They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this ...

jimpeel

jimpeel

Well-Known Member
The government has seized numerous web domain names for various behaviors.

ICE will do this; but they won't do the job they are designated to do. A click on the links in the story will show you their fancy schmancy webpage which states the domain has been seized.

SOURCE

Feds Seize Websites Suspected of Online Piracy

Published November 27, 2010 | FoxNews.com

The U.S. government is shutting down websites suspected of copyright infringement or selling counterfeit goods as Congress debates a bill that would give feds more authority to do so.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency within the Homeland Security Department, has seized more than 70 websites in recent days, according to the Wall Street Journal, and posted a notice saying that the domain name has been seized by ICE through court-ordered warrants. The notice also states penalties for willful copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods.

Neither ICE nor Homeland Security responded to messages seeking comment. An ICE spokeswoman confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that the agency executed court-ordered seizure warrants against a number of domain names but declined additional comment.

"As this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional details available at this time," she told the newspaper.

Online publications, including http://torrentfreak.com/, first reported the seizures which began on Thursday when ICE agents raided facilities operated by a hip hop file-sharing site called http://www.RapGodFathers.com. Other seized sites that share music or sell goods include http://www.torrent-finder.com, http://www.timberlandlike.com, http://www.dvdsetsonline.com and http://www.handbagspop.com.

Some of the siteowners have reportedly complained that their domain names were seized without any notice or warning.

The seizures come as Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., vows to block an online copyright enforcement bill that was unanimously approved last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bill would allow the Justice Department to seek expedited court orders blacklisting websites suspected of piracy.

Supporters say the bill will help put an end to websites, some of them foreign-owned, that steal intellectual property, which is estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $100 billion every year and results in the loss of thousands of jobs. (Does anyone believe those numbers? -- j)

"The Internet serves as the glue of international commerce in today's global economy. But it's also been turned into a tool for online thieves to sell counterfeit and pirated goods, making hundreds of millions of dollars off of stolen American intellectual property," Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said in a written statement.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the committee, said if "rogue websites" existed in the physical world, the store would be shuttered immediately and the proprietors would be arrested.

"We cannot excuse the behavior because it happens online and the owners operate overseas," he said in a written statement. "The Internet needs to be free – not lawless."

But Wyden says the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, or COICA,
(Isn't that a chicken's reproductive organ and shit chute? Oh, yeah, that's a cloaca. Silly me! -- j) is excessive.

"Deploying this statue to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile," he said during a hearing on digital trade. "If you don't think this thing through carefully, the collateral damage would be American innovation, American jobs, and a secure Internet."

Wyden's opposition dooms the bill in this Congress and would force the next Congress convening in January to start from scratch.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group, also opposes the bill, saying the collateral damage would be "enormous." The group said if the bill had passed a few years ago, YouTube might not exist today.

"There are already laws and procedures in place for taking down sites that violate the law," the group said in a statement on its website. "This act would allow the attorney general to censor sites even when no court has found they have infringed copyright or any other law."
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Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

Working for the man.

Doing big business with some teeth.
 
Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

a much better use of ICE
than securing our borders

but then again I've never had a website
crash into my car and get out and hoof it
or steal everything in my yard that wasn't nailed down

wish I could say that about the illegal beanners
 
Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

jimpeel said:
(Does anyone believe those numbers? -- j)

(Isn't that a chicken's reproductive organ and shit chute? Oh, yeah, that's a cloaca. Silly me! -- j)
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1. yes. it's probably vastly more than that.
2. hah hah poop chute!
 
Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

In other news ...

Prison terms for owners of The Pirate Bay reduced. Fines increased. Appeal to Supreme Court to follow.

SOURCE

Prison terms of Pirate Bay executives' shortened
Nov 26 09:33 AM US/Eastern

A Swedish appeals court Friday shortened the prison terms of two founders and a financier of Swedish filesharing site The Pirate Bay, but increased the damages to be paid to movie and music firms.

"The Appeals Court, like the district court, finds that The Pirate Bay service makes possibly illegal filesharing in a way that entails a punishable offense for those who run the service," the court said in its ruling.

Three founders of the site Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij, both 32, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 26, were in April 2009 found guilty of promoting copyright infringement with the website.

The verdict, considered an important symbolic victory for the movie and recording industry, handed the three founders along with an important financier of the site, 50-year-old Carl Lundstroem, sentences of one year in prison.

On Friday, the Svea Appeals Court shortened Neij's sentence to 10 months, Sunde's to eight months and Lundstroem's to four months.

Warg, the third co-founder, received the same lower court sentence as the others, but did not take part in the appeals trial due to illness. He will face a separate trial probably next year.

"Unlike the lower court, the appeals court does not believe one can make such a collective decision entailing that everyone carries the same responsibility for what is done within the framework of The Pirate Bay," the court explained.

However, it ruled that instead of paying around 32 million kronor (3.4 million euros, 4.5 million dollars) in damages to the movie and recording industries, the amount should be hiked to 46 million kronor.

"This is because the Appeals Court to a larger extent than the district court has accepted the plaintiffs' presented evidence of their losses," the court said.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay, which claims to have more than 23 million users, makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site.

During last year's trial, the defendants maintained that filesharing services can be used both legally and illegally, insisting their activities were within the law. They vowed to wage a lengthy legal battle and to take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

Copyright AFP 2008,
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Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

yes, we would not want the government protecting the property of the productive and affluent. instead, the government must make more efforts to protect the menial jobs of the worthless from invaders who don't whine as much.
 
Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

There is, however, exciting news on this front.

Stay tuned.

SOURCE

BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures
Written by Ernesto on November 30, 2010

The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension.

dot-p2pIn a direct response to the domain seizures by US authorities during the last few days, a group of established enthusiasts have started working on a DNS system that can’t be touched by any governmental institution.

Ironically, considering the seizure of the Torrent-Finder meta-search engine domain, the new DNS system will be partly powered by BitTorrent.

In recent months, global anti-piracy efforts have increasingly focused on seizing domains of allegedly infringing sites. In the United States the proposed COICA bill is explicitly aimed at increasing the government’s censorship powers, but seizing a domain name is already quite easy, as illustrated by ICE and Department of Justice actions last weekend and earlier this year.

For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS entries of domains, not least because several top level domains are managed by US-based corporations such as VeriSign, who work closely together with the US Department of Commerce. According to some, this setup is a threat to the open internet.

To limit the power governments have over domain names, a group of enthusiasts has started working on a revolutionary system that can not be influenced by a government institution, or taken down by pulling the plug on a central server. Instead, it is distributed by the people, with help from a BitTorrent-based application that people install on their computer.

According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”

“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”

The Dot-P2P project was literally started a few days ago, but already the developers are making great progress. It is expected that a beta version of the client can be released relatively shortly, a team member assured TorrentFreak.

The project has been embraced by many familiar names in the P2P-community. Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is among them, and the people from EZTV have been promoting it as well.

“For me it’s mostly to scare back. To show that if they try anything, we have weapons of making it harder for them to abuse it. If they then back down, we win,” Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment.

Although the initiators of the project are still debating on various technical issues on how the system should function, it seems that the administrative part has been thought out. The .p2p domain registration will be handled by OpenNIC, an alternative community based DNS network. OpenNIC also maintains the .geek, .free, .null and several other top level domains.

On the other hand, there are also voices that are for distributed domain registration, which would keep the system entirely decentralized.

The domain registrations will be totally free, but registrants will have to show that they own a similar domain with a different extension first, to prevent scammers from taking over a brand.

The new P2P-based DNS system will require users to run an application on their own computer before they can access the domains, but there are also plans to create a separate root-server (like OpenNIC) as a complimentary service. It’s worth noting that the DNS changes will only affect the new .p2p domains, it will not interfere with access to any other domains.

It will be interesting to see in what direction this project goes and how widely it will be adopted. There are already talks of getting Internet Service Providers to accept the .p2p extension as well, but even if this doesn’t happen the system can always be accessed through the BitTorrent-powered application and supporting DNS servers.

If anything, this shows that no matter what legislation or legal actions are taken, technology stays always one step ahead. The more aggressive law enforcement gets, the more creative and motivated adopters of the Open Internet will respond.
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Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

Set up a mine field between the US and Mexico. A mine goes off, then replace it. A very simple solution. If Mexico doesn't like it, then too bad. Soveriegn territory is soveriegn territory.
 
Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

Yea, but then we have Welsh Princesses giving us grief.
 
Re: They won't secure the border against millions of invaders but they will do this .

It seems that the Afghan border has higher precedence than our own.

SOURCE

Napolitano Visit Aimed at Beefing Up Afghan Border Security, Customs

By Mike Levine

Published December 31, 2010 | FoxNews.com

KABUL, Afghanistan -- During an unannounced New Year's Eve visit to Afghanistan, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano traveled to the country's mountainous border region near Pakistan to see first-hand her department's efforts in the war effort there.

"Seeing is worth a thousand words," Napolitano said after the tour, to which Fox News was granted exclusive access. "This all involves safety and security in this part of the world. And that is something that has direct connection as well to the United States."

She described her department's role in war-torn Afghanistan as a "complement" to the military operations there.

Her agency has about two dozen officials in Afghanistan, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Customs and Border Protection officers, and Border Patrol agents. Many are training Afghan security forces to manage their country's borders.

Although the Afghan government receives most of its money from foreign allies, customs fees and tariffs account for more than half of the money Afghanistan generates on its own. Increasing that revenue flow is a top priority for U.S. officials working to stabilize the chaotic country.

Earlier Friday, Napolitano and her staff met with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Hours later, a fleet of military helicopters took Napolitano, her staff and a Fox News crew to Torkham Forward Operating Base, about five miles from Torkham border crossing, a main access point for supplies coming through Pakistan to NATO forces in Afghanistan.

At the base, she ate lunch with some of the troops who protect her agency's officials in the war zone. She called it an "honor."

The trip to the border region culminated with a helicopter flight over the Torkham border crossing. Getting to the crossing by ground was deemed too dangerous.

In May, according to Pakistani reports, security forces at Torkham crossing "defused an explosive device fitted to a container taking supplies to NATO forces in Afghanistan."

Nearly three months ago, Torkham crossing was shut down for 11 days by Pakistan after a U.S. helicopter strike in the border region killed two Pakistani soldiers. The crossing was reopened after American officials apologized, but during the shutdown about 150 trucks were destroyed and many people were injured as they became easy targets.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials described the Torkham area as generally not hostile toward the U.S. military.

Officials said the growing Homeland Security presence in Afghanistan is the product of an effort launched under the Obama administration. Officials say it is part of a "vision" from the late U.S. envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, who sought to include more federal agencies in the war and nation building effort here.

In early November, customs and border officers and agents from Homeland Security's investigations unit conducted a one-week workshop for 44 officers from Afghan law-enforcement agencies, training them on the interdiction and investigation of cash smuggling. Such criminal activity funds terrorist and criminal organizations.

In January 2010, a "Customs Academy" opened in Kabul, training as many as 200 recruits in an effort to turn the Afghanistan Customs Department into "a modern service," as the U.S. embassy put it in a press release.

In addition to the Homeland Security officials already on the ground in Afghanistan, several more are expected to land there over next month. Those ranks don't include the more than 50 former CBP officials hired privately to support the DHS mission there.

Napolitano was expected to ring in the New Year with U.S. personnel at the embassy in Kabul. A bonfire was being prepared as of early Friday evening.

The New Year's Eve trip was Napolitano's first to Afghanistan since joining the Obama cabinet.

She was in the country once as Arizona governor.
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