Reagan is the one who signed "asset forfeiture" into law. I remember at the time reading newspaper articles claiming this was "just going to be used to keep drugs off the streets" and how "law enforcement are outgunned and now can defend themselves against drug dealers".

It was obvious to me then that this was a violation of due process. Also, it is not authorized by the constitution, and thus every act of seizure under it is criminal act. (There is a federal law that makes it a felony to violate constitutional rights under color of law. Fourth amendment prohibits this.)

Notably, Bush the First, Clinton, Bush the Second and Obama have not made any moves to undo this legislation.

Meanwhile, this has been used to take money from bikers on their way to buy a motorcycle, and random motorists in Florida and Texas who get pulled over for speeding. "It could be drug money" says the "law enforcement officers" who take life savings and then spend it on themselves.

Just because they haven't seized your assets yet, doesn't mean you aren't at risk.

When the government can take whatever it wants, without any legal restraint, and in violation of the ultimate law of the land, that government is not a legitimate government.

We should be outraged. We should be throwing the bums out-- from Obama down to the local state congresspeople or local sheriffs and judges who fail to take actions overturning this, or who themselves participate in this. It does not matter what party they are from, they are all culpable, and they are all criminals.

Edited: I removed the reference to my property that was stolen by the FBI because it prompted many people to attack me below. I really would rather the discussion be about how to resolve this issue for domain names, or maybe some discussion about how to overturn these seizure laws.

Edited: I've made the legal case in defense of those wrongfully convicted. I cannot keep up with the tide of people who have no citations of the law, but are quick to disparage me personally, for my crime of defending victims here.

Frankly, I think that the ease with which people assume that "naturally" these people were "bad guys" and therefore what they did was "illegal" despite the law and the constitution, is the very proof of my central point that the government is out of control, and they are getting away with it because people can't be bothered to challenge the belief-- taught by government in government schools-- that the "rule of law" holds sway.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Federal authorities unsealed an indictment Friday against the founders of the three largest internet poker companies operating in the U.S. The indictment charges eleven defendants, including the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker, with bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling offenses, according to Federal authorities in New York. Restraining orders were issued against more than 75 bank accounts used by the poker companies and their payment processors, while five Internet domain names used by the companies to host poker games were seized, federal authorities added in a statement. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/doj-indicts-founders-of-top...

Indictment http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/April11/schein...

This is a disaster. A very sad day for the internet. We are entering into pastor Niemoller territory here: first they came for the file-sharing websites, next they came for the online gambling websites, and I would guess that Bitcoin is probably next in line, and following that, Magic: the Gathering online and the MMORPGs.

I think it's a matter of perspective. We do this with enterprise software, except we don't call it a "time bomb".

"We've deployed your installation with a provisional, expiring license. We'll issue your permanent license once you've confirmed the software is installed and configured to your liking."

Then when they send the check, we send the license. It's never been a problem for any of the parties because we've always been very up front about how the process works. No surprises.

The irony is that this is still going on at Google, and presumably everywhere else in the industry as well. Some new strong-willed engineer joins, takes a look at the code, declares "This is amateurish. We should be doing so much better," and then gets a whole bunch of people to rewrite it, usually in a different language, with a different style of coding.

I'll credit this with a major shift in my thinking about what constitutes "good" programming. From the outside, I looked at Google and thought "wow, they're accomplishing amazing things, they must have amazing engineering practices". And yeah, things are pretty rigorous...but what I found was that the people who were, by and large, responsible for all those amazing things didn't care. Most of them had fairly loose preferences for favorite programming languages, and favorite development methodologies, and basically ignored the fad du jour. What they did have was an obsessive focus on the user, and on getting things done so they could move on to get other things done. Navel-gazing about what language was best or whether we should be using OOP or how stupid the previous engineers were was generally reserved for the B-players. The As were thinking about how we could return results as you type, or how we could process real-time microblog feeds, or how we could expose new and potentially groundbreaking new features without losing millions of dollars from UI tweaks.

Basically, the code quality of the initial version was "good enough", as was the code quality of every subsequent version of Google (except when it wasn't, which is when it got rewritten), and that's all that mattered. As long as you can do useful things for the user, it doesn't matter whether your coworker thinks you're a 1337 hacker.

I've conducted extensive benchmarking of rackspace cloud, ec2 and about 38 other iaas providers. Rackspace cloud is definitely not faster than ec2 by a long shot. Rackspace cloud utilizes homogonous infrastructure, AMD 2374 to be exact. All instance sizes are burstable, so you typically get about the same CPU resources on a 1GB instance as you do on a 16GB instance according to our benchmark results. Ec2 on the other hand scales CPU much better all the way to dedicated dual quad X5570s with the cc1.4xlarge. Both this and the rackspace sponsored bitsource study compared an ec2 m1.small. Any study that does this should be immediately discounted as that is about the worst possible performing ec2 instance size. Adrian cockroft from Netflix refers to these types of studies as benchmarketing. They do not accurately depict the performance capabilities of ec2.

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...

The hijacked DNS has not propagated everywhere yet. Mine are still working. If anyone has last minute business to do on these sites, such as cashing out before the FBI steals your money, add these to your hosts file:

$ host pokerstars.com

pokerstars.com has address 77.87.179.116

pokerstars.com mail is handled by 20 mx20.pokerstars.com.

$ host absolutepoker.com

absolutepoker.com has address 66.212.244.175

absolutepoker.com mail is handled by 10 mail.absolutepoker.com.

absolutepoker.com mail is handled by 5 mx1.absolutepoker.com.

absolutepoker.com mail is handled by 5 mx2.absolutepoker.com.

$ host fulltiltpoker.com

fulltiltpoker.com has address 91.211.98.20

fulltiltpoker.com mail is handled by 200 mit-mx00.fulltiltpoker.com.

fulltiltpoker.com mail is handled by 100 mx00.fulltiltpoker.com.

$ host ultimatebet.com

ultimatebet.com has address 66.212.244.148

ultimatebet.com mail is handled by 100 mailb.ultimatebet.com.

ultimatebet.com mail is handled by 200 mailc.ultimatebet.com.

ultimatebet.com mail is handled by 10 mail.ultimatebet.com.

$ host ub.com

ub.com has address 66.212.231.205