
Internet blacklist bill COICA one step closer to becoming law - starkness
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20023238-38.html
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jrockway
I emailed Dick Durbin and he told me that this legislation was "vitally
important to America", and that he would be voting for it. I told him that I
wouldn't be voting for him.

~~~
rdtsc
> vitally important to America

It is vitally important to America if by "America" he means a couple of media
companies, their lobbyists and handful of senators who are on their payroll.

Also I like how instead of you telling him what is important for America he
lectures you what is important.

How much does it take to bribe a senator? What are they paying him I wonder?

~~~
chc
Might be relevant to your interests:
[http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N0000...](http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00004981&cycle=2010)

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olefoo
Once again Americans are or should be embarrassed by their legislators. This
puts us in the same boat as China in that we are attempting to block bad
knowledge by fiat rather than with education.

How can we decry repressive censorship regimes in other countries when we
reserve the right to blackhole sites that we disapprove of on whatever
grounds?

~~~
jrockway
No, not really. Unlike China, our government is too dumb to even do it
correctly.

I run my own DNS resolver. Guess what the config will be when this law passes?
Step 1, try real DNS. Step 2, try open DNS. Anyone behind my firewall will
have no idea that this law even exists.

Also, how does DNS affect bittorrent? I'll tell you how -- not at all.

You can't censor the Internet. Any attempt to try is just hilarious. (Remember
when drugs were illegal and nobody could use them? Oh wait...)

~~~
gasull
_No, not really. Unlike China, our government is too dumb to even do it
correctly._

You can easily bypass the Great Chinese Firewall with iptables:

[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/ignoring_the_g...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/ignoring_the_gr.html#c83747)

tl;dr: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP

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jambo
What if bit.ly and other shorteners supplant DNS for affected sites, e.g.
<http://bit.ly/xAwIp> redirects to thepiratebay.org's address, 194.71.107.15.

Will bit.ly have to start breaking every previously shortened URL that
redirects to the IP address of an offending site? Or more likely, any
shortened URL that redirects to an IP address directly at all?

~~~
someone_here
What if there was a new service that simply takes the blacklist and "fixes"
the DNS. You could type something like <http://blacklis.tr/piratebay.org> and
get forwarded to the correct IP. They could monitise the same way OpenDNS does
by providing a DNS service as well.

~~~
skymt
A service specifically designed to circumvent the blacklist would likely be
blacklisted as well. I think the best (most robust) option is peer-to-peer
distribution of a regularly-updated hosts file. Irritating yes, but impossible
to stop without moving to an IP blacklist.

~~~
Xuzz
There are any number of ways to get around the blacklist, but none of them
matter if they don't apply to _everyone_. It's about the public, not a
dedicated tech-person getting around it.

~~~
tomjen3
Normally I would agree with you, but you are talking about a technical measure
standing between an irresistible force - male teens looking for free porn and
the object of their desire.

In addition, these programs need only be written once, then they can be
distributed forever.

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lkrubner
Interesting:

"After a flurry of last-minute lobbying from representatives of content
providers including the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)..."

Well, I am glad they listened to so many diverse groups. I mean, the MPAA and
the RIAA? That ensures the legislators heard every possible viewpoint on this
issue.

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frisco
Once again, the government fails to understand how the Internet works.

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ewjordan
One thing I was wondering was whether or not, for instance, Google would be
prohibited from returning a direct IP address link to (say) the Pirate Bay in
response to a search for "pirate bay".

The text in the bill says:

 _`(i) a service provider, as that term is defined in section 512(k)(1) of
title 17, United States Code, or other operator of a domain name system server
shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to
that domain name's Internet protocol address;_

...and the definition of "service provider" as referenced is:

 _(1) Service provider. — (A) As used in subsection (a), the term “service
provider” means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of
connections for digital online communications, between or among points
specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification
to the content of the material as sent or received.

(B) As used in this section, other than subsection (a), the term “service
provider” means a provider of online services or network access, or the
operator of facilities therefor, and includes an entity described in
subparagraph (A)._

It looks like Google would probably fall under (B) there, so if they received
a court order, they couldn't specifically do DNS routing; it's probably
questionable whether returning a link as the first result to the IP address
that the domain name would resolve to if it wasn't blocked counts as resolving
a domain name, I'd imagine the government would make an argument that it does.

But there's still a _gaping_ loophole here: the bill says that a service
provider must "prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's
Internet protocol address", so fine, maybe Google couldn't return a link to
194.71.107.15 in response to "thepiratebay.org", but there's absolutely
nothing in the bill that says they couldn't return a link to 194.71.107.15 in
response to "Pirate Bay", "piratebay", "thepiratebay", etc. There's also
nothing in the bill that prohibits them from responding to a
"thepiratebay.org" query with a message telling the user that the link they
were looking for was filtered out, and suggesting that they strip the suffix
off of the search term to get around the domain name resolution restriction.

I realize this doesn't solve the problems of broken links on the net or
anything like that, but it's an indication of the fact that this bill,
horrible as it is, will likely just be routed around like many other problems
on the Internet, with a lot of effort wasted in order to do so.

~~~
LurkingGrue
I suppose this mean anybody interesting in piracy will just run their own dns
servers.

Dead easy and I suppose somebody will put out a simple copy of bind for
windows that you can run locally.

~~~
jamesbritt
A simple hosts file will work for windows

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Ixiaus
Illicit material will always exist, it may just be less visible to the average
joe/public (who, honestly, are dumb enough anyway that it's a pointless battle
to educate them) and the legislators are simply making it more difficult to
track people by forcing them to use innovative and private measures. VPN?
Check. Self hosted DNS? Check. GNUnet/Freenet? Check.

Dinosaur politicians and corporate lobbying will always be behind the times,
nothing we can do about that except do what _we_ do best: hack. Do the
"illicit" stuff under the radar and keep your shit to yourself.

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devmonk
(posted this in related thread)

Contact your senators and tell them to just say no to S. 3804:

<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-3804>

[http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_se...](http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_senators.htm)

No good can come of the gov't trying to control what domains can be accessed,
and it won't stop those that wish to do us harm or take advantage of us,
because they'll just use another domain.

~~~
frisco
That's the wrong response though. It distinguishes between this bill and other
internet-monitoring-and-censoring bills, when in reality none exists: all of
them are equally silly due to technological reasons. Instead of saying that
nothing good can come from the government controlling what domains are
accessed (which is true), point out that it's technically impossible and makes
us look like idiots.

~~~
devmonk
What I wrote them was a little more in depth and more general, but I think it
is important to mention the specific bill each time in addition to the overall
sentiment, so the secretary reading the mail puts an X mark in the tally next
to the bill number on her notepad. :)

Basically, I pointed out that things have been just fine with the free
uncensored net we've had so far, that this would limit that freedom by
attempting to restrict what we could visit, and that those with malicious
intent could easily thwart such attempts.

I think that part of the reason they are doing this is to attempt to have
access to block off our country's network in case of "cyberwar", etc., so it
is probably a defensive measure, rather than what they claim it to be. They
probably can't just do this type of blocking at the periphery, since
satellite, etc. connections within the U.S. could just as easily be a danger,
not just the big trunks coming out of the ocean.

I don't want our country to be at risk, but I think that a simple blacklist is
not the way to do it. Now, if they installed devices at each ISP that all
traffic had to run through- then you might have a greater defense. But,
basically, in cyberwar, we're all screwed. Things like this are chump change
compared to EMPs, viruses, state-controlled botnets, etc. Cyberwar would be
almost purely offensive, similar to nuclear war.

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hartror
So if this gets passed there will be a numerous ways of circumventing this as
people will organise around it. Also once this starts happening it will
provide huge promotion for the sites that are inflicted with this legislation.

Can we volunteer to go first? I'm sure I can find a snippet of a Disney movie
to post under the grounds of fair use.

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devmonk
Related comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918594>

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mrschwabe
Okay. So what's the best .com alternative domain name extension; one that will
not be subject to this tyrannical law?

