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Verisign wants power to shut sites down upon law enforcement request
- rhizome 15y agoThe only way this will be avoided is if energy is not wasted on Verisign and instead is directed toward now allowing the police to make the request without a warrant.
- rhizome 15y agooops, that should be "not"
- m3luha 15y agoAnonymous, Where are you?
- click170 15y ago"Well if ICE can do that, why can't we?" Someone should head down to their local branch of the Occupy Wall Street gathering to see if they can convince some people to add this to their list of grievances.
- bluedanieru 15y agoEither we'll have distributed DNS, or within 10 years the Internet isn't going to exist in a recognizable form.
- davidu 15y agoWe have distributed DNS already. Perhaps you are unhappy with the corporation in charge of .com. Important distinction.
- bluedanieru 15y agoI mean distributed in the sense that it is not centrally controlled.
- davidu 15y agoI know, and it's not. It really is distributed. You have a hard-coded list of 13 root servers. You don't have to use them.
- wladimir 15y agoIt does look like the US becomes scarier every day. More and more extrajudicial powers, secret laws, restrictions on speech, unwarranted searches/wiretaps and so on. Their "war on freedom" is very successful. As I've said before, the internet really should stop relying on the US that much. Too bad Europe and others seem to be asleep in this case. Maybe they will get it when it is too late. Having what is slowly becoming the world's only information distribution network in the hands of one government (or, any government) is a very big risk.
- bluedanieru 15y agoSadly, I think placing 'it' in the hands of an international body like the UN or whatever wouldn't be any better. In the case of the UN, it would probably be worse (China and the US would likely veto any measure aimed at opening things up, and with more political cover to do so). The only long-term solution that I can see if you're really interested in online freedom is to remove all the underlying infrastructure from centralized control in an irreversible way, up to the hardware level as much as is practicable (global wi-fi is probably not realistic but is a goal worth striving toward). I suppose Tor is as good a model as any, just less visible to an end-user. It isn't enough though, and is still vulnerable.
- wladimir 15y agoWell, yes. The ideal situation would be to decentralize everything. Tor-like over networks could play a role in that. But my main point is that so much is hosted on US-based (or US-owned) "cloud servers". And so much relies on US-based services like Skype, Facebook, Gmail. So that when the they pull the internet switch, for whatever reason, the whole communications infrastructure is messed up. And they can easily spy in information stored on their soil. More and more information and communication is under control by the US. I'm having a hard seeing how we can 'pull out' of this when it becomes necessarily. I don't think we such a reliance on China.
- bigiain 15y agoSo, how long until amazonaws.com gets shut down? Boom! There' goes maybe 70% of the internet startups in one misguided "think of the children" swoop...
- wmf 15y agoI think VeriSign is smarter than that. The opposite is more likely: EC2 is "too big to seize". But startups should be using their own domains, so I'm not sure this is even an issue.
- bigiain 15y agoI bet there were people who thought DigiNotar were smarter then they were shown to be too... I do though suspect that Jeff Bezos could throw enough weight around to resolve that sort of problem. (Could Amazon just buy VeriSign outright if they needed too?)
- shareme 15y agowait they want to shut down 2600 again? for those that do not know the back story ..2600 the underground hacker magazine site was shut down for awhile because Verizon did not like 2600 giving voice to wikileaks volunteers and een interviewing them.. Verizon kept claiming equipment malfunctions..