VeriSign demands website takedown powers

[nhklein]

On 10/11/2011 10:06 PM, Marc Perkel wrote:
> On 10/11/2011 7:04 AM, Alex Gakuru wrote:
>> No court order necessary
>> By Kevin Murphy
>> 11th October 2011
>>
>> <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/11/verisign_asks_for_web_takedown_powers/>
>>
>>
>
> Thanks for the heads up Alex. I have some mixed feeling about this as
> I am someone who wears two hats. So I'll throw the delema out there
> and see what you all think.
>
> First - as the founder of the Church of Reality and a former employee
> of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (sys admin - not lawyer) I and a
> fierce defender of free speech and due process, keeping the hands of
> governments off the Internet. The Internet is actually considered a
> holy object in the Church of Reality as it is the central factor
> driving human evolution allowing us to evolve into something that
> increases our chances of long term survival, so we can continue to
> exist. If you fail to continue to exist then you are no longer part of
> reality.
>
> Then there's my second hat. I also own a spam filtering company where
> every day I block millions of emails from people pretending to be
> banks and trying to trick you into giving up your login so that
> criminals can steal your money. It is a private sector business and I
> can instantly block a domain that is clearly committing fraud. So a
> domain like wellssfargo.com (note the double S) pretending to be Wells
> Fargo Bank is immediately blocked by me
Just for some basic clarification: you do not take down a domain - you
put an address into a blacklist. And only those servers where someone
opted in to use your blacklist (and users downstream) is affected.
> - and every other server on the planet who uses my blacklist.
You cannot block anything from reaching me. But if VeriSign blocks a
.com nobody can reach it.
>
> Then there's Wikileaks which I support and which most every government
> out there wants shut down.
>
> Just wondering if it would be useful to have some sort of discussion
> about this for the sake of clarity.

I see this as a big difference.


Norbert Klein

--
A while ago, I started a new blog:

...thinking it over... after 21 years in Cambodia
http://www.thinking21.org/

continuing to share reports and comments from Cambodia.

Norbert Klein
nhklein at gmx.net
Phnom Penh / Cambodia