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U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More

172 points| Uncle_Sam | 15 years ago |torrentfreak.com | reply

72 comments

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[+] ig1|15 years ago|reply
As I pointed on when people were complaining about a .ly domain being pulled for hosting adult content, .com has exactly the same issues.
[+] DannoHung|15 years ago|reply
Is there a TLD that doesn't have any issues?
[+] sudonim|15 years ago|reply
These seizure notices are not 508 compliant. Isn't the government obligated to make all websites under their control accessible to people with disabilities?

There isn't even an alt tag on the giant images with text.

Now Im just sayin' but if they're using stupid loopholes to seize these domains, couldn't they be sued under the americans with disabilities act?

[+] baddox|15 years ago|reply
Because the government never breaks its own rules.
[+] rapind|15 years ago|reply
This looks kind of fake. Can anyone confirm that throwing up this image is real and not a publicity stunt?

They've got piwitracker and google analytics running on a page that just serves up one image.

[+] compumike|15 years ago|reply
Regardless of the legal and other issues here, this looks like a hoax or hack. The nameservers are now pointing to ns[1,2].seizedservers.com. However, doing a whois lookup on seizedservers.com reveals that it was registered only this past Wednesday!

In comparison, looking back at some domains that were previously seized by ICE (and verified by the NYTimes blog), they're all pointing to 74.208.15.160 without any weird NS changes or on-page analytics. (see http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/in-anti-the... and http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1006/100630losangeles.htm)

[+] swombat|15 years ago|reply
So, who's getting started on that alternative DNS system? Until a formal infrastructure emerges, it can probably be cobbled together with a combination of BIND servers and browser plugins, I'd imagine...
[+] vib|15 years ago|reply
Pardon my newbieness. But if these guys had a .cn domain instead, or anything along those lines. They would be safe, no?
[+] woodall|15 years ago|reply
A nice little Hosts file/Manager could also do the trick. Can't wait for the new era of darknets; not that the old one has disappeared.

If the hosts file manager could also work as a dyndns type utility, then servers could change IPs at random and the user would be none the wiser.

[+] jcromartie|15 years ago|reply
What do ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) and Homeland Security have anything to do with torrents?
[+] redthrowaway|15 years ago|reply
Customs deals with counterfeit goods, iirc. That's what filesharing is being classified as.
[+] dedward|15 years ago|reply
What I want to know - was the registrar involved in this, and acting on instructions from US authorities, or acting on instructions from ICANN, or was the domain record actually modified at a higher level than the registrar had control over (is that even possible?)
[+] JoachimSchipper|15 years ago|reply
At a higher level. Yes, that's definitely possible - the .com nameserver tells resolvers where to find the nameserver for domain.com. Try 'dig @l.root-servers.net www.google.com' sometime.
[+] ez77|15 years ago|reply
Believe me, I don't want to sound anti-American at all but... what's up with that adored eagle? Thirty thousand nuclear warheads are enough to keep us scared.
[+] ryanwaggoner|15 years ago|reply
It's just a national symbol; most countries have something similar. Also, the US nuclear weapon stockpile is down to about 5,000; hasn't been 30,000 since the 1960s.
[+] fab13n|15 years ago|reply
Time to apply for a YNews startup offering uncensored DNSes :)

If you're willing to do Evil to monetize it, you might even get to resell sex.com and a couple of expensive domains. Or just explain to investor that one day, when you'll be big enough, you'll be able to do it. Also, you'll be able to decide how fast you respond to requests according to whether the domain's owner subscribed to your "premium" service.

TL;DR: brace yourself for libertarian cyber-mayhem.

[+] davidu|15 years ago|reply
Well, we at OpenDNS could make this work for all our users today. And I think we're large enough that they wouldn't just seize our domain.

But it's a slippery slope... Once you fragment the DNS like that, it's hard to go back. And then we're put in a position to make editorial judgements of which version of the domain to follow which we prefer to not be in. So we don't, for now.

There's a lot more thinking about this subject that I and others have discussed, but fragmenting the DNS is not the ideal answer. Making ICANN independent of the US is, however, of critical importance.

[+] michaelelliot|15 years ago|reply
I wonder what process ICE go through to have a .com redelegated. Since Verisign operate the .com registry they would have to be involved at some point along the line.
[+] vaksel|15 years ago|reply 

   Several other domains also appear to have been seized
   including 2009jerseys.com, nfljerseysupply.com, 
   throwbackguy.com, cartoon77.com, lifetimereplicas.com, 
   handbag9.com, handbagcom.com and dvdprostore.com
i don't see why those domains would be seized
[+] khafra|15 years ago|reply
They all sound like sites making pirated/counterfeit items available.
[+] gst|15 years ago|reply
The interesting question is if all those domains belong to US citizens.

If the US only seizes domains of their own citizens that's somewhat OK for me.

If the US also sizes domains of other nation's citizens I guess in the future I'll only use domain names outside the jurisdication of the US. But if that's the case I wonder why they haven't taken down PirateBay yet.

[+] num1|15 years ago|reply
I'm sitting a little confused here. The WHOIS for torrent-finder.com lists an address in Egypt. But comments that I've seen so far express anger, but are explicitly tempered by the fact that this is happening within the US and we haven't crossed any lines yet. Didn't we just cross lines?
[+] ffffruit|15 years ago|reply
While I do respect the fact that this sounds terrible, I cant help but point out the fact that torrentfreak's news reporting has always been extremely biased, in many cases rendering the information they provide in their posts as untrustworthy.
[+] ernesto99|15 years ago|reply
Bias is something totally different than being untrustworthy.

I write for TorrentFreak and while I agree that we have our own look on things, we do check all facts carefully, possibly more than the average 'news' outlet.

Please back up your untrustworthy claim or stick to the bias one.

[+] michaelelliot|15 years ago|reply
Sadly, I agree.

I've also noticed the same recently while reading a TechDirt article. If only they were more objective, it would really lend to their credibility.

[+] ryanhuff|15 years ago|reply
Is it typical for a government agency to use a commercial data center/hosting provider for this kind of activity?
[+] redrobot5050|15 years ago|reply
In this case, the evidence that this is a hoax makes me feel that the government had no involvement in this.

However, for future reference, yes. The government would easily contract out something like this. There is a virtually no limit to what the government would contract out. For example, some of my co-workers work on the no-fly-list database/content repository.

There's very little that the government does in-house these days.