-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
Date: January 26, 2007 8:59:07 AM PST
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Politech] More experiences with GoDaddy, free speech, and
domain deletion [fs]
Previous Politech message:
http://www.politechbot.com/2007/01/26/godaddy-pull-plug/
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Politech] MySpace, GoDaddy pull plug on computer
security domain name without warning [fs]
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:10:30 -0800
From: Marc Perkel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Declan,
Last your GoDaddy yanked the domain for the data center where my
computers are hosted. (nectartech.com) They managed to take
thousands of
domains offline as a result. I helped get them back online by
recording
two phone calls to their tech support department.
http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000861.html
http://marc.perkel.com/audio/godaddy.mp3
http://marc.perkel.com/audio/godaddy2.mp3
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Politech] MySpace, GoDaddy pull plug on computer
security domain name without warning [fs]
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:00:28 -0600
From: Buzz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: Buzz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
Declan,
This may not be on the same scale, but I recently had a personal
website shut down by GoDaddy. The site is for a humorous rock band
some friends and I have been in for many years now (http://
www.bhtch.com); it gets very little traffic.
One day the site just disappeared. The site was hosted via
SiteFlip, which is a reseller of SSLcatacombnetowrks.com. Getting
into contact with SiteFlip was next to impossible, as they are one
of those fly-by-night, email-contact-only web hosts run out of some
guy's garage. The response I eventually got gave me no indication
as to why the hosting was shut down, and it took massive effort by
multiple members of our band to get them to let us get our data off
their servers (essentially, they kept canceling our tech support
accounts). As far as I was able to discern, they were told to shut
us down by our registrar, i.e. GoDaddy. Mind you, we were never
given any sort of refund of hosting fees.
As far as I could tell, our site was never in violation of
SiteFlip's TOS. Our domain does get spoofed a lot by spammers, as
you can imagine, but I would have thought the Powers That Be at our
host and registrar would possess basic postmaster skills like
reading email headers. I used to work for an ISP as acting
postmaster, and I can tell you it's not rocket science.
Regardless, I've since transferred all domains away from GoDaddy,
and I will never use them, SiteFlip, or any SSLCatacomb-related
services ever again. I'm now with eNom, the registrar for ICDSoft,
which is one of the best hosting companies I've ever dealt with.
I've had other sites hosted with them for years with no problems,
and their tech support is amazing.
Cheers,
Buzz
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Politech] MySpace, GoDaddy pull plug on computer
security domain name without warning [fs]
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 15:26:58 +0530
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: -ENOENT
To: Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hey Declan
Curious what you get when you add two and two together (and this case
could very well be me getting an answer "twenty two", but still..).
Myspace is suing Scott Richter for illegally accessing thousands of
myspace accounts and posting spam bulletins to the friends list of
those
accounts ..
And now there's this big list of myspace accounts floating around
online. This stuff is quite possibly phished from myspace users,
usually
naive kids who routinely post the kind of personal information online
that's an ID thief's dream come true, There's a huge amount of
phishing
spam targeted at myspace, so it need not necessarily be shoddy
security
on myspace's part.
Coincidence? Or not?
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [Politech] MySpace, GoDaddy pull plug on computer
security domain name without warning [fs]
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:32:41 -0500
From: Richard M. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 'Declan McCullagh' <[email protected]>
As an aside, using the DNS system to censor Web sites is sometimes
necessary. Back in 2004, a number of folks and myself investigated
a piece
of malware that turned people's home computers into Web proxy
servers in
order to host porn and phishing Web sites. Every 10 minutes, DNS
records
would get updated to move a Web site from one home computer to
another. The
goal was to make it hard to shut down the Web sites. I tried to
get the
domain registration company to turn off the domain names being used
by the
scammers, but had no luck. The system was finally shut down when
analysis
of the malware showed that a master host system at Everyone's
Internet was
running the whole show. Turning off the master killed the network
of scam
Web sites. Had the scammers moved the master system around to other
hijacked home computers, the DNS system might have been the only
way to turn
off the scam network.
Richard
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Politech] MySpace, GoDaddy pull plug on computer
security domain name without warning [fs]
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:41:50 -0500
From: Paul Levy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
We have had our own go-around with Christine Jones, after Domains
by Proxy (an affiliate of GoDaddy) gave us very little time to get
into court to oppose a subpoena to identify a Doe. It was like
pulling teeth to get even a couple of days extension, and even
though the time they were willing to delay compliance with a
subpoena is much less that the real biggies like Yahoo! and Google
insist on as a matter of course, she used similar words, "very
generous," to describe her response to our requests. Of course,
when a case is pending far from where you are (this one was in
Arizona), the lawyer who wants to help needs time not only to
review the case and prepare papers, but to find local counsel. We
were able to get to court in time, thank goodness, and the court
quashed the subpoena. http://www.citizen.org/hot_issues/issue.cfm?
ID=1526
We attacked Ms. Jones her publicly for her company's grudging
response to a customer's appeal for time to protect his anonymity,
and although she responded by saying how hurt she was, we have
actually found that she has been much more responsive WRT anonymity
issues more recently, at least to us. We certainly commend her
for this improvement, and her responsiveness has been useful to us
as regular litigators representing clients trying to preserve their
anonymity. Whether relying on personal relationships to decide
when to be responsive to customers seeking to preserve their
anonymity is a good idea for a company that wants to build its
business by offering a "protect your anonymity" product is another
question.
The same reasoning would apply to her "good corporate citizenship"
response to criticism over her willingness to pull a web site
without notice or opportunity to respond and persuade. We can only
hope that GoDaddy will learn from this experience and build a more
reasonable policy for future cases.
Your comment on the relevance of the DMCA also brings to mind the
question about whether we should be thinking about reforming the
DMCA takedown provisions both to ensure better protection for the
"accused" end user who is victimized by this sort of demand, and at
the same time extend the DMCA approach -- absolving the host of
liability in return for entering into the takedown minuet -- to
areas other than copyright.
In some ways, one might shudder at the extension of a procedure
that isn't working well for the end user, but on the other hand the
big ISP's have, as a practical matter, extended the model to other
legal claims through programs like eBay's VeRO. Given the current
language of the DMCA (and the Communications Decency Act, which
protects ISP's against liability based on hosting but exempts
"intellectual property" claims), if a company claims a trademark
violation, of a violation of other rights at the edges of
intellectual property such as the right of publicity or trade
secrets, the ISP has no protection against liability even if it
gives notice, receives a put-back response, and then refrains from
removal. Knowing the limits of the DMCA protection, companies
routinely and rather cynically throw claims other than copyright
into their takedown notices.
There are a couple of ways in which the DMCA take-down process
might be improved. Currently the ISP takes down content
immediately upon receiving a Notice of Claimed Infringement (NOCI),
then sends notice to the end user. If the end user files a
counternotice, the ISP puts the material back online fourteen days
later unless the content-owner files suit during that period. This
system gives the content owner a free 14-day temporary injunction.
A better way would be to notify the user as soon as the NOCI is
received, and give a reasonable amount of time (10 days) to file a
counternotice. If the counternotice is filed within the time
period, the material will never have been taken down and the ISP
will still enjoy the benefit of safe harbor. The content owner
would then have to seek an injunction to take the material offline.
Moreover, one might, for example, provide that once an alleged
victim claiming wrongdoing initiates the takedown minuet and the
user responds to the takedown notice, not only the complainant but
the ISP also is committed to the process, and the ISP is BARRED
from removing the material unless the claimant actually does go to
court. At that point, the ISP should act as a stakeholder, leave
the resulting action dependent on what happens in the litigation.
Paul Alan Levy
Public Citizen Litigation Group
1600 - 20th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 588-1000
http://www.citizen.org/litigation
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