Da Frog]

"Whoopsie"

[Ragnar]

Why does the USA think it's the internet police?

[Kermit Da Frog]

Why does the USA think it's the internet police?

[Kouen Hasuki]

Why does the USA think it's the internet police?

Why not, There the "World Police" too

[deadlegion]

Why does the USA think it's the internet police?

Because the USA likes it when people hate them.
Unless, of course, decisions are being made by retards.......and what are the chances of that?

[Lee]

Why not, There the "World Police" too

Funny...

Team America: World Police video in the last post

[Kouen Hasuki]

Funny...

Team America: World Police video in the last post

i was posting at same time

cba to edit or anything...

also your title says Psyduck but you got a 2 headed dragon as an avatar

[Lee]

i was posting at same time

cba to edit or anything...

also your title says Psyduck but you got a 2 headed dragon as an avatar

And it's transparency isn't real It's just a blue background.

I need to change my Title.

[JKDarkside]

Now that's a derp moment.

[Russ]

Well at least they took child porn down, don't need any of that floating around.

[Kouen Hasuki]

Well at least they took child porn down, don't need any of that floating around.

its a shame they killed a fly with a bazooka in this case

[garrendesares]

i wonder if they are trying to take the whole internet down lol.

[Mistral]

Why does the USA think it's the internet police?

I'm actually honestly curious about this, but who do you believe should have jurisdiction over digital crime? Going by the physical location of DNS hosts and servers, or of the company or individual(s) running the site in question seems as good a method as any, to be honest, though other methods, such as targeting the traffic issued from foreign servers as in the Great Firewalls of China and Australia, do exist as well. I do not believe in the arbitrary dichotomy of the physical and digital world, and even if I did, it is natural for governments to seek to enforce their own legislation, online as well as off.

[Drageuth]

I can't really say that I'm really that concerned that a few websites got brought down mistakenly for a couple of days while attempting to rid the Internet of a bit of child pornography. Yes, it is unfortunate that it happened, but at the same time, I don't think you are going to find anyone who is going to make any believable case that child pornography is acceptable under any measure. Just because it was the United States that did this, and made a slight boo-boo in the process, everyone seems to have a "well, it's just the Americans! They seem to think they can control the world!" or "Well, it's a country run by retards, what do you expect?" kind of attitude, but people seem to be ignoring what it was they were targeting. This isn't a website sharing a couple of music files, or offering free movie downloads, etc... this was an attempt to shut down child pornography based websites.

Sorry to the websites that inadvertently got shut down because of it, but are now back up and running (or close to), but that's a good cause if I ever saw one.