"Today, Sony Pictures has upped the ante against global cybercrime, taking legal action to clean up piracy... We're taking YouTube to task as the owner of infrastructure frequently exploited by cybercriminals to infringe copyrights by uploading unauthorized movie clips... On June 26, the court granted our request and made Sony the DNS authority for youtube.com, allowing us to identify and route all known infringing traffic to the Sony sinkhole and identify users who posted unauthorized content."

At least that's what I'd expect from a constitutional state ;-)

If people gave the money they can (at least in England) mount a private criminal prosecution. That's very rare, but it does happen.

I'm pleased that MS is doing this. So long as it stays open, scrutinised by the courts, and restricted to massive malware botnets the results are good for almost everyone.

Microsoft failed to secure Windows XP against malware and botnets, so all Windows XP users will now be redirected to Ubuntu.com when they try to access the internet through Internet Explorer.

That is because Windows, OS X, Android and Linux allow their users to install third party programs without whitelisting them. There is nothing stopping users from installing malware. OS X and Linux have less malware because they're not as popular as Windows and Android.

That's opposite to iOS, Windows Phone/RT, XBox and Playstation which are pretty much free from malware because everything has to go through an app store.

That is because Windows, OS X, Android and Linux allow their users to install third party programs without whitelisting them.

<Devil's advocate>Then clearly Microsoft aren't doing enough to look after their own back yards, and their domains should be seized and potential Microsoft customers rerouted to information about the dangers of using Microsoft products and safer alternatives.</Devil's advocate>

This is a highly impractical response to the problem of malware, of course, but I don't find the analogy stretched at all. The action Microsoft have reportedly taken -- and the support they appear to have been given by the courts -- are just about as absurd as my tongue-in-cheek response above.

We seem to have grown up and stopped assuming everyone using P2P protocols obviously wants to pirate films, and we don't assume everyone using Windows XP obviously wants to be part of a botnet, so why would we assume everyone using Dynamic DNS obviously wants to distribute malware?

[Edit: There are now quite a few HN posters in multiple discussions about this action who are saying their innocent use of No-IP is being undermined because Microsoft's sinkhole is getting in the way.]

(unless we're talking things installed through homebrew, pip, gems and whatnot, but those aren't likely to be used by inexperienced users)

I doubt No-IP will settle out of court. They'll probably countersue - they have nothing to lose, and that sounds like a company lawyering up and getting ready to kick ass - and I'd expect they'd ask for very big, even punitive damages. The $200k bond isn't even two orders of magnitude enough to hedge against MS literally destroying their business, in what may have been an ultimately well-intentioned, but spectacularly reckless, action.

How long until MS reverse the DNS changes, I wonder, especially given they can't keep up and they're all effectively down? 12 hours? 24?

It's no surprise, btw, that domains in US jurisdiction are under US jurisdiction.

We could use some more TLDs that aren't, I think, and I've held for some time that the root DNS should be held by some kind of international treaty entity acting as IANA.

IP can work between broad and anonymous mesh nets, but when an IP address can be resolved to a business or person it provides an exploit vector.

It costs like this because the namecoin price is so low. However, if it was used more, the price would skyrocket.

Reminds me of the old days of communism when you could have your "property" sized since legally speaking everything belonged to the state.

And no you can't say this is different because the courts ordered it since no-ip was not given a chance to defend itself.

How much would like to bet Microsoft presented the case as some rogue Arab sounding names(terrorists?) running shady bot-nets in cooperation with no-ip a company obviously involved in that criminal activity.

Not the largest and well known freed DNS provider in the world that happens to be used by a large number of bot-nets as well.

If this is ok I'm sure you could find millions of reasons to seize goggles domains like indexing warez sites or websites like the pirate bay.

Oh nevermind...NSA...M$ is teh suxor...oh mer gurd!!!!

This just proves that the current authorized domain system is not working, and its the beginning of the end.