Last week, a Turkish court ordered an access ban on a single post in the vast sea of more than 60 million individual blogs on WordPress. But for many users, that meant their Internet service providers blocked WordPress entirely.
A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of WordPress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.
It is the second sentence in the order, however, that caused the complete ban of WordPress in the country. “If the access to the single page cannot be possible due to technical reasons,” it reads, “block access to wordpress.com.”
Tag: Domains
You’ll NEVER guess who has bought I Taught Taylor Swift How To Give Head dot-com
In one of the most unlikely but intriguing domain registrations in recent years, pop star Taylor Swift has, it appears, registered ITaughtTaylorSwiftHowToGiveHead.com.
No, really.
The registration was sparked by Swift’s lawyers threatening the owner of ITaughtTaylorSwift.com, run by, um, the man who taught Taylor Swift how to play guitar.
Teacher Ronnie Cremer says he received a letter accusing him of infringing the “Taylor Swift” trademark and demanding he hand over the domain within three days. Cremer says he is innocent of any infringement, and refuses to give in, although he is not out of the woods yet.
The affair appears to have spurred Swift’s overzealous team to preemptively register a whole range of other “I Taught Taylor Swift” domains, using the brand-protection company MarkMonitor. Including one about being taught how to give oral sex.
The Pirate Bay Domains Targeted in Legal Action
While it is technically possible to operate without one, domain names are considered vital for any mainstream website. Domains give a web service an identity and make them easy to find.
This is exactly what authorities in Sweden are now trying to deny The Pirate Bay.
Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, the man behind the now-famous operation to take the site down in December, is now spearheading the drive to shut down The Pirate Bay’s access to a pair of key domains. ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se are Ingblad’s targets, the former being the only domain currently being used by the site.
Originally filed at the District Court of Stockholm back in 2013, the motion targets Punkt SE, the organization responsible for Sweden’s top level .SE domain. Ingblad’s assertion is that since The Pirate Bay is acting illegally, domain names are necessarily part of that site’s ‘crimes’ and should be tackled like any other part of its infrastructure.
“A domain name is an aid for a site. When a site is used for criminal activities a domain is aiding crime,” Ingblad said.
While actions against domain names aren’t unprecedented in Sweden, this case is unique. Punkt SE (also referred to as the Internet Infrastructure Foundation) informs TorrentFreak that while two earlier actions targeted the owners of Swedish domain names, this is the first time that the prosecutor has targeted the .SE / IIS registrar directly.
French plod can BAN access to any website – NO court order needed
The French government wants to block terrorist and child porn websites so badly that it’ll even pay for the privilege.
A new implementation of last year’s Terrorism Act (effectively a new decree extending the scope of the existing law) will force internet service providers to block websites within 24 hours if ordered to do so by the police – with no court order required.
However, in a sweetener to the ISPs that might well complain about the “burden” of doing so, the law promises that any costs incurred will be reimbursed.
The stick for non-compliance is a pretty big one – a year in jail and a €75,000 fine. Yet that hasn’t deterred one local access provider, Illico in Corrèze, central France, from rebelling. The body says it will refuse any blocking requests.
Civil liberties groups and open internet advocates are also up in arms.
“The measure only gives the illusion that the state is acting for our safety, while going one step further in undermining fundamental rights online,” said Felix Tréguer, founding member of digital rights group La Quadrature du Net. “We must get it overturned.”
He added that blocking is ineffective since it is easily circumvented, as well as disproportionate because of the risk of blocking perfectly lawful content.
KickassTorrents Taken Down By Domain Name Seizure
With millions of unique visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) is one the most used torrent sites on the Internet.
The site’s popularity has made it a prime target for copyright holders, many of whom would like to see the site taken offline.
To evade law enforcement and ease pressure from the entertainment industries, KAT has moved domain on a few occasions over the past several years. Most recently the site has been operating from the Kickass.so domain.
The Somalian .so TLD appeared to be a relatively safe haven, but today it’s apparent that this isn’t the case. About an hour ago the Kickass.so domain status listing was updated to “banned.”