Yup. And what we should be doing is figure out how to get the message across to American businesses in general. They need to understand that they're not immune. What has happened to JotForm and a few thousand other small companies can happen just as easily to any other company trying to do business in the US. They can be shut down on a whim, with no explanation, at any time. There is no defense against this, other than to publicize it and get people to understand what it'll do to their businesses if they don't act.

Saying how awful it was for one company doesn't do much. Understanding that you may be next is what it'll probably take to get people to fix the growing problem.

No, the point is that in the US's treatment of Internet sites, the law is now clearly irrelevant. The current poster child is JotForm, whose domain name was shut down for no stated reason, without a court warrant, and there's not even a suggestion that JotForm was violating any law. In fact, the jotform.com name was eventually restored, but the authorities involved haven't stated why the action was taken.

The general understanding is that it was probably a "mistake", i.e., the agencies involved didn't know or care about the law or finding any evidence; they just sent GoDaddy the takedown request without bothering with a court order, and GoDaddy accepted it without question. The silence from officialdom is because they knew they blew it, and don't want to admit their mistake. But this isn't consolation to the businesses that have been silenced by such random, unexplained takedowns. JotForm wasn't an isolated incident; there have been thousands of them in recent months.

Any businesses using a hosting or domain-name service in the US has to now be aware that their online presence can disappear instantly, with no explanation and no recourse. It doesn't matter whether you are following US law or not. It all just depends on the whims and misunderstandings of a flock of agencies that you don't know about and who won't talk to you.

It simply doesn't make sense to do business under such conditions. Sensible businessmen would be looking around for Internet hosting and domain-name services that are stable and reliable. Such services no longer exist in the US, and can't exist as long as the authorities act outside the law, so you should be moving your Internet business elsewhere.

Why do people have to keep saying this, as if it were some exciting new idea?

Fact is, the "IP" laws' only function has always been to limit our (re)use of others' ideas. And, as Isaac Newton famously put it in his "standing on the shoulders of giants" remark, building on others' ideas is how we have always progressed. Nobody has ever started with a "blank slate", and invented new things from first principles. Advances have always come from studying what others have done, and finding better ways to do things. Patent and copyright were developed explicitly to block this building process, and that's all that they've ever been used for.

"We're pretty sure that there are some safe ways of doing it, but we haven't bothered to teach our workers to do it that way, because it's too expensive."

We in the computer biz are pretty familiar with this sort of euphemistic safety claim. But if the "users" can't get it right, it mostly says a lot about the UI that you've handed them. If the users can't figure out how to do it right, either it's been made too difficult, or they don't have good training/documentation -- or they're being "encouraged" to do it wrong by their bosses. Usually all of the above.

Yeah, but admit it: It was funny. I think that's what 19thNervousBreakdown (768619) was going for. I've already posted, so I'll just have to hope that someone with mod points will give him (her?) one or more.

Well, maybe, but I think the pseudo-dispute arises more from things like all the time I find myself wasting with GUI tools that make me wade through several windows, each of which needs to be laboriously guided down through the directory tree, to do what could be done in 1/10 the time with a simple cp or mv or ... command. I've wasted a lot of my life on idiotic simple-minded tasks like that, which are fast and easy with a CLI, but achingly time-consuming in a GUI.

Not that I couldn't think of a quick and easy way to do such things in a GUI. But the people who write GUI tools don't ever consult with me (presumably because I have no "experience" designing modern GUi tools ;-), so they continue to present me with windows positioned at my home (or the root) directory, and I have to once again guide them down to the directories that I want them to use, at each level scrolling slowly through the contents of a directory, clicking on a subdirectory, scrolling through that directory, etc. Then I click on something that does the job, the window disappears, and the directory is forgotten, so I have to do it all over again for the next task.

Granted, there are some thing that a GUI tool does a lot better than a CLI tool. But this is undercut by all the things that take orders of magnitude more time with the GUI. They haven't even figured out a convenient way to include wildcards in file names (or if they have, the implementers have never heard of it).

In my experience, the biggest UI improvement in history was when they came out with the "make" command. Of course, most GUI users have no idea what that is, or if they do, they're horrified by the complex-looking text files that they don't understand. But it's a really effective way of packing up a lot of repeated actions, giving them a name, and invoking them via a brief mnemonic command. Sorta like scripting, but with automatic checking to see whether each step actually needs to be done.

OTOH, pretty pictures can be fun and entertaining.

Well, my first thought was that I can't boycott Sony over this, because I haven't bought anything of theirs since back when they were caught including rootkits on their CDs.

I don't know if it's possible to do two boycotts against the same company simultaneously. If so, you would one do it?

Yeah, that sounds about right. In all three cases, we have a name, and maybe a few names that we'd never heard before that supposedly refer to their leaders. But nobody has bothered to show that there was an actual organization behind the names.

For all we know, you and I and that guy over there could all be "members" of Anonymous (and Al Qaeda and the Mets ;-). After all, if they came and arrested you, for some appropriate value of they, how would you prove in court that you weren't a member? I for one don't know how I'd prove my non-membership.

It's also sorta like back in the day of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign against the Red Menace that was threatening the US. I occasionally thought about how I would prove that I wasn't a Communist, if I were dragged before one of those Committees. I probably couldn't, and I'd read a lot about all the people whose lives had been ruined by such accusations, based on no evidence at all.

So what's your defense against being Anonymous? Or Al Qaeda? Or a Met?

Note that, if you visited cia.gov after reading this story, they have evidence that you were part of the "attack".

Haw! And we can hope that none of Rick Santorum's supporters are reading this. They're the sort of folks who're likely to hunt Father Mulcahey down and interfere with his promotion.

OTOH, that's a crowd that isn't overly literate, and is unlikely to follow a site that describes itself as "for nerds", so the good Father's history is probably safe with us.

I do sorta wish I had a mod point ...