USA seizes torrent search engine & 70 other domains through ICANN

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-engine-domain-and-more-101126/
http://www.osnews.com/story/24074/US_Government_Censors_70_Websites

Following on the heels of this week’s domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it’s clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.

While complex, it’s still possible for U.S. authorities and copyright groups to point at a fully-fledged BitTorrent site with a tracker and say “that’s an infringing site.” When one looks at a site which hosts torrents but operates no tracker, the finger pointing becomes quite a bit more difficult.

(...)

This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an ominous graphic which indicates that ICE have seized the site’s domain.
“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he explained.

Beginnings of censorship ?
USA has finally shown its true fascist face. I wonder if bitcoin domains will be on the list...

Discuss.

[theymos]

It was Verisign (the COM registry) that did this, not ICANN. ICANN is always terrified of making controversial actions, and they would never do something like this, even with a court order.

You can see that the domain is redirected at Verisign's gtld-servers.net rather than ICANN's root-servers.net. I'm surprised so many news organizations made this mistake. I am not surprised that GoDaddy said this, since it is one of the most dishonest and incompetent companies ever.

[Anonymous]

Its time for a distributed dns the government cant take down.

All of the important bitcoin sites should be mirrored on a separate network with the TLD of .btc


 

[kiba]

Its time for a distributed dns the government cant take down.

All of the important bitcoin sites should be mirrored on a separate network with the TLD of .btc


 

So...Offer a bounty on it?

[bober182]

You can't just make TLDs unless you use a pseudo TLD like .onion or .i2p new ones are being made at ICANN but its a long process .xxx is taking years and is really controversial.

[ribuck]

You can't just make TLDs...

You don't have to use the ICANN root domain servers. Lots of groups use alternative DNS roots, although you're never going to see a Windows OS that defaults to anything other than the ICANN root.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

You can't just make TLDs...

You don't have to use the ICANN root domain servers. Lots of groups use alternative DNS roots, although you're never going to see a Windows OS that defaults to anything other than the ICANN root.

Overwriting ICANN IP's at ISP level should not be very hard in case of USA starts to really censor the interwebs.
Also, it is probably quite easy to do on Linux.

[MrBison]

Thank god I don't live in the USA. And I certainly hope I will never see this image

on bitcoin.org .

[ribuck]

... hope I will never see this image on bitcoin.org ...

It would make a really great April Fools joke to hack the website and put that image there.

[Anonymous]

Would be something if you could have a system where you could add domain addresses to your hosts file easily.

At the moment you can  get a list of the banned domains and copy and paste them to your hosts file to bypass central control.

Actually it wasnt the fault of icann. I heard that verisign was the culprit.

[RHorning]

You can't just make TLDs...

You don't have to use the ICANN root domain servers. Lots of groups use alternative DNS roots, although you're never going to see a Windows OS that defaults to anything other than the ICANN root.

It would be a nice idea to set up a unique BTC top-level domain with OpenNic or one of the "more reliable" alternative DNS groups.  Hmmm... I need to think that one through a bit more, and I hope that others give it some thought as well.