Name Of Organization:. Dmca Response Form1: Fill & Download for Free

Two things qualify as “weirdest,” one from China and one from organized crime. They're both so weird it's hard to pick a winner, so I declare a tie.I Google my own name frequently, together with statistically improbable phrases from my books and Web sites, looking for people stealing my content. Almost everything I write is released free under a Creative Commons-like attribution license (you can use this as long as you give credit and a return link), but an astonishing number of people copy stuff I've written, take my name off it, and claim to have written it themselves. So 2–3 times a year I make a list and file a few dozen DMCA takedown requests.I do not understand the impulse to steal something that is available for free. But I digress.About eight or nine years ago, I Googled my name and found a Chinese Web page that was a wall of Chinese text with “Franklin Veaux” embedded in the middle of it. I see my name on non-English sites more often than you might think, usually when people translate my polyamory or BDSM pages into other language.I ran it through Google Translate and discovered it was a magazine article about the depraved decadence of the immoral Western world, as evidenced by depraved Westerners like Franklin Veaux, who cast aside decency and morality by saying it's OK to have promiscuous sex. So hey, decadent Westerner!The second was sites that contained my name, small (one or two sentence) snippets from my Web sites, and tons of keywords from everything from porn to popular children’s toys, all in a huge mishmash of word salad on Web pages that, if you visited from Google, attempted to download the W32/Zlob malware, but if you visited directly instead of from Google, gave you a 404 error.I did some investigating and discovered all these pages (and I found tens of thousands of them) all lived on the same Web host, iPower Web. iPower was using home-grown control panel software, and Eastern European organized crime had hacked them and ended up infecting hundreds of thousands of sites living on iPower servers with malware.I blogged about it[1], got contacted by law enforcement, and eventually helped put many of the folks responsible in jail. So that was cool[2].[1] Polyamory and crime on the Internet[2] Except the bit where I was mailbombed repeatedly and my Web sites were subject to sustained hack and DoS attacks for the next few months. But I got interviews on IT sites and infosec journals, which was fun.

It's totally nonsensical, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)/PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) is the single most dangerously misguided, destructive yet ineffectual piece of legislation I've encountered in my career as a social media lawyer, advisor and executive in the consumer Internet industry since 1998. [1]I find that bricks-and-mortar metaphors, albeit imperfect, can be helpful, so bear with me. [2] SOPA/PIPA invents a new, powerful tool to combat Intellectual Property infringement at the behest of one group of mostly uber-wealthy private property owners [media conglomerates and luxury brands], then immediately hands it over to other "residents" [Internet companies] — let's call them "neighborhood watch groups" — and makes it their legal responsibility, under threat of criminal penalties, to attempt to reduce the crime rate in "Internet City" by requiring each group to remove the "street signs" or "house numbers" [hyperlinks, search engine results and DNS entries] immediately upon receipt of any complaint from anyone about a theft that allegedly occurred at a given address, without any due process of law. This has the effect of:Not stopping determined thieves in any meaningful way; [3]Harming the vast majority of residents, local businesses and their guests by removing navigational guideposts that are relied on for a vast range of legitimate purposes, from pizza deliveries to new home construction [social media and UGC sites]; [4] andThreatening residents' safety by leaving gaping holes where the signs were torn out [DNSSEC], protected only by flimsy warning tape that troublemakers bent on creating mischief could remove at any time. [5]But wait, it gets better. The law both threatens "neighborhood watch groups" with penalties for non-compiance and immunizes them against liability for being overzealous in removing "signs" immediately upon request rather than putting up any resistance. How do you suppose that incentive structure will motivate most people, however well-intentioned, when it comes to free expression? [N.B.: Key areas of relevant IP law — namely fair use in copyright and likelihood of confusion or dilution in trademark — are highly subjective.] At the margin, it would encourage the groups to take every report seriously, no matter how minor; remove the signs "just in case" there is a burglar on the loose; and encourage residents to "rat out" any neighbors they dislike for the pettiest of infractions. [6]The "houses" in this subdivision were all built in just the past few years, creating vast, unprecedented wealth, transformative innovation and virtually boundless opportunity (hundreds of thousands of good jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder value) in an otherwise struggling Rust Belt "city." The very thing that has made neighborhoods like this one (let's call it "Facebook (product)" for the sake of discussion) so valuable is their location adjacent to the junction of major freeways and mass transit, where anyone from anywhere could easily find their way to pay a visit. It quickly became the most vibrant neighborhood in Internet City, with nearly a billion "residents" at last count. But developers and homeowners will be deterred from building out similar new "neighborhoods" or investing in "remodeling" when faced with the prospect of rendering these homes inconvenient and inaccessible by being forced to remove street signs and numbers at the drop of a hat. From an ROI perspective, it might make more sense to hide new communities behind locked gates or out on the fringe of town, and to take care not to build anything too colorful or controversial for fear that neighbors might call in bogus complaints to have them "taken off the map." [7]OK, the metaphor is getting tired, but to summarize: This sounds like sheer insanity. If thefts are a serious problem in the area, couldn't the people who have the most valuables simply pay to have a private security guard patrol their property rather than making it the neighborhood watch group's problem? Well, sure. That's what we've had in place throughout the entire lifetime of the social Internet (1998 to present); it's called the "notice and takedown" procedure set forth in Section 512 of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and most people other than Viacom Products and Services seem to think it's worked out pretty well. [8] (Viacom spent something like $100 million fighting YouTube over it in court, but lost in the end anyway.) Others have worked out more constructive solutions that involve hiring a vigilant private "security" force, making cooperative arrangements with their "neighbors" in their mutual best interest and so forth. SOPA/PIPA basically flushes the DMCA down the toilet. [9]Why on earth would Internet City impose this kind of a system? Because the privileged few who have the most to gain have been plying the "city council" members with lavish dinners and rounds of golf for years. And as for everyone else who merely resides in the community... well, they got a notice on page 17 of the local newspaper of some kind of hearing or other a few months ago, but it sounded like a boring technical issue about signage, and most folks are too busy building homes and raising families to study the details of draft legislation or show up at zoning subcommittee hearings (a classic Collective Action problem) — until their entire way of life is threatened. Homeowners and residents weren't at the table when the details of the new system were hammered out over single-malt Scotch at the club. So now, on the eve of a vote on the final bill, it takes one hell of a grassroots effort across all of Internet City to counterbalance all those dinners and $20 cigars.If you've made it this far, I'll end with quotes from a few people who know more than I do about the subject:It contains provisions that will chill innovation. It contains provisions that will tinker with the fundamental fabric of the internet. It gives private corporations the power to censor. And best of all, it bypasses due legal process to do much of it.-- James Allworth, Harvard Business School“This is a move that threatens, rather than protects, property rights, and also threatens America's Internet and tech leadership.”-- Neil Stevens, RedState.comWhen civil liberties organizations describe the bills as encouraging “American censorship,” a weighty charge, the legal analysis by [Harvard Law] Professor [Laurence] Tribe and I support that conclusion . . . according to the American Supreme Court’s established First Amendment jurisprudence.-- Marvin Ammori, renowned First Amendment lawyer----------[1] Private practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, 1998-2000; in-house lawyer at Excite@Home, one of the first search engines and broadband ISPs, 2000-02; Gemstar-TV Guide 2002-04; MySpace (product) / Intermix Media / Fox Interactive Media 2004-06; VP and global head of Legal at eHarmony 2006-09. Now back in private practice.[2] Thanks to Carlos Ribeiro for coming up with the "street signs" concept in his answer to What are the best analogies to explain the problems with SOPA?[3] The game of technological cat-and-mouse has already begun in anticipation of these laws. Even if domain names and links are removed from Domain Name Systems servers and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), direct navigation to any site by IP Addresses will still be possible; offshore DNS Providers, Proxy Servers and similar tools can be pressed into service; and with the world's largest, most lucrative consumer Internet market at stake, offshore entrepreneurs could be expected to seize the opportunity to profit from the "prohibition economy" to the fullest extent practicable.[4] Imagine having to remove every link to YouTube on the Internet because the site displays some infringing content among its inventory of millions of videos![5] For a discussion of how SOPA/PIPA would eviscerate DNSSEC, an initiative intended to prevent the hijacking of domain names for purposes of fraud, identity theft, phishing, etc., see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/20/sopa_breaks_dnssec/ .[6] If held vicariously liable for the alleged copyright infringement of their millions of users under traditional standards applied to publishers and distributors, every major social media site would be sued out of existence within weeks. This is the very reason for the existence of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). See http://bottomlinelawgroup.com/2010/11/12/if-you-build-it-they-will-abuse-it/ .[7] There is a history of bogus DMCA take-down notices being filed with online service providers. For this reason, the DMCA includes a carefully crafted counter-notification mechanism to allow users who posted content that was erroneously designated "infringing" to make the case for reinstatement.[8] See http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act .[9] See http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/ten-years-later .

For a change, a meaningful article from BBC and example to the contrary from ZDNet they link.Just a small addition. All of this is a response to some cybersecurity whitepaper some genius in US wrote, actually proposing kicking Russia off the access to DNS roots. Contrary to what ZDNet (and most others) wrote, there is no relation to ongoing (and futile) efforts by the Roskomnadzor (Russia’s communications watchdog) to filter/censor mischievous sites.Now, this is why whoever came up with the genius scheme of kicking Russia off the root access is full of it. IMHO, more trouble than it is worth. Because.DNS can be setup to operate indefinitely off the cached data, however stale. The root servers are really revolvers of last resort of sorts. See DNS root zone - WikipediaDNS servers are typically configured by IP address rather than by name. Some good ones to try are 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare, best known as the purveyors of seemingly idiotic “I am not a robot” click puzzle. Known to infest my ISPs corporate intranet) and 9.9.9.9 (Cloud 9. Uses anycast. How this is supposed to work with TLS tunneling is actually beyond me, but it does)Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) do not require a hierarchy of resolvers. The intent is to be able to authenticate everything in situ.Any serious corporate network’s nameserver is not your typical BIND mule, but to large extent acquired semantics of Microsoft’s Domain Controller, which you can think of as a useful superset of DNS. Specifically is there no requirement for hierarchy within a FQDN (fully qualified domain name) You can resolve individual parts “between the dots” in any order as DC=. As a more technical side note, taking a country off DNS would also require knocking out Microsoft Azure. (due to ADFS thingamajig, meaning Azure Active Directory Domain Services) Should somebody have the overpriced most-emterprise-like diddly “federated” version of Azure, is turning it off somewhat against the specification of not at all being in no suburb of Seattle anymore, but somewhere in the cloud. You can set up a DC on Unix using Samba and I spare you the gory details of Microsoft’s legacy crud that is still around and potentially useful as fallback.As a somewhat mischievous solution is there a peace of software informally available for free download by good old DoD called installRoot, which is a centralized manager of all certificates on your system. (its usefulness is diminished lately because it does not find Netscape-format store in later version of Mozilla, but it still does all the Windows and Java certs) As an added benefit, it also turns off the “civilian” root system and turns on old school Arpanet. Instead of clumsy 13 civilian roots named after first 13 letters of Latin alphabet, does it turn on old school ARPANET with 48 numbered roots. Yepee, you get to see .mil sites again (I surely hope of unclassified variety :) Why 13? Well, for graph theoretical reasons beyond the scope of this conversation, the Internet is not completely nuke-proof. It has been proven that it takes at most 13 nukes (or other major traffic jams) to conclusively sever it into two disjoint pieces. Why 48? Because Uncle Sam wants to know where you are down to each individual bit of your internal LAN’s Ethernet address, which happens to be 48 bits long. Got no proof of any of this, just overheard.Still with me? As you may have surmised, the actually protected property is not as much the ability to look up DNS (converting name to IP address, but the REVERSE lookup, converting IP addresses back to authoritative names) for which there is a special designated domain in-addr . arpa ( and in-ipv6 . arpa ) This battle has been conclusively lost to to various provider of “cloud-based” load balancing services like Akamai or Cloudflare, as this is what they use to transparently substitute the machine name serving you a URL to a one on a different continent, should a need arise. How can you play with the big boys? By engaging in IPv6 “brokering”, which is a fancy way of calling a translation between IPv6 and IPv4, possibly skipping the indirection of resolving some common domain name for both addresses. Fortunately for you, the mess that it was a few years back subdued and apparently has been entirely subsumed by IPv6 rapid deployment which can be expressed entirely by semantics of Linux’s newfangled ip command (from iproute2 suite) No documentation whatsoever. Also highly recommended IPv6 Tunnel Broker by Hurricane Electric (the only and best remaining provider of such things. Also somewhat a misnomer, as they throw in a lot more free DNS services than DynDNS ever gave you, see Hurricane Electric Hosted DNS A must if you are on Dynamic IP (your provider reserves the right to change your home IP / host at any time) Also great to learn about Teredo tunneling which is intended as IPv6 tunnel of last resort. For reasons also beyond the scope of this conversation, will reestablish last known good network topology if on. (in its own weird wordview) Quite fittingly named after a particularly nasty shipworm. Bonus points if you get it to route for you! (Teredo relay in their parlance, as opposed to a Teredo server) A quick and dirty check. See if you got an address 192.88.99.1 on your IPv4 network. Should you use a fairly common 255.0.0.0 bitmask for your LAN, are you still certain it is still inside your perimeter.There is an area where nobody is particularly interested in interfering with the Russians and that is domain names in Cyrillic. There is a scheme going that uses .рус and .рф domains in Unicode. This is rather unfortunate. They should really bring out KOI8-R, the native Russian 8-bit encoding, which got a useful property that it is kinda sorta remains readable as ASCII if you strip one bit to make it 7. This (ab)uses the fact that most letters in Latin and Cyrillic are kinda same. It has been considered a good business practice to make them look different for the same font, but it does not have to be and in fact, was not for old-school computer terminal fonts. An interesting side effect of that is an entirely different notion of Lexicographical order - Wikipedia, which is how you sort the dictionary. ASCII is sorted in the same way Latin alphabet is (ABC) but KOI8 is sorted by scan-codes, or directly in the order the letters are printed on a standard Russian typewriter, which is really QWERTY in disguise! This makes the whole problem of resolving a potentially obfuscated text (corresponding to subversion of DNS akin to “phishing” sites exploiting typos rather than rather harmless outright denial) slightly more interesting that a trivial Substitution cipher. In this case, do we have two passable plaintext to every compromised/crypted one and both could be kinda nonsensical, as domain names often are. Lets say one is a native Latin encoding, another Cyrillic. Now suppose Russian registrars start registering domain names within newfangled Internationalized domain name conventions which have a mixture of Latin and Cyrillic letters. This is not inherently wrong, but is a form of ASCII spoofing (also addressed in above article) You have to use an old-school fixed width typewriter font to confuse the bunch, but it is not the point here. The point is to “salt” the public name in such a way, that it is not possible to unambiguously reduce the organization’s domain name to Latin-only cypher without knowing the KOI7 “hash” of organizations domain name in (KOI8) Russian. ASCII cannot win that one because one of the main design criteria of original encodings was alignment to next closest power of 2, which is 32. To achieve that, ASCII table was padded with 6 punctuation characters between upper and lower case, which are not valid for naming purposes (26+6) and KOI table kinda lost a letter (Yo (Cyrillic) - Wikipedia, Ё, 33–1) which was banished from KOI-7 on the account of violating some important standard called ISO 646 and potentially conflicting with DEL and EOF characters. In KOI8, its got a dubious distinction of having entirely non-standard distance between upper and lower case, only 16, instead of 32 elsewhere in ASCII or KOI. This means it is not going to survive a standard upper-to-lower case conversion, which is something mod 32-ish like (too lazy to check :) Interestingly enough, is KOI8 sorted with lower case first, the exactly opposite way of ASCII. Which brings us to another interesting Russian letter called Short I - Wikipedia, Й. Why exactly did they keep a capital for it? In order to be capitalized, does a sentence need to start with a word also starting with the letter. Wiki says it is only possible for this letter to be not at the end of the word when transliterating foreign names like Yorkshire (obviously no need for that crap) or Jovovich (Who, Milla? She’s not really foreign and will survive with a Ya (Cyrillic) - Wikipedia ) To one up Wiki, did I find a single common noun starting with the short-i in Russian language, йод for iodine (damn, I am so pre-2011 archived copy. They already dropping the breve in Иод — Википедия) I was going to suggest Ёд instead, because it adds up with retrofitting it back to original German Jod (Bolschaja Loptjuga) and and/or making Йолка and Йoжик valid spellings, because they work phonetically the same, damn it. This dialect of Russian I am speaking here is colloquially known as Olbanian, BTW. So, what I am proposing is to make it legal to substitute either lower or upper case Yo in place of capital I-Short (Sorry, Milla) In case of lower case, does it end up being with other lower case letters, except for ASCII where there is no such letter. Lets now look for reinterpretation of rather impressive escape prefix for “internationalized” domain names of “xn—”. Say we really mean to say Ёд— in Cyrillic interpretation. Is there a wrong letter or one letter to few? You tell me. One is technically an odd parity violation and another even (see Parity bit - Wikipedia noting that one letter has an odd and another even index) And so we reorder stuff until we achieve an encoding reduction relative to ASCII of at least one character. With DEL and EOF at our disposal, trivially done. When in doubt, add some Moutchkines to the mix, because tch (tsch in German) is just a single letter ч. Can French people really pronounce this sort of stuff with their nose? (As we well know by now, they just used the French-like spelling on my name to appear posh) Note that none of this is to be interpreted as a “strong secret” in cryptographic sense, but a naming scheme that a lot easier to defend than attack. Note that applications of Cyrillic encodings to fixing screwed up Unicode is not new. Check out this for example Исправление текста набранного в неверной раскладке. Retroactively recovers selected text to mixture of Latin and Cyrillic accidentally typed in using wrong keyboard layout, with special characters, proper case and allowing for any localized keyboard layouts vaguely based on Latin or Cyrillic. For example “Ghbdtn Ькю Вощт Вщ bp Rbtdf” recovers to “Привет Mr. John Do из Киева” This allows us to also conclusively debunk the legend of lytdybr (Лытдыбр), a Livejournal-originated meme about Russian users accidentally typing “dear diary” using QWERTY and than getting confused about what they were trying to say. Unicode of course, ingested all the previous crud, like peculiar spacing between Cyrillic upper- and lower case Yo’s and added some more. By the time they got to capitalizing various small and insignificant languages derived from Latin or Cyrillic by means of adding various Umlauts, accents and breves, they gave up on blocking cases together. For those does a capital letter immediately follow lowercase.So, is this too much paranoia? Probably. Not that one can expect some US Department of Trade to not weaponize the control they still wield over Internet’s most important name servers, however deranged that might be. BTW, now that they are weaponizing the holy buck left and right (to own detriment), start getting used to the Currency sign (typography) (Soviet Union couldn’t be seen with $$$ on their keyboards. Another tremendously important priority of another superpower reaching for senility, just a bit earlier) Also note the conspicuous absence of specifically Russian from all the God’s languages offered by the dear Quora lately. One could almost suspect a political thing about Russians there... Not that I am interested in using it, better take it to Anglo-Saxon pigdog’s home turf of course. What is the most insignificant and small language you’ve seen lately? I’ve seen people posting in Finish a few days back. Also interested in a scoop on how blatant censorship of political opinion based on policies not officially stated anywhere is to reconcile with the old DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Wikipedia) safe-harbor provisions? It used to mean that you better not touch any user content on your own to qualify as a mere platform that knew no nothing and is not liable for no nothing? Could it be that some provisions of Electronic Commerce Directive 2000 - Wikipedia of dear EU’s are interpreted to the exact opposite of DMCA’s original? (not obvious, seems largely same-ish) If yes, could it be conceivably legal to pigeonhole moi to ether jurisdiction on the basis of IP geolocation alone (logging in using my Google profile, which unlike Quora itself, does have specific policies about EU-specific shite aplenty, but won’t really mind me moving :) Quora always gives me their server hosted in Germany based on likely proximity. Do you reckon it is worth the trouble “moving back” to US? One obvious advantage is the ease of filing class-action lawsuits.