Microsoft Takes Down No-IP.com Domains

An anonymous reader writes For some reason that escapes me, a Judge has granted Microsoft permission to hijack NoIP's DNS. This is necessary according to Microsoft to thwart a "global cybercrime epidemic" being perpetrated by infected machines running Microsoft software. No-IP is a provider of dynamic DNS services (among other things). Many legitimate users were affected by the takedown: "This morning, Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware. We were very surprised by this. We have a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives. ... We have been in contact with Microsoft today. They claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening."

Re:Microsoft takes on global cybercrime epidemic

[lister king of smeg]

i wonder if the same court would let you take update.microsoft.com and redirct it to ftp.debian.org using this reasoning

Re: Sue them for all they're worth

[Ultra64]

Because creating an account on a website is a measure of how important someone's opinion is, duh.

Re:Legal Precedent?

[MrNemesis]

Most people I know that use no-ip are people setting up their own minecraft servers its not a hotbed of criminal activivty like MS claims.

I looked up this "minecraft" of which you speak, and it seems to be some crudely archaic simulation where you wander round indiscriminately smashing rocks together and killing animals - basically a terrorism simulator. I fail to see why anyone would support the use of this software.

Lots of terrorism-simulator apologists say it's something called an Indy game, but it bears absolutely no comparison with any of the Harrison Ford films (and in any case, an Indy game would require royalty payments to LucasArts which we can find no record of). It doesn't have a proper company behind it like EA or Zynga but only a nebulous cloud of anonymous people known as "notch".

Not only that, it seems that the hacker group "notch" had their paypal account suspended several years ago due to money laundering and other suspicious activities.

Frankly anyone who uses this simulator or supports the filth behind it deserves everything they get.

Richard Domingues