8 Ways To Circumvent the PROTECT-IP Act 284
Dangerous_Minds writes "One of the things that the PROTECT-IP act is said to do is make DNS servers censor websites that have been accused of copyright infringement. Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid decided to look in to how many ways he could come up with that would circumvent such censorship. He found 8 ways to circumvent such censorship. The article includes pros and cons and links to guides on how to carry out these methods. The methods are: using a VPN service, using your HOSTs file, using TOR, using freely available DNS lookup tools, changing your DNS server to a non-US server, using command prompt, using Foxy Proxy, and using MAFIAAFire. If anything, the list raises serious doubts that the PROTECT IP Act will even put a dent on copyright infringement online."
Best idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Best idea: Don't use DNS servers located in the United States.
I mean, at the rate our country's going, it won't be long before other countries just start walling us in. Not out. In. "Those 'mericans are craaaazy. They think they own this shit. Well, this here is mah router, and this here is mah website, and those yankee bastards can eat a bag of dicks."
Progress: It's gonna happen, whether Uncle Sam wants it or not.
Re:Best idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Progress: It's gonna happen, whether Uncle Sam wants it or not
Uncle Sam ain't the one holding progress, it's corporate America and its shills who do, and it's nothing new either...
Re:Best idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It's getting harder for the foreigners to tell the difference.
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Go with the times. Uncle Sam has become a branch of corporate America a long time ago. I'd be surprised if he ain't a Trademark of Disney or something similar by now.
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SUPER DEFINITIVE Best idea (Score:5, Insightful)
And all this just for the sake of the likes of Justin Bieber and Shakira and Hollywood so they can profit for the crap they do.
If you want to fight censorship you have to go directly to your " "artists" " and ask them why they work for a MAFIAA thats trying to fuck our internet. An active, longlasting and noisy boycott targetted to the "artist" him/herself is all You need.
But no! lets all fiddle with proxies and Tor so we can have our tunez and have the mental-fap that we 0wned the censorz and we can has "teh 1337est freedom"
Engineers think in solutions for engineers.. this is a problem that have root in society and how they consume media. Here we have 8 solutions the don't solve the inherent problem that is: Media industry have failed (You know it, they know it) and it's going down fucking everything in the way, because they can.
They are testing the waters and those 8 "solutions" are what they want to see, not the general public realization of the absurdity this is.
Re:SUPER DEFINITIVE Best idea (Score:4, Insightful)
An active, longlasting and noisy boycott targetted to the "artist" him/herself is all You need.
Right, let's get all those millions of 13 year old Bieber fans to join up.
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Was that directed at me? Sorry, I don't understand.
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And all this just for the sake of the likes of Justin Bieber and Shakira and Hollywood so they can profit for the crap they do.
That's just it, though. They probably aren't going to profit from this. At all. Not only that, but I doubt they'd see much profit out of people who are, at most, potentially (only potentially) causing a loss of potential profit. Some of those people might not even have any money to begin with, and others won't even have a chance to buy the content anyway (in some cases, perhaps).
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It's not "just" for the current hot single music and video artist copyright owners. There's a great deal of content that governments want the infrastructure to control: this especially includes embarrassing content, such as is available at Wikipedia, but also includes data for mining of their own behavior, such as the very documents the Freedom of Information Act is supposed to provide. The photographs of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison with the goofy, smiling, blonde female soldier in front of a man who'd
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Best part about this comment:
Justin Bieber is Canadian.
Shakira is Columbian.
Go Go Gadget U.S. lawmakers!
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Real artists work outside the system, they have been doing it for ages, a real artist is going for the art to innovate the art not for the money so the problem I guess the general definition of the word "Artist" got fucked up somewhere in the 70's.
I can't do music at all but if I could, I would share it via torrent and receive donations If I want, or "buy my new song for $1 or $5 and get autographed hard copy, don't have money? Invite me a beer or a joint and lets get along". Lots of real artists are doing
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They don't have to wall the US out, all it would take is other nations signing onto an ICANN replacement. Then, even though an IP range may belong to foo.com in the US, everyone else will resolve it to bar.eb (for Elbonia), and their traffic would go to that site. Same with DNS. The international registry may say vendagoat.com goes to the site in Latveria, while in the US, it goes to a company that has had it for a while.
It would be a split, but it would be relatively easy to do if other countries decide
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Set up your own DNS server and let it talk to the root servers directly. It's no big deal to do.
Unfortunately - the ISP:s will probably soon start to filter the DNS requests too in the same way as they have done with SMTP.
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I'm also from Texas, native enough to know where the Chicken Ranch was and which governor personally shut it down, know people who consider stump-breaking as a part of owning a ranch, know the difference between Central TX, Eastern TX, and north TX barbecue by the sauces they use, and by sight, know the difference between a pickup truck owned by someone who is all hat and no cattle versus a truck owned by someone who actually takes it off the tarmac. Hint: 2WD and 4WD are secondary, although 4WD always is
Re:Best idea (Score:5, Funny)
Last time Texas tired of a governor you guys shipped him off to the White House. We still owe you bastards for that one... if you so much as even think about trying that stunt with Perry, we're going to have to give you jerks back to Mexico.
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And I think we are about sick of Perry... Sorry.
Last time Texas tired of a governor you guys shipped him off to the White House. We still owe you bastards for that one... if you so much as even think about trying that stunt with Perry, we're going to have to give you jerks back to Mexico.
Don't worry, the Mexicans are working it from the other angle as well.
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He didn't say he was from the Jersey Shore....
Re:Best idea (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? I read it with an Aussie accent.
Whatever accent you used, the vocabulary is entirely un-Aussie."Eat a bag of dicks"? Never heard that. "'mericans"? We'd say "yanks", or "septics" for a more vintage slang. "Mah"? In Strine, we say "me" for my. Basically, Australian vowels are shortened, the opposite to southern USA.
Black Hats (Score:5, Insightful)
"One of the things that the PROTECT-IP act is said to do is make DNS servers censor websites that have been accused of copyright infringement. Drew Wilson ... found 8 ways to circumvent such censorship. ... If anything, the list raises serious doubts that the PROTECT IP Act will even put a dent on copyright infringement online."
Think of our legislators as black hats, poking holes in our network infrastructure because they are malicious pricks, or getting paid, or both, but the end result is that we learn how to make the network resistant to their attacks. In a way, they perform an important function. Sure, we all prefer white hats, but the black hats are out there, in congress, running major corporations, and even in the White House. Nothing is going to change that, so we must secure our network from the threat they represent.
Re:Black Hats (Score:5, Insightful)
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They are more like script kiddies, playing with buzzwords they do not understand, not even realizing how ridiculous they look. They wield potentially very destructive tools without understanding the consequences.
Crap... If only I read this before I commented eariler... Sigh... I will try and mod you up in a different thread in compensation.
Missed the easiest (Score:4, Insightful)
Run your own recursive DNS resolver with DNSSEC validation. I recommend Unbound [unbound.net], because it's easy to set up and it runs on Windows and Linux.
Granted, it is technically still possible to censor your results by intercepting your DNS packets, but if implementations of DNS censorship in other countries are any indication, running your own resolver works nicely.
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If PROTECT-IP requires DNS severs in the US to censor domains, wouldn't that apply to your self run DNS server as well?
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Well presumably there are sanctions for non-compliance in the act.
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Guess what... it still works.
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You can bet it will involve an endless boring rant though, along with ghastly spelling and lots of bolded items, making it unreadable without severe eye pain.
And the solution will probably give you malware. (:
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APK should be around here somewhere to tell us how to solve this one...
När man pratar om trollen, så står de i farstun...
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There's what's legal, and what's likely to be prosecuted. If you install optware bind on your dd-wrt Buffalo router [buffalotech.com] it's not like men in black will bust down your door. Laws like this are directed at commercial providers and they provide compliance for 98% of the populace.
Commercial providers have their revenue stream to protect, so they comply with laws like this with minimal oversight. What you do in your living room is pretty much up to you. (with a few exceptions)
But what matters is the million geek army... (Score:5, Insightful)
Legislation, even in a more dictatorial environment like China's is invariably slow and misinformed regarding technology. The delusion of those who think themselves in power can be stated in one sentence, "We think the internet is controllable."
And it is, sometimes, for a while.
More so in China where fewer wish to rock the boat (for the moment), but censorship is a complete fail in countries like the USA and Russia or the former Eastern Bloc countries. Too many unhappy, unemployed, poor engineers. Articles like this one point out just how futile and absurd such efforts are.
Information may not want to be free, but *people* sure are nosy bastards. You can bet they'll work around anything throw in their path, even if means going back to exchanging CDs, tapes or paper.
Re:But what matters is the million geek army... (Score:4)
"We think the internet is controllable."
For the average Joe, which are most of the 'consumers', yes it is.
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"We think the internet is controllable."
For the average Joe, which are most of the 'consumers', yes it is.
Yeah, but they have friends. I used to get asked about how to use Kazaa, Limewire, Bittorrent, etc all the time. Now that they've moved on to iTunes and Netflix, the requests are down considerably.
It will be interesting to see how the community responds to this.
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Joe won't even know as long as he can get facebook, twitter, iTunes, and porn.
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Until someone more knowledgeable helps them out, that is.
Re:But what matters is the million geek army... (Score:5, Insightful)
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We have smoke and mirror politics. They say they are doing something, and then cripple it at the end.
Holy shit, just look at the Ground 0 workmans comp that was passed last year. Took them 9 years to pass it, Jon Stewart to raise awareness and they passed it, except they added a few fuck yous in there... Mainly, not paying for cancer treatment. The #1 thing most Ground 0 workers have. Statistically this is impossible unless there was a specific event all of them
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there will always be peripheral devices. even when it's all plugged into our brains, we'll occasionally want a hard copy.
so when there's peripherals, there'll be mass storage devices.
they hold a bit more than a CD.
Europe has them too (Score:5, Insightful)
In Denmark all the ISPs block The Pirate Bay. I've tried to get around it, turns out it's implemented using DNS, which a retarded chimpanse could circumvent.
The problem is it sounds good on paper. Blocking access to the sites like that gets most of the n00b people away to alternatives, but if you have any technical skill you can get around it. The alternative is some form of deep packet inspection, and no ISP wants that.
I can't see how the blocking makes any sense. It is not impacting piracy whatsoever. Every blocked site has alternatives, and they too will need to be blocked. At some point they will be, but only to give birth to even more alternatives. One buys an internet connection, and that should come without restrictions. It's like selling a car and trying to prevent the driver visiting some foobar number of places.
Inherent Flaw (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what laws they have in place or the methods they use. We'll simply find ways around it. It's really quite silly, they're attempting to hold onto a system that's morally flawed and very nearly outdated by fighting a large number of talented tech saavy people on the internet. They'd have better luck trying to call the internet police on the trolls at 4chan.
9th way (Score:3)
Don't use domain names. The abstraction may be convenient, it may be useful, but it isn't strictly necessary. The IP address works just fine.
http://216.34.181.45/ [216.34.181.45] gets you to Slashdot with no DNS involvement.
Of course, the question is now around that missing abstraction. Do you trust me? Is that really Slashdot's address? Is it a rick-roll, a goatse, or a virus-laden fake? What most people don't consider is just how much they trust their DNS providers, but they do so with no authentication on that service. Many of the ways in the article are the ways that malware uses to subvert your relationship to your real DNS server.
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It seems to me that getting rid of DNS would mean named-based shared-hosting would cease to work. That would certainly increase IPv6 adoption since if every name-based host all of a sudden needed a unique IP address, they'd be totally depleted by sometime before I finish typing this message.
Of course, good luck getting people to remember http://20014860800c6a/ [20014860800c6a] for Google.
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Okay, Slashdot really botched that IPv6 address...
ht tp://2001:4860:800c::6a
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You have to write it as http://[2001:4860:8006::6a]
They made a RFC about this new syntax for IPv6 literals: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2732.txt [ietf.org]
The problem is without the [] you would need to count :'s to find the optional port part of the URL.
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Don't use domain names. The abstraction may be convenient, it may be useful, but it isn't strictly necessary. The IP address works just fine.
...unless, of course, the server serves as host to more than one domain, and uses the domain name to decide which website to give you.
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Actually you just have to craft the http request accordingly:
echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: slashdot.org\r\n\r\n" | nc 216.34.181.45 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/1.3.42 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.00500120110805
X-Bender: You can trust anything!
X-XRDS-Location: http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xrds [slashdot.org]
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 86840
Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:13:38 GMT
X-Varnish: 743390134 743389563
Age: 60
Connecti
Re:9th way (Score:5, Interesting)
And how do you do that with a browser?
Interesting, another site, which happens to be blocked by DNS in my country, is also doing this rather stupid redirect:
baldur@pkunk:~$ host thepiratebay.org 8.8.8.8
thepiratebay.org has address 194.71.107.15
baldur@pkunk:~$ curl -v http://194.71.107.15/ [194.71.107.15] ...
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Location: http://thepiratebay.org/ [thepiratebay.org]
Now try it with the "official" DNS server:
baldur@pkunk:~$ host thepiratebay.org 212.10.10.4
thepiratebay.org has address 212.10.10.15
This is what the site looks like if you do not override the DNS server:
http://212.10.10.15/#Engelsk [212.10.10.15]
Text in english:
The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police, who assist in investigations into crime on the internet, has informed Telia Stofa, that the internet page which your browser has tried to get in contact with may contain material which could be regarded as child pornography.
On recommandation of The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police Telia Stofa has blocked the access to the internet page. If you have any objections against the internet page being blocked, please contact Telia Stofa.
The Danish Anti-Distribution Filter covering pictures and movies showing sexual abuse of children is part of a European police co-operation (CIRCAMP) for the prevention of commercial and sexual exploitation of children.
According to Section 235 of the Danish Criminal Code it is a criminal offence to disseminate, possess or for a payment or through the internet to become acquainted with child pornography. The maximum penalty can in certain cases be imprisonment for up to 6 years.
Information on criminal conduct on the internet may be passed on to the National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police.
Are you in need of help or guidance in relation to child pornography, please visit www.brydcirklen.dk.
In case you are wondering what The Pirate Bay has to do with child pornography, nothing. It was just easier to get this law into place using the "protect the children" argument. As soon we had this censorship system into place it got used for everything else too. You can expect the same with your new system in the US.
Way 9 (Score:2)
Become very rich, bribe enough politicians with more money than the RIAA/MPAA offers, get them to change the laws.
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No single person would have to 'become' very rich.
If only a million people would put money toward a fund that would make downloading movies and TV shows completely legal - even if its source is without a doubt questionable, for example, matching that of, say, a Netflix subscription, then....
$10/month * 1,000,000 people = $10,000,000/month.
$10,000,000/month * 12 months/year = $120,000,000/year.
$120,000,000/year * 4 years/term = $480,000,000/term.
I can bet you that the MPAA is not spending half a billion doll
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Become very rich, bribe enough politicians with more money than the RIAA/MPAA offers, get them to change the laws.
The Pixar feature is a $200 million dollar production that will gross $1 billion dollars in its first run theatrical release. Tell me how you persuade the voter in California that pumping that much money into the state economy is a bad thing.
User Verb (Score:2)
The question ultimately is "What does the user DO to bypass these measures." In any of these cases, the user downloads and runs a small script, once. This makes getting illicit material a 2-step process, up from a 1 step one. The technical details of the script are so obvious that any coder could write it. That's better, but still a barrier so small you could trip over it. The past has proven that installing BitTorrent, Kazaa, or another single piece of software is no real barrier to anyone.
By comparis
"Dent" in infringement? (Score:5, Insightful)
"If anything, the list raises serious doubts that the PROTECT IP Act will even put a dent on copyright infringement online"
Let's be honest here... I doubt even the asshats who wrote the legislation thought it would do that. At best its real purpose is to create a mechanism the government can use to shut down websites.
=Smidge=
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"If anything, the list raises serious doubts that the PROTECT IP Act will even put a dent on copyright infringement online"
Let's be honest here... I doubt even the asshats who wrote the legislation thought it would do that. At best its real purpose is to create a mechanism the government can use to shut down websites. =Smidge=
DHS/ICE seems to be doing fine even without PROTECT-IP
Is circumvention a crime? (Score:2)
Since you are in effect accessing sites declared "illegal for a US citizen to view", is the very act of trying to get around the DNS block considered 'intent' and grounds for search/seizures looking for evidence of downloaded files or just outright criminal charges from the act itself?
Don't laugh. its possible..
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If they make any claims of websites being illegal vs. some content being in violation of copyright law they are enacting unlawful censorship. It will be thrown out by the judiciary so fast we'll forget it was ever a problem.
They don't have to make it that good... (Score:3)
If you can prevent most people from doing it, you can then start issuing insane prison sentences/fines on those who do. Isolate and punish. No one is going to give jail time or excessive fines...(right? please?)...to the 14 year old who stumbled on Napster, but the computer geek who "bypasses DNS" using a dangerous hacker operating system called "linux": http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090414/1837144515.shtml [techdirt.com]
In short, first you make sure only a tiny minority can sympathize with them, follow it up with character attacks, and BAMN: you can start sentencing people to a few decades in prison for a victim-less crime committed in their late teens.
Sure I'm being more than a little hyperbolic here, but the point is that the more steps you go to to bypass this sort of thing, the more you start to look like an unsympathetic, evil hacker to the nice gentlepersons on the jury...don't dismiss the value of making it harder for the average person to the censorship lobby's efforts.
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s/found/accused of being/g
Remember, the burden of proof is on the owner, and you can bet it won't be cheap, easy, for fast. Additionally, some iterations of PROTECT-IP include(d?) measures requiring the interception and blocking of non-US roots.
Don't confuse kangaroo courts for courts of law.
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*blocked domains from non-US roots. Bleh, typo (braino?)
The ninth way... (Score:5, Informative)
They haven't voted it in yet. It's on hold in the Senate.
Write your congresscritters (one rep, two senators). Include Senator Wyden, who placed the hold on it. Good old fashioned snail-mail. They pay more attention to that than to emails or phone calls. In your own words, tell them why it's a bad law and should not be passed. Be polite. Then tell them that you'll be paying special attention to their votes on the bill. Follow through on that - write another letter if and when they vote.
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They haven't voted it in yet. It's on hold in the Senate. Write your congresscritters (one rep, two senators). Include Senator Wyden, who placed the hold on it. Good old fashioned snail-mail. They pay more attention to that than to emails or phone calls. In your own words, tell them why it's a bad law and should not be passed. Be polite. Then tell them that you'll be paying special attention to their votes on the bill. Follow through on that - write another letter if and when they vote.
I've done this a few times, even for my state representatives but to no avail. The only thing that happens is that I get auto-added to their re-election campaign mailing lists. I've come to the conclusion that the only thing these people listen to is money.
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This is slashdot. We bury websites with traffic without even trying hard. Surely we can get up enough letters to Congress to get noticed.
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This is slashdot. We bury websites with traffic without even trying hard. Surely we can get up enough letters to Congress to get noticed.
Do you really think a significant number of Slashdotters are going to type up (or write) a letter, put it in an envelope, find a stamp, and mail it? Here's how it would probably go...
1. Slashdotter writes a letter in Word/Pages/OpenOffice/AbiWord.
2. Slashdotter looks for envelope and stamps. No go. His parents might have some, but it's such a pain climbing all those stairs...
3. Slashdotter says "this problem was solved 20 years ago by implementing email-to-mail gateways". Slashdotter spends the next two day
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This is Slashdot, where people complain bitterly if things aren't handed to them, for free, on the Internet, in a format they prefer.
Write a letter? Politely? Are you serious?
Innocent until proven guilty? (Score:2)
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Don't worry citizen, I'm sure the entertainment industry would never use laws like this to get rid of sites that compete for users time like user generated content. That would be unethical.
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Some clever bastard thinks that if you tear gas the national mall, you are not technically silencing the guy at the end of the reflecting pool that is speaking. Just imagine old alabaster Abe Lincoln presiding over that sort of scene.
This is plain thuggery.
Copyright isn't censorship... (Score:2)
Re:Copyright isn't censorship... (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, all the "censorship" talk about copyright makes me imagine a spamlord complaining that he's being censored because he can't get his mass mailings out to everybody.
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
--- George Orwell (1984)
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If the ONLY content on a particular website is copyrighted works being given away (distributed) without license and you can prove that the website/domain name will never ever ever be used for anything else, then you can claim that blocking said website/domain is not equal to censorship. Otherwise you should send the owner notice of violation and take them to court.
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In other words, you're going to have to take the position that Walmart and Amazon.com should be able to print up all the copies of books, movies, software, and music that they want, and pay no money to anyone.
Yet Amazon doesn't print up public domain works, instead selling them for the high prices set by parasitic publishers.
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I didn't read any of this as an attempt to equate copyright enforcement with censorship. The problem is that the government will have the authority and the means to shut down entire websites simply because someone complains that a copyright has been enfringed. That is, there is no requirement (or even mechanism) for judicial review before an entire site is muzzled. That opens the door to Censorship with a capital-C.
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Is copyright a limit on the things I can say, even if what I'm saying is just repeating what someone else has said? If yes, then copyright is censorship. It's really that simple. In fact, copyright started as a method of censorship in medieval Europe before being codified into law and turned into what it is today.
The question is not whether copyright is censorship, because it is. The question is, how much of this censorship is adequate and reasonable to support and enhance creativity, and at what point does
If PROTECT-IP passes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Two thoughts:
1. There is an immediate First amendment freedom of speech issue here, as speech will be silenced without due process. The abrogation of the right to speech is inherent in the abrogation of the ability to be heard in a public forum. If you tear gas the audience of the guy on the soapbox, you are still stifling speech. This silences speech, without any legal determination whether the speech is protected. Historical evidence has shown that laws of this sort will be abused to silence appropriate and protected speech. It will not fail to do this, because there is no process in place other than the will to power. We can bank on that. This aspect of the law should be struck down on basic Constitutional grounds (and it will be severable so it won't affect the rest of it, unfortunately.)
2. We are on our way to the Great Firewall. This is the exact same thing China does to websites that it thinks are against political interests. It's just that our political interests are based in the distorted idea that we can build an economy on censorship and artificial scarcity of information, in an age of unprecedented freedom and speed of communication which enabled that dream in the first place! It's a circular firing squad we're setting up here. We are on the wrong side of history if we let this pass or remain unchallenged. We are just absolutely brain-dead to shoot the nascent information economy in the face with the uncertainties this process will cause.
This provision is a myopic, special interest concern that fails to see that you can't have the good without some measure of bad. We should take the good and mitigate the bad. This is disrupting the whole damned thing, like a player who "wins" a chess game by throwing the board into the air. Write your congressperson a letter on letterhead. Call them. Visit them. March on Washington, if you are able.
For God's sake, we cannot let them do this. We're going for a triple-dip recession if we do.
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For God's sake, we cannot let them do this. We're going for a triple-dip recession if we do.
That is: if we'll survive the second, isn't it?
Check your drug store. They've already lost. (Score:2)
Every drug store has blank DVDs and CDs at the front counter, in the impulse buy section, near the chewing gum and candy bars. Most computers come with a standard DVD/CD burner, and have for years. Why do you think people buy them? Look at the way personal computers are advertised: you buy a computer for Internet access, and you use the Internet for free music and video.
It's been obvious to most people for years now that there's no practical limitation on copying digital media. It's been common practice to
Citizen Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
They're laughing at you. (Score:4, Interesting)
This clumsy assault which you've thwarted with your technical prowess, and all of its sibling assaults in this diversionary and dissipative battle, are not the war however. They know they can't win the technical battle, so of course they will not even set foot on the field. They will say "We tried to build a secure network, but we've been continuously thwarted in our every attempt. Now we need to go after these [insert scary moniker]." The next phase will be increased and targeted criminalization. This phase is the building of the case in support of the draconian laws that are to come. It's difficult to take away people's freedoms for no reason. It's easy to convince people to give them up voluntarily in exchange for security. Especially for security from mysterious threats involving forces that they do not understand (eg. technology). By feigning technical restriction, they are drawing you out [xkcd.com] so that you might build the case against you yourselves. It's classic battlefield tactics--use your enemy's strength against them.
This war can only be won by defeating the enemy's ability to create legislation against freedom. Since it is the public's ignorance that will make this possible, the battleground of education is where this contest will be decided. Unfortunately, that particular topic is deep behind enemy lines and well nigh unassailable.
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In typical fashion, the pseudointelligensia object to technical solutions, but have no solutions of their own ("well nigh unassailable"). Yeah, we fucking know they won't meet us on that battlefield, and will instead concentrate on jailing us. But what else are we to do, throw up our hands and say "Oh, you've taken away our DNS resolution, we are wounded, we will behave exactly as you desire now"?
You want to defeat the enem
Operation Delego (Score:2)
Of the approximately 600 members of Dreamboard, only 72 were charged, and twenty of them as John Does. According to the Twitched Indictment, Dreamboard gave advice to its members as to which encryption to use, but obviously the Feds aren't shouting from the rooftops about which security protocols they weren't able to break and/or circumvent...
Law that penalizes a third party (the ISP) (Score:3)
So we've got to manage infrastructure in a way that's counter to it's purpose. They propose this already knowing the workarounds and that it's technically not a feasible solution for anything, and yet they want it to go through anyway.
Laws shouldn't be there to force third parties to operate in an inefficient or insecure manner. Laws are supposed to be to punish the guilty party, or get restitution for the wronged party. Yes, there are criminal laws that say "don't do this." Don't speed, or don't murder would be examples of those. But I'm having trouble remembering a law that required a 3rd party to censor things at someones request.
If libraries weren't dying as an instituion I'm sure the most obvious similarity would be a librarian being asked to pull books and hide them in the back room because they weren't allowed to show them to the public anymore. I find it interesting that people in America are scared to go to certain websites or look at some of these leaked documents online because it might be illegal or might be used against them. Not only have we bowed down to censorship, we're running scared that someone will find out we aren't so pure and innocent.
People even here are asking "will it be legal to circumvent this?" when the true question should be "why is censorship suddenly a part of the US federal governments mandate?"
Circumventing the circumvention (Score:4, Insightful)
The countermeasures look like they've been written by a script-kiddie. They are not 100% effective. Everybody has been concentrating on DNS servers. Guess what...
1) There are already some greedy asshat ISPs intercepting port 53 and replacing results with their own. Right now, they get a lot of complaints when they're caught. But if the government orders it, all ISPs will have to do it.That'll stop *ALL* regular DNS queries to foreign servers (including roots), unless you VPN, or ssh-tunnel, or use non-standard ports.
2) "Undesirable sites" can be null-routed. Remember when Pakistan accidentally knocked Youtube off the net for the entire planet? http://slashdot.org/story/08/02/25/1322252/Pakistan-YouTube-Block-Breaks-the-World [slashdot.org] Even knowing the correct IP address doesn't work then. Only VPN or ssh-tunneling will get you the content if the IP address itself is blocked. Of course if the US managed to knock foreign "infringing" servers off the net, the MAFIAA wouldn't exactly cry about it.
An article written by a total bozo (Score:4, Informative)
6. Using Command Prompt Quick Explanation: In Windows at least, one can simply open up command prompt (explained in tutorial) and simply type in “ping [insert domain name here]” and obtain a server IP address for later use.
The guy is a fucking cretin.
How do he think PING finds the address? It looks it up using the default DNS.
It will put a dent in it (Score:3)
Actual solutions (Score:3)
I thought there were going to be some legit solutions in TFA but... So here are a few that will actually work.
1) Create a DNSSec DNS service that runs over an "unblockable" encrypted protocol. For example, DNS over HTTPS. Blocking HTTPS traffic would fuck the people pushing this legislation in addition to banks, online shops, online services, etc...
2) Build a completely open wireless network using participation, pwnd phones, pwnd wireless, radio packet technologies, even pidgeons.
3) Revolt. None of this "vote them out of office" bullshit. If your congresscritter votes for this type of legislation go to their house, drag them into the street, beat them to death with a stick. I guarantee the next one will vote against it. If not. rinse. repeat.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Excuse me? Don't be so quick to tie workarounds to illegal behavior. Even if you never visit a censored web site, you should change your setup to render DNS censorship ineffective. It is important to keep the tools of censorship dull, or we'll see the day when they're used against our freedom!
Re:first comment? (Score:5, Insightful)
They're already being used against our freedom.
That's the whole point of the law.
All it takes under Protect IP is an accusation.
If you run a website, you can be filtered with little recourse, and be forced to prove your innocence. Might not sound like much, but let me ask you this: how many sites these days use images they found on Google? Thousands, tens of thousands? Every single one of those sites could potentially have a complaint filed, and be labeled as a "pirate" site without the business owner even knowing what happened.
It's unfair.
It stifles speech, and it can easily be used by competitors to hurt the free market.
There's more than just pirated movies here.
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there are a few root DNS servers located outside the US. The problem would be that the root servers would then be out of sink with each other. Not sure that it matters, maybe there is a way to keep a record around, but not send it to anything other than a root server.
Re:Non-US = silly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Am I incorrect when I say that the root DNS servers are controlled by the US and all other servers are programmed to follow them?
The DNS system is a tree like hierarchy. The root servers only have the IP addresses of the next level, which is the .com, .org, .net and all the .[country code] (.uk, .dk, .se, etc).
It would not be possible to block illegalsite.dk using the root servers. You need the .dk servers to do that. The root servers could take the whole of .dk offline but that would be a major international crisis. Nobody wants that.
Now it is just as easy to get a court order in Denmark to block anything on a .dk domain. It is probably easier. But apparently the american lawyers are lazy and want to use the USA courts.
One can wonder however how it was that thepiratebay.org got blocked in Denmark. But not in the USA where they could simply turn off the domain since it is a .org.
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The goal is sufficient deterrence, or sometimes just evidence that you're engaging in behavior you know to be complicit in a crime.
Which it will completely fail to do. The pirate sites can get non-US domains or the people accessing them can easily route around the problem at their end.
It's just more knee-jerk bullcrap from technologically illiterate politicians which harms fundamental Internet infrastructure while it can't possibly achieve what they say they want to achieve. On the plus side, maybe it will help the push toward eliminating DNS in favor of a decentralised alternative which can't be censored.
Re: (Score:2)
Complete prevention is not the point, even complete prosecution isn't the point. Anybody can get away with speeding, or breaking in a locked door, or any number of crimes if the circumstances are right.
The goal is sufficient deterrence...
More simply: The goal is to make us afraid.
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. Idiot proof. So while we may read about 8 ways to bypass, I question how many people or incapable of using these ways and, if this DNS block won't actually reduce the usage substantially.
They won't need to understand the methods, they'll be built into the next generation of download software.