What to do about illegal websites
There’s a discussion today in Norway about a website set up to funnel people to pay porn sites. The website itself is a discussion forum, where people routinely upload pornographic pictures. Many of those pictures are illegal, such as photos taken of unwitting girls on beaches. There’s also misuse of famous people’s pictures, stolen from various places.
They’ve managed to figure out who owns the website, but part of the discussion is what to do about the website - the server is in another country, and it might be extremely difficult to get it shut down.
I just wanted to suggest another solution:
Block it with DNS.
It’s doable on a national level. Italy did it with pirate bay. Of course, it won’t keep out the persistent pervs, but a DNS ban - after a court process of suitable nature - would at least make the domain less viable commercially - and that’s the point!
September 16th, 2008 at 2:44 am
As long as there are a gazillion of public usable DNS servers out there, I see no point in banning the domain from all the national DNS servers.
Users are very much organized today. If some one finds the way how to work around an national ban of a domain (on the DNS level) and there exist such things as forums where those pervs meet, then forget the DNS ban. It is not enough effective.
Okay, okay. You probably ban some teens surfing on such a domain by accident but you will in no way ban the mass of pervs looking out for such pages.
Just my two € cents.
// Steve
September 16th, 2008 at 11:31 am
It’s trivial to get past a countrywide DNS ban, so yes, I won’t keep out those who are determined. It would be hard to keep those who are determined out, period. But make it harder to monetize the site, and maybe it won’t be as attractive to the owner - in other words, make it harder for new people to join.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:46 am
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September 21st, 2008 at 10:24 pm
how ridicules.
you talk about these “scum pervs” using that site as if your royal, and their just low rank peasants. granted its your god given right to have that opinion, but now your trying to terraform and censor peopls legal rights based on your own personal preferences? how pathetic, normally i dont argue on the internet as its usually pointless, but i just had to here. im down right shocked, to encounter this level of ignorance and stupidity here on the internet, usually this only occurs in real life, in government buildings.
obviously if the site breaks any laws, it should be taken down. HOWEVER if it dosent, then regardless of how you personally feel about it, theres nothing to do..
for example, should youtube.com be shut down because sometimes people upload illegal videos? copyrighted stuff etc. its the same thing, and the answer is no,
again,, right now (granted there was no max comment length) i could cut and paste an entire copyrighted book into this comment and post it, instantly making spamhuntress.com and illegal site.. so because i have the freedom to do so, should your site be closed down??
its this simple, if nakenprat should have their dns banned, so should your site, either agree with that or admit to beeing a hypocrite
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:50 pm
blackhatbootcamp looks like spam to me…
October 15th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Now ISPs are to play content police for keepers of moral standards? What about liability in case some blocking was unjustified? Even if there were some official body to look over these bans (let’s call it the Chinese Wall model) who is controlling the controllers? Will these lists be maintained and if not what happens to accumulating ip addresses or abandoned domain names that have changed hands?
I understand it is merely a suggestion, but in my opinion a rather silly one, because it tries to sweep a social problem (not accepting private bounderies) under the carpet. If these people break any laws then by all means the police should handle this. If there are any violations of rules, then the forum’s hosting company should take appropriate action.
Unlike spam, this problem is not really one to average internet users, because they won’t get to see this content until they deliberately choose to do so. So what is the problem apart from some good doers’ feeling of impotence? People can look for themselves and for corporate environments there are administrators that can set rules for acceptable Internet usage.
October 16th, 2008 at 4:09 am
To quadruple opt-in marketer:
The police in Norway has a filter that some ISP’s are subscribing to, including Norway’s biggest. I believe they filter sites that are illegal in Norway. So this IS done, it just isn’t used in cases like this.