Politics and Law

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is a lightning rod for controversy, but a recent attempt to keep a low profile might just result in, well, more press. The onetime vice presidential hopeful Palin, who stepped down from the governorship this summer, will be speaking at a Right to Life event in Milwaukee, Wis., on Friday evening, and her team has mandated that there are no reporters allowed--or gadgets.

According to CNN, laptops, cell phones, cameras, and anything else that could potentially be used as a recording device will not be allowed into the auditorium. Tickets to the event were $30.

It's not an unprecedented move by any means. Advance screenings of movies, for instance, regularly have a no-cell-phones policy now that just about any phone can be used as a recording device. And Palin is hardly the only high-profile politician to put a no-press, no-recording rule in place for a speech: Former Vice President Al Gore did just that for a keynote address at the RSA security conference in early 2008.

But the funny part is that banning the press will generally do very little good, since anyone with a notebook or a good memory could easily post quotes or a synopsis to a blog or Twitter account within minutes of the event ending. In this case, as with Gore's press ban at RSA, it's likely that Palin's move will just end up stirring up more buzz.

Considering her book "Going Rogue: An American Life" is coming out in a matter of days, that might ultimately turn out well--or not.

The Chinese government may be waving a white flag in response to all the criticism of its Green Dam filtering software.

Beijing won't force the widespread installation of the Internet filtering program on PCs and other consumer products, China's industry minister, Li Yizhong, said Thursday, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The Green Dam interface. (Credit: University of Michigan)

In June, China said it would require that the Green Dam software be installed on all computers sold in the country by both domestic and foreign manufacturers. Since later that month, China has been delaying a permanent decision on whether to demand the software be preinstalled on all PCs.

According to the Wall Street Journal story, Li said that the intention was for the software to be installed voluntarily by individuals or their parents. He stressed that the program is intended to protect children from pornography and other harmful content and that attempts to politicize the issue or "attack China's Internet management system" are fanciful and irresponsible, the Journal reported.

China will still move forward with installing Green Dam in schools and Internet cafes across the country.

Since China announced the requirement of Green Dam, the software had been criticized on several fronts, putting pressure on the Chinese government to re-examine its decision.

In addition to protecting children from pornography, the filter was seen as a further attempt at censoring content objectionable to the Chinese government, also creating potential trade barriers and other headaches for PC manufacturers.

Experts also said the program is poorly developed and unsafe and would leave PCs vulnerable to hackers. One exploit popped up in late June that would allow attacks on computers outfitted with Green Dam.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il issued a "special pardon" to two Current TV journalists who were recently charged for perpetrating "hostile acts" against the communist state, according to various news reports.

We "are overjoyed by the news of their pardon," the journalists' families said in a statement.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton reportedly arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Tuesday in a publicly unannounced visit to meet with Kim. During this meeting, the North Korean leader ordered the two prisoners released, according to the Associated Press.

"While this solely private mission to secure the release of two Americans is on the ground, we will have no comment," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "We do not want to jeopardize the success of former President Clinton's mission."

Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, were detained on the Chinese border on March 17 and convicted of sneaking into North Korea illegally. Working for Current TV, a San Francisco-based Internet news and video site co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, they were reporting on North Korean refugees fleeing to China.

In June, the journalists were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for "the political motive to isolate and stifle the socialist system," according to the Korean Central News Agency. Both Ling and Lee accepted the judgment.

This was Kim's first meeting with an American official since October 2000, when he met with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. After suffering a stroke last August, he has reportedly not met with Western officials from other countries either.

According to the Associated Press, the Korean Central News Agency said the release of the journalists is a sign of North Korea's "humanitarian and peace-loving policy." It is still not clear when the women will be allowed to leave, said The New York Times.

"We are so grateful to our government: President Obama, Secretary Clinton and the U.S. State Department for their dedication to and hard work on behalf of American citizens," Lee and Ling's families said in the statement. "We especially want to thank President Bill Clinton for taking on such an arduous mission and Vice President Al Gore for his tireless efforts to bring Laura and Euna home...We are counting the seconds to hold Laura and Euna in our arms."

The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists also welcomed the news of the journalists' pardon.

"This has been a long and complex process given the situation on the Korean peninsula," CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney said in a statement. "We thank former President Clinton for his intervention and we are grateful that the North Korean authorities have responded to appeals for clemency."

This post was updated at 3:45 p.m. PDT with comments from the journalists' families and again at 4:45 p.m. PDT with more details.

Updated at 2:20 p.m. PDT with comments from HP and Lenovo.

The U.S. Trade Representative has written a letter to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce asking that the country drop its requirement that all new PCs sold in China have special filtering software installed.

The letter was sent Tuesday by Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, and expressed concern that the Green Dam-Youth Escort software required to be in all new PCs by July 1 violates World Trade Organization rules.

The Green Dam software is intended to keep children from accessing pornography online, according to the Chinese government, but the U.S., along with some technology companies perceive the requirement as further attempts at censorship as well as a trade barrier.

"China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues," Locke said in a statement.

In the same statement, Kirk said, "Protecting children from inappropriate content is a legitimate objective, but this is an inappropriate means and is likely to have a broader scope. Mandating technically flawed Green Dam software and denying manufacturers and consumers freedom to select filtering software is an unnecessary and unjustified means to achieve that objective, and poses a serious barrier to trade."

U.S.-based trade associations representing the personal computer industry have already voiced their objections to the Green Dam policy. Dell, which has been ramping up its business in China over the last year, says it has made no decision yet about whether it will comply.

"Along with the rest of the industry, and relevant trade associations, we are reviewing the policy initiative and are working with government officials and others to understand its application," said company spokesperson Jess Blackburn.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest manufacturer of PCs, is also taking a wait-and-see approach. "HP is working closely with the trade industry association, ITI, to seek additional information, clarify open questions, and monitor developments on this matter," said a company representative.

Lenovo, the world's fourth-largest PC maker, which is based in China, also said it is still figuring out a plan, but hinted it might be prepared to comply with the Chinese policy.

"We are closely monitoring developments," a company representative said in an e-mail. "Lenovo sells in over 160 countries and in so doing we obey the law and abide by local regulations wherever we do business, and we will continue to do so."

A joint venture of Siemens AG and Nokia Corp., two large European technology firms, is denying reports that Iran uses its Web-monitoring technology to censor and spy on its citizens' online activities.

Nokia Siemens Networks said Monday that it has sold telecommunications systems to the Iranian government but that any built-in monitoring technology was for voice communications and not the Internet.

"The lawful intercept capability is purely for local voice calls," spokesman Ben Roome said in an interview. "We don't know who may have provided other Internet technologies to Iran."

The company's denial comes as protests over Iran's disputed election enter their second week, amplified by Twittering from the Iranian diaspora and cell phone videos showing ongoing street conflicts and the apparent death of young Iranian woman called Neda.

Images and video clips trickling in from the streets of Tehran--even ones whose authenticity may never be established--have electrified the West and demonstrated the limits of power that the government is able to wield. Because foreign correspondents are being pressured by authorities and forced to leave, according to journalist advocacy groups, the country's relatively tiny Internet pipe to the outside world is offering a unique glimpse of the situation on the streets.

Iran's Internet restrictions are no secret, of course. As CNET News reported last week, Web sites including Facebook, YouTube.com, and the BBC have been deemed off-limits by government censors, and there have been recurring reports that Twitter.com and Yahoo Messenger have been blocked as well. Except for some hiccups, though, Iran's Internet authorities have chosen not to pull the plug on the nation's connections to the outside world.

The source of the surveillance technology used by Iran's Internet service providers remains an unresolved political question that could prove an embarrassment for any Western company linked to Tehran's censorial regime. Few technology executives have forgotten the spectacle of Washington politicians calling Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to a hearing and denouncing him as "spineless" for doing business in China, or Cisco being dubbed as "collaborating with the Chinese government" for supplying Internet switches and routers.

This recent dispute erupted in the form of a front-page article in Monday's editions of The Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the Iranian government has developed "one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet" with the help of Nokia Siemens Networks. The headline read: "Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology." (In April, the Washington Times published a similar report that also named Nokia Siemens Networks.)

But Roome, the Nokia Siemens Networks spokesman, said that the newspaper's report was incorrect. He said in a blog post, "Unfortunately, I was unable to clarify for the Wall Street Journal the limited scope of the lawful intercept capability (voice calls only) and rule out...deep packet inspection and Web filtering."

Roome argued that, whatever its faults, even Iran's wiretap-ready mobile phone network has proven vital in spreading word about the political upheaval unfolding amid widespread protests. "Mobile networks in Iran, and the subsequent widespread adoption of mobile phones, have allowed Iranians to communicate what they are seeing and hearing with the outside world," he said. "The proof of this is in the widespread awareness of the current situation."

Complicating the matter is the difficulty of identifying the technology used. It's relatively easy to figure out which Web sites that are off-limits--groups like Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have made a practice of compiling such lists--but much harder to know what hardware or software is being used to monitor Internet links.

"For the filtering work we are able to verify the actual functionality," said Rob Faris, research director for the Berkman Center. "It's just about impossible to document surveillance with the same level of confidence."

In terms of Web blocking, a Berkman Center report compiled in 2005 said that Iran used Secure Computing's SmartFilter. It quoted the company's chief executive, John McNulty, as saying: "We have been made aware of ISPs in Iran making illegal and unauthorized attempts to use of our software. Secure Computing is actively taking steps to stop this illegal use of our products."

McAfee now owns Secure Computing and sells the software as McAfee SmartFilter. A product description boasts of "a proven repository of more than 25 million blockable websites across more than 90 categories."

"We have never seen any direct evidence or hard proof that Iran has ever used any McAfee or Secure Computing product," McAfee said in an e-mailed statement on Monday. "McAfee complies with all export laws and regulation applicable to its products. Rigorous due diligence was conducted prior to the acquisition of Secure Computing and there was no indication of any contract in Iran or support being provided in Iran." (A U.S. economic embargo restricts trade with Iran.)

More recent reports suggest that Iranian Internet providers have developed or adapted their own Web filtering technology, but shed little light on the question of surveillance.

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Compared with a few years ago, traffic analysis and inspection have become more common for Internet providers; their legitimate purposes include detecting malicious activity, prioritizing online phone calls over e-mail, and for mobile providers, charging different fees for different types of data.

Cisco's Service Control Engine series boasts of conducting "deep packet inspection" and "detection and control of virtually any network application, including: Web browsing, multimedia streaming, and peer-to-peer (P2P)." WireShark, free software for intercepting and decoding traffic, can record and display what's taking place on a network. And most modern routers can block or log access to Web sites based on a list of Internet addresses or domain names.

"I don't know how one could actually determine" what Iran is using for surveillance, said Tony Barbagallo, vice president of marketing at WildPackets of Walnut Creek, Calif., which sells Internet monitoring tools including OmniPeek Network Analyzer. "It's pretty easy to conceive that they could be using homegrown technology."

"Our products are used in the United States and elsewhere specifically for lawful intercept," Barbagallo said. "We've actually developed extensions to our products to make it easier to do lawful intercept. Any of our customers with a maintenance contract can download the same products the governments are using."

This echoes the argument that Nokia Siemens Networks has made: that selling voice-only lawful intercept gear to Iran is acceptable because built-in wiretappability is required in the United States and Europe. Ever since the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, U.S. telephone companies have been legally required to make sure their networks can easily be wiretapped by police; in 2006, a federal appeals court upheld the Bush administration's decision to extend those rules to Internet providers.

On the other hand, the United States and Europe tend not to imprison people for criticizing their respective governments, something that responses posted on Nokia Siemens Networks' blog pointed out on Monday. One response asked: "What happens when your 'lawful intercept' capability is sold to regimes which are likely to use it a way which would be considered unlawful under European and U.N. Human Rights conventions -- say to suppress freedom of speech?"

Jay Botelho, WildPackets' director of product management, said the best way for an Iranian Internet provider to monitor its customers would be to use one bank of monitoring equipment for e-mail, another for Web browsing, a third for VoIP calls, and so on. "Using our product, the easiest way to monitor everything is to hook onto an (extra port) port off your main switch," Botelho said. "The problem is that depending on the traffic, that could overload an appliance. But if you slowed everything down, you'd get everything."

That's not a problem in Iran, which has limited connectivity to the outside world, and where download speeds are far slower than what many other countries enjoy. Some Iran watchers have speculated for years that those sluggish connections represented a form of social control--it dramatically curbs Web video usage, for instance--and point to a 2006 decree saying that Internet connections should be limited to 128 Kbps (kilobits per second).

The largest Internet provider in Iran is Tehran-based Pars Online, which claims to employ over 400 people. It claims to have three satellite stations that can send data at 155 Mbps (megabits per second), amounting to the size of the virtual pipe connecting much of Iran to the outside world. By contrast, Verizon's FIOS service offers each home subscriber a connection of 50 Mbps for downloads and 20 Mbps for uploads.

Twitter made its case this week that it's up to the task of being a player in geopolitical journalism.

The Iranian government, which is attempting to control the flow of information among protesters of the supposed results of that nation's presidential election, is having difficulty stopping citizens from using technology to report what's happening, express outrage, and get people out to opposition rallies.

Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, information gathered on the Web is crucial to its understanding of the post-election unrest that has led to mass protests and fatal clashes with police. Twitter, where users have been filtering relevant information with the hashtag #iranelection, has been a crucial hot spot for raw news.

Twitter even rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval at the request of the U.S. Department of State. The diplomacy agency is working with multiple social-networking and communication services to ensure that conversation and information channels stay active.

One technique being employed to get around the government's online blockades is the electronic equivalent of a detour, which involves using something known as a proxy server.

Normally, a Web browser makes a connection directly to a Web site's Internet address. But that address can be easily discovered and added to the government's blacklist. The trick is to redirect Web browsing through a proxy, which could be a permanent commercial service, or someone volunteering his or her computer temporarily.

Worried that the Iranian government might seek out and punish any Twitter users who were employing the microblogging site for potentially subversive purposes, Twitterers are encouraging others to change their stated country of origin. Certainly, the Iranian government knows how to use Twitter and how to find people in that country using the microblogging service as a way to spread news about the protests.

The easiest way the Iranian government could discover which tweets were from Iranians is to look at whose accounts are registered to people who identify themselves as being from that country. A new thread that spread quickly across Twitter urged people around the world to change those settings in order to make themselves appear to be in Tehran.
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A new generation of Iranians has found ways to bypass the country's notoriously censorial Internet restrictions and disseminate details about Iran's internal turmoil in the wake of the recent election.

In technical circles, at least, Iran is well-known for erecting one of the world's most restrictive Internet blockades, second only to China in its scope. Certain blogs are cordoned off, politically unacceptable keywords are blocked, and Web sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, the BBC, and YouTube remain--at least at the moment--off-limits.

That has complicated the task of distributing videos and e-mail descriptions of the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marching in the streets to protest the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of reformist leader Mir Hossein Mousavi have alleged that the election was a fraud.

But the government's censors have been unable to staunch every data leak. "The bottom line is that a lot of information is still getting out," says Zahir Janmohamed, advocacy director of the Middle East and North Africa for Amnesty International USA.

Some of the online restrictions appeared around the time of the election: that's when Facebook, BBC English (BBC Persia was already blocked), Technorati.com, and YouTube were added to the verboten-in-Iran list. One report says that YouTube's traffic from Iran has dropped by 90 percent in the last few days, and another says that Yahoo Messenger was blocked early Wednesday. Unconfirmed reports from Iran say Twitter.com is also blocked.

One way around the government's online blockades is to find the electronic equivalent of a detour, which involves using something known as a proxy server.

Here's how it works: Normally, a Web browser makes a connection directly to a Web site's Internet address. But that address can be easily discovered and added to the government's blacklist. The trick is to redirect Web browsing through a proxy, which could be a permanent commercial service or someone volunteering his or her computer temporarily.

Then, instead of the relatively easy task of blocking Facebook.com or YouTube.com, the Iranian government has the far more difficult job--in practice, an impossible one--of identifying and blacklisting thousands of individual proxy servers.

In the last few days, Web sites like proxysetupforiran.blogspot.com have sprouted, as have exhortations to engage in a bit of social activism by creating your own proxy server, complete with detailed instructions on how to do it.

Twitter is abuzz with information on how to set up proxies and tips on how to keep addresses known to correspond to Iranian government computers from using them. Other sites have suggested filter-bypassing utilities like a Firefox plug-in that bypasses bans on connecting to Flickr.com or software called FreeAccess Plus that claims to circumvent restrictions on YouTube, MySpace, and some Persian-language sites blocked by Iran.

Using Tor to stay anonymous
Similarly, Iranian usage of the Tor anonymizing network has spiked. "We have seen a doubling of Tor users from IP addresses in Iran over the last few days," says Andrew Lewman, executive director of The Tor Project.

Think of Tor as a far more complex and powerful version of a proxy server; once a computer with the right software installed connects to the Tor network, the rest of the connection becomes very difficult for even government agencies to monitor. Unlike some Web-based anonymizers or proxy servers, Tor can handle instant messaging communications as well.

Tor's public addresses can be blocked, of course, but enterprising individuals can set up private entry points. "You act as a secure relay into the Tor network," Lewman says, referring to private entry points. "From someone watching it, it looks like an SSL session between a browser and a web server, so it doesn't stand out. We look like SSL by design, because who's going to suspect a web browser?" (SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, the standard method of encrypting Web connections to banks or credit card companies. There have been reports that Iran is blocking SSL too.)

A Web site called iran.whyweprotest.net has recommended Iranians use Tor to cloak their identities and bypass government filters; a related one called TorIR.org offers instructions on how to configure the software for most common Web browsers.

Daniel Calingaert, deputy director of programs at Freedom House, a human rights group, says Iranian authorities have been focused on jamming phones and satellite connections and have not paid as much attention to the Internet.

"They're still focused on cat and mouse games with satellite broadcasting," Calingaert says. "They had jammed BBC Persia, which is probably the most respected and known source of news. And then we've heard that BBC moved to different frequencies. A lot of people are able to get it. It varies based on time of day and neighborhood."

Janmohamed, from Amnesty International USA, says that because SMS text messages are curbed, Iranians have been using the Twitter application on mobile phones as an alternative. And now, he believes, the government has begun to pay attention. "When I look at the pattern of arrests from Saturday to today, initially you had the Mousavi supporters, the Calvin Klein activists--the urban elites--and now you're getting people of all different backgrounds," he says. "They're cracking down on a wider group of people."

According to the OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration of Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University, Iran "uses the commercial filtering package SmartFilter--made by the U.S.-based company, Secure Computing--as the primary technical engine of its filtering system."

McAfee now owns Secure Computing and sells the software as McAfee SmartFilter; a product description boasts of "a proven repository of more than 25 million blockable websites across more than 90 categories." (A U.S. economic embargo against Iran prohibits software licensing and the company has said in the past that the software is pirated. McAfee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, an OpenNet contributor, wrote in a blog post this week that "today Iran runs its own home-grown filtering software.)

Even if Iranians can't always secure a reliable Internet connection to the outside world, they nevertheless have a potent voice: the Iranian and Persian diaspora, amounting to millions of former residents living abroad. It just takes one e-mail message with a video or photo attached for the contents to rocket around the diaspora and eventually end up on a place like TehranBureau.com. In a pinch, a simple phone call to a family member abroad can be transcribed for a Twitter feed.

Freedom House's Calingaert says: "What makes this situation different from others and is driving a lot of it is that you have a very large and vibrant online and blogger community of Iranians outside the country."

"People are really bypassing channels though Facebook and Twitter and contacting their cousins," Amnesty's Janmohamd adds. "You've got one of the largest Iranian diasporas in Los Angeles. Information is getting out there."

Updated 8:14 p.m. PDT: Added more information on Iran's filters.

Almost 20 years ago exactly, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese military opened fire on prodemocracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, resulting in the loss of hundreds--if not thousands--of innocent lives. Most of the slain were students. However, the Chinese government would like the younger generations in China and the rest of the world to know very little about that.

Many media reports say that in the recent days leading up to the anniversary, China has been blocking Web sites like Twitter, Yahoo's Flickr, YouTube, Microsoft Hotmail, Live.com, Wordpress, Blogger, and many other social-networking sites and news outlets in an effort to keep the event an internal issue. Several of my friends in China have confirmed the inaccessibility of these sites. China currently has the most Internet users in the world.

According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, Microsoft's new search engine Bing is also blocked. In response to this, Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesman, said his company "is committed to helping advance the free flow of information, and is committed to encouraging transparency, due process and rule of law when it comes to Internet governance."

The Associated Press reported that other Chinese blogs and file-sharing sites are also disabled. VeryCD, a popular Chinese video-sharing portal, has put a note on its site saying it will be offline until Saturday for "maintenance reasons." The popular miniblogging site Fanfou has done the same thing.

Foreign journalists are currently barred from entering Tiananmen Square and have not been given any specific reason as to why.

On June 4, 1989, student protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square in the capital city of China and called for a democratic system and clean government. Troops moved in with tanks and were ordered to open fire at the crowd. Unofficial figures indicate that somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people were killed.

Since then, the Chinese government has carefully guarded information on the event--and even refused an independent investigation into the matter--which is believed by many to be one of the bloodiest examples of human rights suppression in the 20th century.

The state of Minnesota has handed Internet providers a 7-page blacklist (PDF) of gambling Web sites that they're supposed to prevent customers from accessing, a move that raises First Amendment and technical concerns.

"We are putting site operators and Minnesota online gamblers on notice and in advance," said John Willems, a Minnesota Department of Public Safety official, in a statement. Companies that received the list of off-limits Web sites--which was made public on Thursday--include AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, and Sprint/Nextel.

The Department of Public Safety's letters to the Internet providers say that "gambling is illegal within Minnesota" and claim that a federal law "requires upon notice by a law enforcement agency that you do not allow your systems to be used for the transmission of gambling information."

Federal law says that a "common carrier" must "discontinue or refuse, the leasing, furnishing, or maintaining" of any service if it's being used to transmit gambling-related information. (The U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Communications Commission, however, have suggested that neither cable providers nor DSL providers are "common carriers.")

Joe Brennan of the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association in Washington, D.C. said on Thursday evening that his group just found out about the blacklist and is consulting with First Amendment attorneys to evaluate its options.

Minnesota's move echoes what happened in Pennsylvania about six years ago. The Keystone State enacted a law permitting the state attorney general to deliver orders to Internet providers telling them to block possibly illegal Web sites.

But a federal judge in Philadelphia struck down the law in 2004 on First Amendment grounds, saying: "There is little evidence that the act has reduced the production of child pornography or the child sexual abuse associated with its creation. On the other hand, there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment."

One reason the law failed to survive the court challenge was because of the way the modern Web is designed. Because many Web sites can share one Internet Protocol (IP) address, blocking the IP address makes the entire list of sites inaccessible. (An expert report prepared for the trial says that out of over 20 million .com, .net, and .org domains, over two-thirds of the sites shared an IP address with at least 50 other Web sites. In many cases, Web sites shared an IP address with thousands of other sites.)

Minnesota's efforts may suffer from the same overbreadth problem. Its blacklist includes GetMinted.com, a gambling site with an IP address listed of 194.36.21.124.

Sharing that IP address is another site called Cashcade--a domain devoted not to a virtual casino, but to a parent company's corporate site, with a product list and hyperlinks to a gambling news Web site that it owns.