I think we should stop viewing this as a bad thing and start viewing it as a huge opportunity. Phone your congress person or senator and encourage them to vote for it.
As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians.
With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system.
Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity.
While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights.
Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.
The problem is that SOPA also introduces a whole bunch of HIGHY SCARY laws and procedures. Disney did not like that review of Cars that you wrote? Then can abuse SOPA to get you off the net, sue you, and kill your revenue streams.
DNS hacks are nice but don't solve the real underlying problems that will actually kill businesses and bankrupt people because of abuse of this law.
And then the government makes using all that fancy tech a criminal offense (if they could pass PATRIOT act and SOPA, why not), makes a few demonstrative cases, and suddenly no normal people want to be part of that, since for the most part, the internet is still working fairly okay for them.
Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0.
That said, a lot of these "solutions" that people are coming up with just end up getting closer and closer to what the DNS already accomplishes.
The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD. The "doomsday" scenario here is that DNS servers stop trusting the root servers, and don't take updates from them.
This is a gigantic headache for network and system administrators. It is not the end of the internet.
Apply for access to the .com zone files, download them, and up your own DNS servers. Don't accept any updates from anybody ever and you'll have a much, much, much more complete, much more "you can query this as a daemon" version of these silly lists.
> "Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0."
Funny, the EFF and Google don't seem to think so.
And have you not noticed Wikipedia's donation campaigns? Do you really think they can afford the legal fees associated with fighting SOPA claims every time some corporate/political entity feels slighted by an article and feels like submitting a takedown?
To be considered for acceptance into the program,
please print and complete the appropriate applications
and fax the forms to +1-703-421-5828.
Verisign, a company intimately involved with the Internet at every level, wants faxed forms, in the year 2011? For access to the TLD zone files, something technical enough that a sane person must have been involved at some point? I can't decide if it's funny or sad.
I've always heard that faxes may have some kind of legal status that other electronic communications don't (why?), but this is just getting silly.
i'm as big a hater of SOPA as the next guy, but this fearmongering is getting a bit silly. as if SOPA is going to pass and overnight all of those popular commercially-run websites are going to vanish with no notice or court hearings.
and from a technical standpoint, most of those websites listed use CDNs for static assets, so unless you list the constantly-changing IPs of akamai and other servers for all of the weird random-looking hostnames used by those CDNs, many of those sites will not even load to a usable state. (and porn sites? really?)
also, from the reddit thread:
As some posters suggested, you can use another DNS server. The two server I'm reasonably certain about are OpenDNS and Google DNS. Both of them are US based but I think Google will move it's server to Europe if SOPA passes.
using a resolver in the EU from the US would be frustratingly slow due to the latency. you're better off showing users how to setup their own caching servers to bypass their ISP (i've always run my own caching server just for technical reasons).
and do you really think google cares about SOPA? they have done practically nothing to stop it; no notice on their homepage, no public awareness, only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing, etc. this is the same company that partnered with china and supported their censorship just to make some additional ad revenue.
There's no need to worry about porn sites. One of the amendments proposed yesterday was to instruct the AG to not use any resources protecting the copyrights of pornography producers. I suppose their legal rights aren't as important as the industries that backed this bill.
I don't understand this visceral hatred of pornography. Like it or not, it's an indisposable part of modern Western culture. It fulfills a need that is as old as mankind itself. Why can't we just acknowledge it for what it is instead of sweeping it under the rug?
Right because enforcement never overreaches and never abuses any weapon they are given.
In the meatspace world, see tasers and pepper spray which are only supposed to be used when a gun would have been, so they are less than lethal - then there is warrantless everything these days, or no-knock warrants on the wrong house from a "tip" and they kill your dog for good measure (happens so often it's a cliche already).
On the net see the DMCA mission creep and the thousands of Patriot Act "cannot tell anyone you were served, not even your lawyer" National Security Letters nonsense.
If someone copies the code to crack bluray or something like that to wikipedia - why wouldn't SONY's lawyers use SOPA to take down all of wikipedia for 10 days?
> only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing
I'm not sure if you know how senate hearings work. There's a reason that no other tech companies were at that hearing, and it's not because they all support SOPA.
I would recommend against using these IP addresses for large sites. Most of them (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) use geographic load balancing to redirect users to servers as logically close to them as possible. Using this list could result in accessing much slower services via server clusters on the other side of the world.
Sounds like the eventual outcome of this is a dark/grey net DNS system. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this already existed, but now it will be much more useful and interesting to everyday people.
It's not the popular websites that will get hit. The public will flip out if their bread and Facebook, er, circuses, go away, and SOPA will not be in effect for very long.
The trouble will come when websites get blocked that do not have enough public support to bring them back again.
As long as Facebook and Gmail are up, it's only nerds like us who will care.
Please, adopt Namecoin. There are already open source DNS servers available I believe. :) Using google document or hosts file do not scale at all, while namecoin now have all hashing power of bitcoin thanks to merged mining.
If SOPA passes, can lots of people call the financial companies, ad companies and others doing business with the RIAA, MPAA, and so forth, and "allege" that they are "facilitating" copyright and trademark infringement. According to the SOPA law as it is now, they will have to be shut down.
At the very least it will tie up the system
Or it might actually show these guys what kind of monster they have brought about ... kind of like Sarcozy's household being disconnected from the internet
Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the current SOPA, only FOREIGN SITES can have their financials cut off, right? I thought the Operation In Our Sites is able to already seize domain names registered locally. So it seems to me that the SOPA simply adds provisions to censor sites registered abroad, in American DNS only, because their registrar is beyond US jurisdiction.
For example Russians use vkontakte.ru to listen to any song. What would SOPA do about this?
However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.
So I think the threat is more to the purity and security of the worldwide DNS system, as well as to the costs of the ISPs, than it is to social networking sites. At least, I hope. Does SOPA override the DMCA for locally-registered sites, or did Operation In Our Sites just give carte blanche to the government to take out sites?
> However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor protection is for? They can't just pull their domain if they are responding in a timely manner to reasonable DMCA takedown requests.
Or am I missing a point you're making? Entirely possible. It's 4:55. I'm burnt out.
On a surface level, most of the items on this list are pretty absurd. Sites like Facebook, Amazon, and Youtube aren't immediately going down as soon as SOPA passes, except the torrent sites. There's a good chance they won't be affected at all by SOPA.
However, this list is interesting because it draws attention to the fact that these huge sites COULD legally vanish without a trace. Although I doubt anyone's going to seriously try to take down Facebook or Amazon using SOPA, it's still scary to imagine.
The list saddens me, to be quite honest. Yes, SOPA is morally wrong and technically stupid, and I don't think the government can or should fight piracy like this. But I think it devalues the cause if such a large portion of the "emergency list" is porno and piracy web sites. Seriously? The real reasons this is dangerous is because of civil rights and the damage that's already been caused to legitimate businesses by government incompetence (e.g. erroneously changing the DNS of small businesses to forward to an accusation of child sex crimes because they happened to share infrastructure with the real criminal).
The fact remains that piracy is dishonest, and only serves to legitimize the claims of Big Media. Say what you want about DRM, copyright law and ridiculous terms of service, but if you're really someone who believes in free government and the important role of the Internet in preserving it, I hope you join with me in rolling your eyes at people who torrent illegal media and worry about the effect of SOPA on their porn viewing. There are plenty of ways to buy inexpensive, DRM-free music, and plenty of ways to actually support the artists who make the music.
bypassing DNS is going to break the internet as much as SOPA is. content distribution networks rely on DNS for load balancing. legitimate sites moving to new servers rely on being able to push out records with low TTLs. by statically caching things for long periods of time, you are going to cause more problems with legitimate sites than you are going to fix to get to "rogue" sites that get taken down by SOPA.
a better approach would probably be to just hit that non-DNS cache for sites that don't resolve, or push out a list of known "killed" sites. if SOPA makes sites given the "death penalty" resolve to an ICE-style page, then the extension could just store the IP addresses of those government-run servers and consult the cache for sites that resolve to them.
If people have serious concerns, would it not be possible to build a Google Chrome/Firefox Plugin that acted as a sort of DNS service? It would be a lot easier for the average user to install one of these in one click than it might be for them to change their DNS settings.
Does anyone notice the irony... back when the internet was new, dns was just a bunch of dns/ip mappings in a text file... then we went to a big distributed system... now the US government is going to force us to go back to distributing text files.
maybe google in their fight against SOPA can come to the rescue and release a database publicly of all its crawled websites, which can be syndicated somehow via p2p. i mean they gotta have this info.
This is a horrible idea. What more could a cracker want than a list of IP addresses that are known web servers. Sure, the big guys are safe. But what about the mom and pop shop that pays $20 a month to host their website on a server that is running a 3 year old version of apache.
EDIT: Can someone show me specifically what I said that is objectively technically incorrect?
You may disagree with security through obscurity, and I agree with you that obscurity isn't a very strong defense mechanism, but that doesn't change the technical merit of it.
I thought blocking IP addresses itself was a part of the proposed law. If that happens, this wont help. Using proxies is a solution, but this will make things much slower, especially for videos.
I have often wished for a way to see a history of what IP addresses domains are resolved to, from my system’s resolver or a DNS server. This, in contrast, seems awfully primitive.
[+] [-] fleitz|14 years ago|reply
As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians.
With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system.
Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity.
While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights.
Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.
[+] [-] st3fan|14 years ago|reply
DNS hacks are nice but don't solve the real underlying problems that will actually kill businesses and bankrupt people because of abuse of this law.
[+] [-] raquo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiba|14 years ago|reply
We should be doing the really right thing in the first place, not wait for really bad things to happen.
[+] [-] jaxonrice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EdSkrillex|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blhack|14 years ago|reply
That said, a lot of these "solutions" that people are coming up with just end up getting closer and closer to what the DNS already accomplishes.
The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD. The "doomsday" scenario here is that DNS servers stop trusting the root servers, and don't take updates from them.
This is a gigantic headache for network and system administrators. It is not the end of the internet.
If you guys really really care that much, here: http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...
Apply for access to the .com zone files, download them, and up your own DNS servers. Don't accept any updates from anybody ever and you'll have a much, much, much more complete, much more "you can query this as a daemon" version of these silly lists.
[+] [-] roc|14 years ago|reply
Funny, the EFF and Google don't seem to think so.
And have you not noticed Wikipedia's donation campaigns? Do you really think they can afford the legal fees associated with fighting SOPA claims every time some corporate/political entity feels slighted by an article and feels like submitting a takedown?
[+] [-] burgerbrain|14 years ago|reply
That is the best case scenario.
[+] [-] gmaslov|14 years ago|reply
I've always heard that faxes may have some kind of legal status that other electronic communications don't (why?), but this is just getting silly.
[+] [-] there|14 years ago|reply
and from a technical standpoint, most of those websites listed use CDNs for static assets, so unless you list the constantly-changing IPs of akamai and other servers for all of the weird random-looking hostnames used by those CDNs, many of those sites will not even load to a usable state. (and porn sites? really?)
also, from the reddit thread:
As some posters suggested, you can use another DNS server. The two server I'm reasonably certain about are OpenDNS and Google DNS. Both of them are US based but I think Google will move it's server to Europe if SOPA passes.
using a resolver in the EU from the US would be frustratingly slow due to the latency. you're better off showing users how to setup their own caching servers to bypass their ISP (i've always run my own caching server just for technical reasons).
and do you really think google cares about SOPA? they have done practically nothing to stop it; no notice on their homepage, no public awareness, only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing, etc. this is the same company that partnered with china and supported their censorship just to make some additional ad revenue.
[+] [-] dangrossman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w1ntermute|14 years ago|reply
I don't understand this visceral hatred of pornography. Like it or not, it's an indisposable part of modern Western culture. It fulfills a need that is as old as mankind itself. Why can't we just acknowledge it for what it is instead of sweeping it under the rug?
[+] [-] ck2|14 years ago|reply
In the meatspace world, see tasers and pepper spray which are only supposed to be used when a gun would have been, so they are less than lethal - then there is warrantless everything these days, or no-knock warrants on the wrong house from a "tip" and they kill your dog for good measure (happens so often it's a cliche already).
On the net see the DMCA mission creep and the thousands of Patriot Act "cannot tell anyone you were served, not even your lawyer" National Security Letters nonsense.
If someone copies the code to crack bluray or something like that to wikipedia - why wouldn't SONY's lawyers use SOPA to take down all of wikipedia for 10 days?
[+] [-] kevinchen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicalist|14 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if you know how senate hearings work. There's a reason that no other tech companies were at that hearing, and it's not because they all support SOPA.
[+] [-] burgerbrain|14 years ago|reply
I don't understand this comment. Can you explain it?
[+] [-] larrik|14 years ago|reply
Use this one to go there directly:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_l...
[+] [-] flyt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forsaken|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koenigdavidmj|14 years ago|reply
The trouble will come when websites get blocked that do not have enough public support to bring them back again.
As long as Facebook and Gmail are up, it's only nerds like us who will care.
[+] [-] pavelkaroukin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|14 years ago|reply
At the very least it will tie up the system
Or it might actually show these guys what kind of monster they have brought about ... kind of like Sarcozy's household being disconnected from the internet
http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence-busted-f...
http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog-post/2011/10/04/g...
But it's OK when THEY do it, right?
However, if there are only foreign sites (registrar is abroad), then I doubt any major sites are hosted there, besides
http://bit.ly http://t.co http://youtu.be http://goo.gl
Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the current SOPA, only FOREIGN SITES can have their financials cut off, right? I thought the Operation In Our Sites is able to already seize domain names registered locally. So it seems to me that the SOPA simply adds provisions to censor sites registered abroad, in American DNS only, because their registrar is beyond US jurisdiction.
For example Russians use vkontakte.ru to listen to any song. What would SOPA do about this?
However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.
So I think the threat is more to the purity and security of the worldwide DNS system, as well as to the costs of the ISPs, than it is to social networking sites. At least, I hope. Does SOPA override the DMCA for locally-registered sites, or did Operation In Our Sites just give carte blanche to the government to take out sites?
[+] [-] msquared|14 years ago|reply
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor protection is for? They can't just pull their domain if they are responding in a timely manner to reasonable DMCA takedown requests.
Or am I missing a point you're making? Entirely possible. It's 4:55. I'm burnt out.
[+] [-] yangez|14 years ago|reply
However, this list is interesting because it draws attention to the fact that these huge sites COULD legally vanish without a trace. Although I doubt anyone's going to seriously try to take down Facebook or Amazon using SOPA, it's still scary to imagine.
[+] [-] bgarbiak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|14 years ago|reply
The fact remains that piracy is dishonest, and only serves to legitimize the claims of Big Media. Say what you want about DRM, copyright law and ridiculous terms of service, but if you're really someone who believes in free government and the important role of the Internet in preserving it, I hope you join with me in rolling your eyes at people who torrent illegal media and worry about the effect of SOPA on their porn viewing. There are plenty of ways to buy inexpensive, DRM-free music, and plenty of ways to actually support the artists who make the music.
[+] [-] leeoniya|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] there|14 years ago|reply
a better approach would probably be to just hit that non-DNS cache for sites that don't resolve, or push out a list of known "killed" sites. if SOPA makes sites given the "death penalty" resolve to an ICE-style page, then the extension could just store the IP addresses of those government-run servers and consult the cache for sites that resolve to them.
[+] [-] morganw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Permit|14 years ago|reply
Just a thought.
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
No need for a browser extension.
[+] [-] dholowiski|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leeoniya|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrod|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noahc|14 years ago|reply
EDIT: Can someone show me specifically what I said that is objectively technically incorrect?
You may disagree with security through obscurity, and I agree with you that obscurity isn't a very strong defense mechanism, but that doesn't change the technical merit of it.
[+] [-] nu23|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evo_9|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IvarTJ|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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