Free Republic

In a move the technology sector will surely see as a victory, a controversial antipiracy bill being debated in Congress will no longer include a provision that would require ISPs to block access to overseas Web sites accused of piracy. Rep. Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), one of the biggest backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act, today said he plans to remove the Domain Name System or DNS-blocking provision. "After consultation with industry groups across the country," Smith said in a statement released by his office, "I feel we should remove DNS-blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that...

> According to the indictment, the suspects entered into deals with various internet advertisers in which they would be paid for generating traffic to certain websites or advertisements. But instead of earning the money legitimately, the FBI said the defendants used malware to force infected computers to unwillingly visit the target sites or advertisements -- pumping up click results and, therefore, ill-gotten profits to the tune of $14 million. The malware was also designed to prevent users from installing anti-virus software that may have been able to free the infected computers. > In the first case, if a user searched...

I live in Central Illinois and for the last hour, Free Republic has been the only website I can access. No eBay, Weather, Paypal, Drudge Report, craigslist, youtube, not even my local bank. I get the "... can't find server" error. I can't even get email. But I seem to be able to access Free Republic just fine. I mean it's a good sign for when the end of the world begins. But for right now it's kind of frustrating.

The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension.

Probably not many people noticed, but FR changed its IP address over the weekend, from 209.157.64.201 to 209.157.64.200. I only noticed because I had hard coded the address to my HOSTS file. I just wanted to remind the admins that there are many links to 209.157.64.201 out there. Search any search engine for site:209.157.64.201 to see.

I have two DNS servers from my ISP A&TT that I use. Just wondering if using a free DNS would do any harm, slow me down or is would be unsafe to use.

A networking error has caused computers in Chile and the U.S. to come under the control of the Great Firewall of China, redirecting Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube users to Chinese servers. Security experts are not sure exactly how this happened, but it appears that at least one ISP recently began fetching high-level DNS (domain name server) information from what's known as a root DNS server, based in China. That server, operated out of China by Swedish service provider Netnod, returned DNS information intended for Chinese users, effectively spreading China's network censorship overseas. China tightly controls access to a number of...

Every day it gets harder and harder to use FreeRepublic. For some reason the site is suffering from unspecified "server" problems that are rarely explained in a way that longstanding members such as myself can even find. The only reason I know there is a server problem is because someone finally posted a comment from FR Staff over on the Alternate Free Republic site; a place I find myself turning to more and more frequently while waiting for the latest daily problem to be resolved. To say this is merely frustrating is the understatement of the year. I grant you...

Without the ingenuity of America’s brightest minds and the investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars, there would be no Internet, as we now know it today. Now, the Obama administration has moved quietly to cede control of the Web from the United States to foreign powers. Some background: The Internet came into being because of the genius work of Americans Dr.Robert E. Kahn and Dr. Vinton G. Cerf. These men, while working for the Department of Defense in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the early 1970s, conceived, designed, and implemented the idea of "open-architecture networking."

An attack directed at the DNS provider for some of the Internet's larger e-commerce companies--including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia--took several Internet shopping sites offline Wednesday evening, two days before Christmas. Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand name, confirmed an attack took place Wednesday afternoon, taking out sites or rendering them extremely sluggish for about an hour. A representative who answered the customer support line said the attacks were directed against Neustar facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose, Calif., and Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications for Neustar, confirmed that at about 4:45 p.m....

From the 'Mission Accomplished?' files: For more than a year now I've heard lots of people in the Internet industry proclaiming DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) as the long-term solution to DNS cache poisoning vulnerabilities. That may not necessarily be the case. A new vulnerability is now out that attacks DNS servers  WITH DNSSSEC installed. In the summer of 2008, security researcher Dan Kaminsky made the whole world aware of potential security issues with DNS, which could have undermined the integrity of the Internet itself. DNSSEC is supposed to be answer, with most of the world's major Internet registries moving to...

I discovered something quite interesting just now. The domain name "ImpeachObama.com" was registered on 15 Jul 2004 07:10:37, just over one week after Obama was CHOSEN to give the keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention in Boston, which he delivered on July 27, 2004, nearly two weeks AFTER the domain was registered. Any browse to that address results in bringing up a Google search on the word "Obama," where, naturally, the first result is Obama's "Organizing for America" organization at BarackObama.com. When it comes to scheming, those Democrats sure don't mess around, do they?

The US government has relaxed its control over how the internet is run. It has signed a four-page "affirmation of commitments" with the net regulator Icann, giving the body autonomy for the first time. Previous agreements gave the US close oversight of Icann - drawing criticism from other countries and groups. The new agreement comes into effect on 1 October, exactly 40 years since the first two computers were connected on the prototype of the net.

Re: FR Down in Virginia --- In freerepublic2@yahoogroups.com, "freeper_p8riot" wrote: > > Went down just a few minutes ago > It is down here as well...El Paso area. Seems to be missing from my DNS server? I can get on FR if I use the TOR network. peculiar....it's like someone erased FR from the domain name server list...all I get is Address Not Found Firefox can't find the server at www.freerepublic.com.

Russian researcher claims vulnerabilities can be exploited in less than a day, but others disagree... Patches meant to fix a flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) don't completely protect the Web's traffic cop from attack, a Russian research claimed Friday. The head of the non-profit that maintains the most commonly used DNS software, however, said there was little to worry about. In a blog post , Russian researcher Evgeniy Polyakov said he had created an exploit able to insert bogus routing information into systems running the most-up-to-date version of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the popular open-source software...

HD Moore has been owned. That's hacker talk, meaning that Moore, the creator of the popular Metasploit hacking toolkit, has become the victim of a computer attack. It happened on Tuesday morning, when Moore's company, BreakingPoint, had some of its Internet traffic redirected to a fake Google page that was being run by a scammer. According to Moore, the hacker was able to do this by launching what's known as a cache poisoning attack on a DNS server on AT&T's network that was serving the Austin, Texas, area. One of BreakingPoint's servers was forwarding DNS traffic to the AT&T server,...

Excerpt - SAN FRANCISCO (AFP)--Internet security researchers warned Thursday that hackers have caught on to a "critical" flaw that lets them control traffic on the Internet. ~ snip ~ "We are in a lot of trouble," said IOActive security specialist Dan Kaminsky, who stumbled upon the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability about six months ago and reached out to industry giants to collaborate on a solution. "This attack is very good. This attack is being weaponized out in the field. Everyone needs to patch, please. This is a big deal." ~ snip ~

Excerpt - The organization that oversees Internet addresses is expected Thursday to approve a proposal to create an unlimited number of so-called top-level domains -- the familiar suffixes like ".com" at the end of Web addresses. Under the plan, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will allow organizations to apply for any top-level domain. Businesses, for example, could use brand names such as ".ibm" or ".ebay" in their Web addresses. Cities could sign up for names like ".nyc" or ".berlin." It will also be possible to apply to use more general terms, such as ".news" or ".sports," to...

Excerpt - Researcher Dan Kaminsky tomorrow will show attendees of the RSA security conference how a Web-based attack could be used to seize control of certain routers. Kaminsky has spent the past year studying how design flaws in the way that browsers work with the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) can be abused in order to get attackers behind the firewall. But at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, he will demonstrate how this attack would work on widely used routers, including those made by Cisco's Linksys division and D-Link. The technique, called a DNS rebinding attack, would work on...

I've been watching Sierra Corporate Design, Inc., v. David Ritz, for a long time. You haven't seen it here because the documents are not kept online and are, therefore, not accessible. However, a decision has been reached in that case and the clerk of court in Fargo was kind enough to fax me a copy of the findings of fact, conclusions of law, and order for judgment. In 12 pages of bad law, a North Dakota District Court judge has declared that using the "host" command with the "-l" option constitutes computer hacking. The "-l" option, which effects a DNS...

French government officials say they are now the fourth victim of cyberattacks originating from China, saying the attacks are similar to those reported by other countries. In the past three weeks, government officials in Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom have claimed that cyberattacks on government systems have originated from China. Chinese officials have denied they are behind the attacks. French officials were careful not to implicate the Chinese government as the source of the attacks.

Attackers are targeting a flaw in the DNS service for Windows server OSes that could hijack the computers that run them, Microsoft warns. The software behemoth advises admins to employ workarounds pending completion of its investigation. The vulnerability affects Windows 2000 Server, Service Pack 4 and SP 1 and SP2 versions of Windows Server 2003, according to this Microsoft advisory. DNS functionality exposed over port 53 is not at risk. Nor are Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP and Windows Vista. An attack can be carried out by executing a stack-based buffer overrun in the DNS Server's remote procedure call (RPC)...

WASHINGTON -- Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday in one of the most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002. Experts said the unusually powerful attacks lasted for hours but passed largely unnoticed by most computer users, a testament to the resiliency of the Internet. Behind the scenes, computer scientists worldwide raced to cope with enormous volumes of data that threatened to saturate some of the Internet's most vital pipelines. Experts said the hackers appeared to disguise their origin, but vast amounts of rogue data in the attacks were...

Not understanding much about computers, I have been getting lots of "The page cannot be displayed" messages when I go clicking. This is a relatively new problem. Also, it seems like everything takes much longer to come up online and pages don't always fill completely. Bottom line is "Cannot find server or DNS Error Internet Explorer". I am using IE7 but am having similar problems using Firefox2. My cable modem checks out. I have deleted temporary files and cookies often. Still, I am getting frustrated by the slow and erratic performance. Any suggestions? Thanks for your help.

DEMS VOW SANCTIONS AGAINST CANDIDATES WHO THWART NEW CALENDER Sat Aug 19 2006 11:16:47 ET The Democratic National Committee moved on Saturday to penalize 2008 presidential candidates who defied a new nominating calendar designed to lessen the longtime influence of New Hampshire and Iowa -- the two states that have traditionally kicked off the nominating process. The NEW YORK TIMES will report on Sunday: The sanctions would be directed at candidates who campaigned in any state that refused to follow a proposed calendar that the committee was preparing to approve. Any candidate who campaigned in a state that did not...

Where is www.cpac.org? I just tried to go to their site and it's down. Servers go up and down, just ask JimRob, but that's not what's happening here. Their DNS entry is gone. Pardon my geek, but ping returns "Unknown Host" and Arin WhoIs shows no match. Likewise for "cpac.org" This is suspicious to me, because highjacking someone's DNS entry is a common hacker attack, I believe it may have happened to FreeRepublic once.

Traitors of Record: The Record of the New York TimesBy Fedora “. . .the most untrustworthy paper in the United States. . .” --President Dwight Eisenhower, referring to the New York TimesIntroductionLast week Senator John Cornyn criticized the New York Times for endangering national security with a James Risen story on NSA surveillance timed to coincide with a vote on the Patriot Act and, incidentally, with the release of a book by Risen. A review of the record illustrates that endangering national security through irresponsible leaks is nothing new for the New York Times. Some particularly outrageous examples are worth...

ALARM - Agreement in Tunis on a progressive evolution of Internet TUNIS - an agreement on a progressive modification of the Internet was reached Tuesday, avoiding a rupture between the United States, hostile with any international control, and the rest of the world, announced negotiators at the world Top on the company of the information (SMSI) of Tunis. MORE...

It's been a good ride, this whole Internet thing. To hear its boosters tell it, the Net has, in addition to the porn, online poker and cheap drugs, given us democratized information, become a tool for the undermining of totalitarian regimes and given people in the farthest corners of the Earth a window on the wider world that would have been unthinkable before Al Gore invented the Internet (sic).But all that is about to change -- starting tomorrow. The bad news is that we can't really do anything about it. The good news is that the changes that are coming...

.Developing countries demand share of control ·US says urge to censor underlies calls for reform A battle has erupted over who governs the internet, with America demanding to maintain a key role in the network it helped create and other countries demanding more control. The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.

...Take the Brown bearbaiting this week. The public humiliation of bureaucrats is a Washington ritual. Rep. John Dingell turned it into a public spectacle. The Brown hearing elicited little helpful information, and the next day Gov. Kathleen Blanco, astonishingly, was not asked to reply to Mr. Brown's accusation that her administration was "dysfunctional." They let her off the hook because like them, she's a member of the elected aristocracy. Every senior manager in the federal bureaucracy followed that Brown bonfire, and they don't want to go there. For them the message is: Be careful, not decisive. FEMA won't get better;...

The intersection of south Robert Street and Bernard Street is a quiet corner of West St. Paul now, but in another time, it was the scene of one of the Twin Cities’ most brutal unsolved murders. Late on the night of January 11, 1978, 73-year-old Frederick Hess, the Surfco Gas Station attendant, was beaten and stabbed to death. The gas station is long gone, replaced by an office building, but the horror of that night still haunts Minnesota lawmen. “A blood covered ice chopper found at the scene of the crime is believed to have been used to inflict the...

Australian researchers are reviving a project to bring an extinct animal known as the Tasmanian tiger back from the dead through cloning. Three months after the Australian Museum shelved plans to clone the tiger -- also known as a thylacine -- a group of universities and a research institute are planning to revive the project, the Sun-Herald newspaper reported. Mike Archer, dean of science at the University of New South Wales, was quoted as saying that researchers from NSW and Victoria states were likely to join the programme, which involves recovering DNA from a pup preserved in 1866 to breed...

COMPUTER criminals are coming up with ever stealthier ways to make money. Rather than attack PCs or email inboxes, their latest trick is to subvert the very infrastructure of the internet, the domain name system (DNS) that routes all net traffic. In doing so, they redirect internet users to bogus websites, where visitors could have their passwords and credit details stolen, be forced to download malicious software, or be directed to links to pay-per-click adverts. This kind of attack is called DNS cache poisoning or polluting. It was first done by pranksters in the early years of the internet, but...

The DNS cache poisoning that first struck more than a month ago and led to users being redirected from popular Web sites to malicious sites that infected their machines with spyware, is continuing, said the Internet Storm Center (ISC) Wednesday. The attacks are taking advantage of vulnerabilities and design flaws in Microsoft server software. DNS cache poisoning occurs when an attacker hacks into a domain name server, one of the machines that translate URLs such as www.techweb.com into the appropriate IP address. The attacker then "poisons" the server by planting counterfeit data in the cache of the name server. When...

Crackers are using a security vulnerability in Symantec's enterprise products to redirect surfers to websites hosting malicious code. The main vector of the DNS cache poisoning attack, detected by the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Centre on 4 March, has been traced back to a vulnerability affecting Symantec firewalls with DNS caching. Symantec has issued a hotfix for its Symantec Enterprise Firewall and Enterprise Security Gateway appliance products. Even users who applied a July 2004 fix to correct a previous DNS cache poisoning problem are advised to revisit the issue. A few non-Symantec users reported similar issues, so the problem is...

Although some ISPs and legislators are crediting the year-old CAN-SPAM Act and better technology for recent gains in the war on spam, many in the industry say the advances are forcing spammers to employ new tactics, which are destabilizing the Internet's crucial DNS. One troublesome technique finding favor with spammers involves sending mass mailings in the middle of the night from a domain that has not yet been registered. After the mailings go out, the spammer registers the domain early the next morning. By doing this, spammers hope to avoid stiff CAN-SPAM fines through minimal exposure and visibility with a...

During a Monday program in DC televised on C-SPAN, Mark Walsh stated that 'Freepers', patrons of the right-wing website FreeRepublic.com, committed DNS attacks against Air America's website in order to disrupt their operations.

VeriSign Inc. is selling its Network Solutions business, which provides Internet domain name registrations, to Pivotal Private Equity for approximately $100 million so it can focus on infrastructure services. VeriSign gained Network Solutions' registrar and registry businesses when it purchased the company in 2000. The registrar business, which offers services such as business e-mail, Web sites, hosting and Web presence, will go to Pivotal Private Equity, the company said Thursday. VeriSign will retain the registry business, which provides the backbone for the .com and .net domain names. VeriSign recently renamed the registry business VeriSign Naming and Directory Services and...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Three Web sites that provide spam blocking lists have shut down as a result of crippling Internet attacks in what experts on Thursday said is an escalation in the war between spammers and opponents of unsolicited e-mails. Anti-spam experts said that they think spammers are behind the attacks, although they have no way of proving it. The technological war comes as Congress considers a federal anti-spam law and California adopts what is widely considered to be the toughest law in the country. The California law, signed on Tuesday, allows people to sue spammers for $1,000 per...

Thursday, May 1, 2003 5:30 p.m. PST William Morris Agency brings down web site critical of anti-war celebs HollywoodHalfwits.com The web site Boycott-Hollywood.us was shut down today due to legal measures brought by attorneys on behalf of the William Morris Agency, which represents various Hollywood celebrities. The web site was known for providing a platform for the public to exercise their free speech rights by commenting on actors who criticize President Bush and the war efforts. Apparently, free speech is a one way street in Hollywood. The law firm Rintala, Smoot, Jaenicke and Rees appealed to domain registrar Dotster.com and...

To make the 13 computer servers that run the Internet's core addressing system more secure, the two machines operated by VeriSign Inc. in the U.S. have been physically and electronically separated to make them less vulnerable to attack