Records Labels Prepare Massive 'Pirate Site' Domain Blocking Blitz 110
An anonymous reader writes "In their ongoing battle against websites said to infringe music copyrights, record labels have initiated a fresh wave of actions aimed at forcing UK ISPs to carry out domain blocking. This third wave is set to be the biggest so far, affecting as many as 25 domains and including some of the world's largest torrent sites and file-hosting search engines. Furthermore, the BPI – the entity coordinating the action – will ask courts to block U.S.-based music streaming operation, Grooveshark."
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Domain blocking has been so successful already. No one will figure out how to use alternative DNS servers, or simply type in the IP address manually.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Informative)
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Or the sites will just move domains/set up alternate domains, as has happened with thepiratebay, eztv, and demonoid just off the top of my head
Why even bother? You can either install plugins off the Firefox site that'll do it for you, or just use Tor to access the site from one of the 150 other countries that aren't retarded. Once you have the magnet URI, the rest is distributed, and there's no amount of DNS tomfoolery that'll stop that.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
Domain blocking has been so successful already. No one will figure out how to use alternative DNS servers, or simply type in the IP address manually.
I already compile a list of IPs for sites I like to frequent - white hat, black hat, or otherwise.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
As do I - I'd tell you where I keep that list (and a backup copy of it), but I don't feel like summoning APK.
first HOST (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Domain blocking has been so successful already. No one will figure out how to use alternative DNS servers, or simply type in the IP address manually.
Doesn't matter, it's all about training governments to bend over whenever they say so. They'll be back again soon, with bigger demands.
PS: Thanks, RIAA, for letting me know about Grooveshark...
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I bet you the next step will be government mandated BGP route poisoning. The nice thing about it (from the point of view of the censors) is that it denies access to far more people than those within your jurisdiction/country/border. Potentially even remove access to the site from the whole world, and it can be done from any trusted BGP peer.
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Oh, and unlike DNS, there is no way the end user can get around BGP route poisoning. It just can't happen. There's no mechanism for instructing the routers to provide an alternate route, they make those decisions entirely by themselves.
There are only a few things I can think of that *can* be done, but none of them are doable by the end user:
- Peering ISPs outside of the jurisdiction of the poisoned routers will all have to filter those route advertisements.
- The direct ISP of TBP will have to play with its
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Cripes, just when you thought it was safe to enter an IP address again....
Very stupid questions: could this be gotten around by mesh network, for instance? Trust would be an issue, might something like Convergence be useful? If BGP poisoning gets used (and I wouldn't put it past them), how much could that screw up other stuff? (I did warn you these are stupid questions. I don't know enough to ask less-stupid ones, and despair of learning even that much.)
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
That they are targetting grooveshark (and so warning players of the same league) gives a hint of what is their target, that the majority of people get free/pretty cheap alternatives to their offering, be legal or not.
If the people behind the idea of the flat earth had their kind of power back in their days to push their views on the masses we would be living in a pretty interesting (but weird) world by now.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Full disclosure, I'm listening to Taylor Swift right now. That's right, I just called myself dumb and am admitting to listening to "Trouble" by Taylor Swift.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
Full disclosure, I'm listening to Taylor Swift right now. That's right, I just called myself dumb and am admitting to listening to "Trouble" by Taylor Swift.
Please mod parent down and parent's parents should be modded down too for allowing this to happen.
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Goats (Score:2)
I'm listening to it too.
Taylor Swift Goat Edition [youtube.com]
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I've been using a Swedish VPN for a while now. There are a few to choose from. They are cheap and uncensored, and as an added bonus shield you from the prying eyes of Big Brother.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
A Swedish VPN once bit my sister ...
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the Swedish VPN
with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given
her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Stockholm dentist and
star of many Swedish møvies: "The Høt Hands of a Stockholm
Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst
Nordfink".
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That won't work for name-based hosting, which pretty much every cheap-ass hostedwebsite uses these days.
FTFY.
Most of your serious trackers and distie sites aren't going to be using virt domains - given the hellish amount of traffic involved, it'll either use multiple dedicated IPs handed off to caching servers, or one hell of a load-balancer.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can imagine a solution which doesn't need operating a server ... but mentioning it might attract apk. :-)
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Why would you need to run a server?
There's loads of servers which are quite easy to run. But why?
Re: Run your own DNS server (Score:2)
In China you run your own local DNS that forwards to opendns over alternative ports. All ddwrt and openwrt support this.
Its how you get to Facebook in China.
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Can't you just have packet rewriting rules that do the same thing without running DNS at home?
In any case, most home routers have a DNS proxy to make DHCP simpler.
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I'm amazed the community hasn't just set up their own free DNS service yet like OpenDNS but overriding entries where necessary, such as redirecting ICE domain seizure based entries to mirrors of the sites or similar.
Sure this seems like a bit of a dirty hack and a use of public DNS that was never intended, but the internet was also never intended to be globally censored by national entities either quite frankly so it simply seems like a necessary fix to a problem of corruption of the network.
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Domain blocking has been so successful already. No one will figure out how to use alternative DNS servers, or simply type in the IP address manually.
It's cute you think they're going to be doing this by futzing with DNS.
My ISP will reroute *all* traffic to the blocked domain's listed IP number(s) through their IWF filter and drop it there.
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The blocks in the UK don't use (just) DNS. You can type in the direct IP address of the Pirate Bay and get no connection.
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hahaa (Score:1)
The tighter they grasp, the more slips through their fingers
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Truth
What a coincidence! (Score:5, Funny)
My wallet is going on a record label blocking blitz
Life sure is funny sometimes.
Re:What a coincidence! (Score:4, Insightful)
Mine's been doing that for years.
As a bonus, it has the beneficial effect of leaving me more money for other, more worthy goodies.
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Well put! In a capitalistic society, with a farcical two-party federal election every few years, the most effective way to vote is with ones wallet.
To everyone who has given these groups money - you let this happen.
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There aren't enough of you for a boycott to make any difference.
Besides, they've already presumed that if you're not buying, it is because you're infringing.
Re:They don't care. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with that is that they can "presume" all they want, but they still have less money coming in. Granted, it doesn't address the aforementioned issue of needing a critical mass of participants for the boycott to be successful, but the mere act of assuming a given cause for a reduced revenue stream doesn't magically restore the revenue stream to previous levels.
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For now.
But eventually they will do what they always do. They will think 'lets raise the price'. Suddenly people find they can live without it. For the first time in 30+ years of cable TV their viewership went down. That is for 3 years straight now.
They will find the gp and say hey what do you watch/read/listen to you have been doing this awhile. He will have a long list of stuff.
Went to the movies a few weeks ago on a lark (first time in nearly 5 years). 45 bucks for a bucket of popcorn 2 pops and 2
Cory Doctorow much? (Score:2)
http://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Cinema-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765329093 [amazon.com]
Interestingly enough, it also happens in UK...
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Cory lives in the UK, he became a naturalized British citizen in 2011 iirc.
You should call it Namecoin! (Score:3)
That's such a good idea that I bet someone else already thought of it. [bitcoin.it]
Re:Time to consider an alternate/supliment DNS roo (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst problem with the central server approach is not squatting, that is a minor annoyance to some people's vanity. The worst problem with the central server is that it is a central server, and thus is vulnerable to whomever has juristiction over the physical location it resides in. However, a peer-to-peer solution (as they look right now) is much worse. There are two major problems with a P2P approach to DNS, that you don't have with the central server.
1) Privacy: when requesting a lookup, you're telling an arbitrary number of strangers which site you would like to visit next. With the server, you're only telling the server, but this is a trust issue and can be resolved. The P2P approach by it's nature cannot be trusted.
2) Poisoning: all you'd have to do to poison a swarm is join it, and start pushing bogus replies to requests. There is no barrier like with a central DNS server, which you'd have to hack into in order to poison.
An approach like you suggest is a central DNS server in disguise and not really a solution to any problem, since you get the worst of both worlds.
Re:Time to consider an alternate DNS root (Score:2)
1) Privacy: when requesting a lookup, you're telling an arbitrary number of strangers which site you would like to visit next. With the server, you're only telling the server, but this is a trust issue and can be resolved. The P2P approach by it's nature cannot be trusted.
This can be solved easily, in exchange for some extra latency, by using onion routing, like Tor, Freenet, or I2P. Requests are encrypted end-to-end and routed through intermediate nodes. No single node (apart from the requester) is aware of both the origin and the content of the request at the same time.
2) Poisoning: all you'd have to do to poison a swarm is join it, and start pushing bogus replies to requests. There is no barrier like with a central DNS server, which you'd have to hack into in order to poison.
Namecoin solves this by associating each domain with a public key. You have to have the corresponding private key to create a reply anyone will accept, or to transfer the domain to someone else's key.
Namecoi
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1) Tor is not a peer-to-peer approach. It does not remove the central server, it only makes the routers individually unaware of the contents of a package. You still have to serve replies from a central server subject to a jurisdiction (the problem we were pretending we could solve). Tor works if you wish to obscure who wants what, but it is still an overlay to the client-server paradigm.
2) Assuming we buy the premise that BitCoins are a good idea and we'd want to use those for our domains in the future, the
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1) Tor is not a peer-to-peer approach. It does not remove the central server, it only makes the routers individually unaware of the contents of a package. You still have to serve replies from a central server subject to a jurisdiction (the problem we were pretending we could solve). Tor works if you wish to obscure who wants what, but it is still an overlay to the client-server paradigm.
Yes, but good luck finding out what that jurisdiction is, at least they don't seem to have much luck in locating and shutting down hidden services. If you only really need a DNS name that'll stay constant and that doesn't need to be "easy" then the onion system would be just fine, you own them by virtue of owning the private key and they all look like ebiueabv35rwas.onion. Unlike an IP you can move the key around and run your site from any box you want, which is the most essential part of DNS. You probably
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1) Tor is not the only option for onion routing. I2P implements the same general idea and supports peer-to-peer protocols (including BitTorrent, Gnutella, and a P2P e-mail system known as I2P-Bote). Tor would work in a technical sense, but each user would have to manually configure up a hidden (.onion) service for other users to connect to, which may be a bit much to expect. With I2P this is the default configuration. Also, Namecoin already has working I2P integration.
2) The Namecoin approach is just one wa
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I2P certainly will not solve the problem, because onion routing was never an answer to the question asked. Onion routing helps protect privacy, and I2P does so by erecting a network within the network. In order to go "outside" you need an outproxy (and it is explicitly stated that you would need to put a great deal of trust in this proxy). Once you're at the outproxy, everything functions as normal - meaning the problem is still there, all you've done is add a layer of complexity for a part of the route fro
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I2P certainly will not solve the problem, because onion routing was never an answer to the question asked. Onion routing helps protect privacy, and I2P does so by erecting a network within the network. In order to go "outside" you need an outproxy (and it is explicitly stated that you would need to put a great deal of trust in this proxy).
I2P works fine without outproxies; you don't need to communicate outside the I2P network for the scheme to work. While there are a limited number of I2P outproxies for certain protocols (e.g. HTTP), that is not the way it is designed to be used (unlike Tor, where internal .onion sites are the exception).
The bitcoin philosophy I'm referring to is the one that has you expend CPU cycles to store "coins" in order to spend these "coins" on actions within the protocol. That is how Namecoin works, you save up coins and spend them on registering your domain, updating or transfering.
Yes, that is how the system works. Calling it a "philosophy" is a bit ridiculous; it's an engineering solution to the problem of ensuring a consistent linear history of updates to a database shared among a l
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I'd be happy with just summaries that English.
Another ridiculous situation (Score:5, Insightful)
This is yet another ridiculous situation, stupid enough that it makes me wonder why such situations exist.
If a website is illegal (for any definition of illegal, including terrorism, pornography, and IP violations), then it should be judged illegal by a court in country with reference to the specific law that the site violates. That country can then mandate that ISPs in that country block that specific website, the government can ask the government of the registrar or hosting company to take action, the government can identify people who access the site and charge them with a crime.
Illegal is illegal, but this thing about "anyone can take action if they think something is illegal" is ludicrous. Letting business advocacy groups, unelected government bureaucrats, and random government departments to suddenly state "we're the governing authority, this is illegal, we're pulling your plug" is complete bullshit. Government departments can certainly make such pronouncements, but should be required to act only with court approval. For instance, if the State Department wants Defense Distributed to take their plans offline, it should get a court order.
The courts exist to protect our rights. Taking action without judicial process is an end-run around those rights, and shouldn't be allowed.
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My reading of the summary is that they are going to the courts in the UK to get the courts to enforce their little list against the ISPs. My clue was the submitter's use of the word "action" which is legal jargon for a law suit.
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The courts exist to interpret and enact the law. If the law says that people are not allowed to breathe the free air around them or drink water from a stream, but must buy their air and water bottled from a factory, then the courts exist to put free-air breathers behind bars.
Its not the media comapnies that are the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
its those who buy their shit. Stop buying it and in 5 years they`ll all fold.
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Won't happen. Can't happen. You'd have to somehow change the mindset of millions of people who like and buy the stuff they sell (giving them more money and influence in the process). The actions of these companies are not widely known except for tech sites, so again, nothing will happen. They've been behaving like dicks for YEARS, and are still hugely profitable.
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and in 5 years they'll all have paid for a law to allow them to deduct 'compensation' directly from your salary.
FTFY
..but they have already won that right.
in my country we have a public broadcasting company. that is now paid from money taxed from everyone directly. that broadcasting company plays music from RIAA(and local equivalent) members and pays them for broadcasting.
of course then there's the bullshit storage media fees etc, but I could avoid storage that is under those.
Good luck with that. (Score:2)
Youtube? (Score:3)
I think they will have a hell of a time domain-blocking YouTube. It's trivial to grab all kinds of stuff there.
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That's what I was thinking. Full albums all over the place. 3 hour compilations. I was looking for Tull's 'Thick As A Brick' the other day, and there was the whole thing and it was a crystal clear rip of the original vinyl. Perfect.
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Yeah.. I was looking for a digital version of some ancient vinyl I have. It's pretty obscure and never released on CD. I found half the tracks from album on youtube.
YouTube has licensing (Score:2)
YouTube has licensing. The vast majority of songs, especially new ones, are released onto YouTube by the record labels themselves, free for everyone to enjoy unless you happen to live in a country with its own brand of insanity (GEMA in German, for example) or they have a branch in your country and they agreed that that branch would have to upload it instead. Keep in mind that record labels have flooded YouTube with DMCA requests before after negotiations broke down and they removed their videos;
http://n [slashdot.org]
missing the point (Score:2)
they're trying to ban grooveshark which operates directly like youtube technically.
thus, they should block youtube as well..
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Actually, Grooveshark operates rather differently. Grooveshark works on the premise that artists (or the labels representing them) have a choice: 1. sign a contract with them for pennies, which is still better than.. 2. don't, see if we care. At the same time, the contract under 1 may or may not actually be honored on the part of Grooveshark ( pending court case: EMI Entertainment World Inc v. Escape Media Group Inc, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 650013/2012 ).
I'm sure they operate te
Offshore VPS (Score:2)
Like you can't get a perfectly usable VPS in Russia, Hong Kong, The Netherlands or lots of other places for around €10 a month or less
Do people still pirate music? (Score:2, Funny)
I stopped pirating music years ago. I use rdio now... $10/month for (almost) all the music I want.
I figured pirating music would have more-or-less disappeared by now.
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Thanks for funding the RIAA and the BPI.
Enough! (Score:1)
To protect their copyrights, they think they have the right to infringe on Constitutional rights of free speech.
The corporations have partnered with government (Definition of Fascism). Those elected officials ignore their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Adding insult to injury, the courts provided those corporations the same rights that were intended for individuals, and provided those corporations immunity from civil and legal actions in many cases.
The people,
They've lost but their lawyers won't admit it (Score:4, Insightful)
They can't stop the internet without hurting themselves and a lot of other legitimate business. And continuing to sue customers? Is it really working out for them? Perhaps all the settlements which never reach the news does make it all worthwhile.
What little [music downloading/sharing] there is going on now can't really be worth the effort in my opinion. There are lots and lots of paying customers out there. I seriously doubt the "bad guys" even come close to the numbers of legitimate customers. They should be paying marketers to improve the number of customers instead of lawyers to leech off of people who don't have money to spend.
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I'm pretty sure the whole lawsuit thing is just a matter of getting one or two precedents on the books, so they can threaten people with lawsuits saying "settle out of court for $10k or risk owing $200k like *these* people... I'm sure they have a payment plan option ready to go and everything because once they get one payment from someone, it's basically an admission of debt ownership.
heh (Score:1)
Well (Score:1)
Re:Once again SUCKMERICA bullying the world (Score:4, Insightful)
While I hope the labels and all their executive die horrible deaths, copyright is rather international. So it's not just "American" companies with a stake in the game.
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It's not only about the copyrighted information. It's also about public domain, and GNU like, or MIT like licenses. It's about the free flow of information. Copyright is just convenient for them to attack means of distributing information freely.
The best way I can prop up this argument is to point out VCRs. VCRs were hardly used on the scale that torrents are to commit mass copyright infringement.
Yet VCRs, 8 tracks, casettes where all targeted. Libaries were targeted. And with libraries, the works were bein
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BPI = UK mouthpiece for RIAA global agendas