This all just goes to prove that this law is not ripe! the law is the law and FDLE Guidelines can’t change the law! Although H. Clinton did not have intent on breaking the law and was not prosecuted. humm i wonder how many people on the hit list had no intent and now their life is ruined!

I wish I could hug you right now. Thanks for the post, which contains so much goodness I don’t know where to start praising it. In my hopeful dreams, you are actually connected with the FDLE and are trying to find a way to educate our legislators. Thanks to you sir/madam.

Incredibly well informed! Thank you!!!

Don’t forget IPv6 addresses. But again, the law says URL, not host/domain. Listing every single IPv4, IPv6, and host address (which would be infinite), you’re still missing scheme, port, path, and argument data on each. And let’s not forget each of those need an identifier or “anonymous”, so now take the cartesian product of infinite with your list of usernames. Now we’re covered.

JV, you just communicated with me and many others. I am replying, thereby communicating with you. Nice to meet you.

Using the FDLE example of Facebook, a site used for communication without a doubt, simply browsing to the site will be one unique URL, per the governing documents (Again, see the RFC). e.g. https://www.facebook.com/

If you then browse to the page https://www.facebook.com/directory/, this is a different and unique URL because the [path] is clearly different. To say that it is not is to break the very RFC which defines the term Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in the first place, and is such invalid guidance by FDLE. Using their example as the invalid interpretation that it is, we can just as easily say the [domain], [port], and [searchpart] have no significance in the URL. Therefore, https://www.facebook.com/ must be the same as https://www.google.com and http://twitter.com and http://floridaactioncommittee.com:80/wp-login.php?even=morestuff

If the law were written as the FDLE wishes it had been, it would replace “Uniform Resource Locator (URL)” with “Fully Qualified Domain Name”, which can still get pretty wild in variations, but even better “Second Level Domain and Top Level Domain”, which essentially is the usually-significant part FDLE seems to be after (e.g. facebook.com, twitter.com, facebook.co.uk, etc.). See RFC 920, which defines these terms and the domain name hierarchy (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920)

Plain and simply this law was written by incompetents who, per the usual, do not care about making sense or complying with the laws of the language, the laws of science, the laws of technology, and so forth. Ironic for a group of people whose job is to make laws. FDLE is doing their best to ensure it doesn’t get out of hand, by spreading official but unlawful and fundamentally incorrect information. Essentially, they are saying “despite the law and the true definition of the term URL, we only want you to tell us the main domain name”.

As an additional bit of fun information, every single page you visit, unbeknownst to the layman, is creating on average hundreds of additional requests in the background to other paths, other domains, and with other arguments, and even to other ports. In other words, when you browse to twitter.com, without having logged in yet, you have just requested 86 URLs (per my test as of this writing) for images, scripts, Async Requests (e.g. AJAX), etc. Even if we ONLY count domains, this single page visit requested resources from 9 different domains. This is on the low end, as large sites are able to significantly optimize things to perform fewer requests. Visit baynews9.com, a site which you can post comments (which is definitely considered communication), and on the home page alone you just performed 220 requests to individual URLs.

To be compliant with this law while still using the Internet in essentially ANY way is effectively impossible. If we were all to actually comply with the law as it is written, FDLE’s systems could not hold up against the onslaught of registered URLs that would have to be submitted.

That’s a lovely idea… only issue is the information is freely accessible so the supporters whose names are used as screen names will know the identity of the person who is using their name. Generally they are politicians or those in law enforcement. Here in Florida they will mess with you!