{"id":21,"date":"2007-01-27T14:23:11","date_gmt":"2007-01-27T05:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a-cubed.info\/blog\/?p=21"},"modified":"2007-01-30T21:25:28","modified_gmt":"2007-01-30T12:25:28","slug":"censorship-by-dns-registrars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/?p=21","title":{"rendered":"Censorship by DNS Registrars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wired’s blog<\/a> is reporting that the insecure.org<\/a> website’s DNS registration was suspended recently by GoDaddy<\/a> following a complaint by MySpace that one of the mailing list archives on the site contained a file of passwords from a cracking attack on MySpace. Reports differ as to how long GoDaddy tried to contact the site’s maintainer Fyodor<\/a> (they claimed they gave him an hour to respond, but his email logs suggest it was one minute). Leaving aside the question of how long they should have waited, the big question here is whether any registrar should be getting involved in such censorship. Removing DNS registration is a horrendously blunt instrument to be allowed to be employed in responding to complaints of inappropriate material hosted on a site. In particular, a complaint regarding a single file held on a site containing in excess of 250,000 pages, should not be subject to complete blackout.<\/p>\n

There are procedures that have gradually developed for dealing with complaints about the content of a site and they involve contacting the abuse team of the ISP providing the connection (and possibly the hosting) of the site. If the material is indeed something that either violates the T&C of the ISP, or is illegal, then they should be able to selectively block the material rather than to take down an entire site. The only thing a DNS registrar can do is remove the entire site from domain name visibility.<\/p>\n

As suggested by Wired’s blog, the ToS from GoDaddy, who say they refuse to be involved in “immoral” activity, beggar belief. What is immoral? While one can imagine that this covers both illegal matters (hosting child pornography) it also ossibly covers socially borderline although legal matters such as hosting adult sexual images and movies. I doubt anyone registering with GoDaddy thought that they might have their entire site removed due to an archive copy of a file (available on numerous other sites) in the professionally controversial, but by no means universally condemned as unethical, full disclosure security lists. If MySpace thought that they would be seen to be doing something by taking this action instead of doing the proper thing, which involved suspending all accounts whose details are shown until authenticated new passwords could be set, and in the meantime obeying the appropriate “disclosure” guidelines, then they have ben mistaken. This has done huge damage to the reputations of both GoDaddy and MySpace.<\/p>\n

This is the consequence of DNS registration being regarded as a service and not ownership of a name. Net neutrality and freedom of speech are under significant attack. While the right of free speech comes with the responsibility to speak ethically, the power of censorship should only rarely be exercised and then only in extreme cases. This was certainly not such an extreme case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wired’s blog is reporting that the insecure.org website’s DNS registration was suspended recently by GoDaddy following a complaint by MySpace that one of the mailing list archives on the site contained a file of passwords from a cracking attack on MySpace. Reports differ as to how long GoDaddy tried to contact the site’s maintainer Fyodor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship-and-freedom-of-speech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}