Long ago, I used to have my favorite pirate sites bookmarked and sometimes the IPs saved. Now, Yandex, is the great piracy search engine. Just type in what you want, and in what format you want it in, and it'll usually show up within the first 10 results. For example:
Yandex is a pretty good search engine. Yandex is essentially what people think DuckDuckGo is, on the other hand DuckDuckGo is essentially is just Bing.
My impression was most use DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons so it's a bit surprising to read Yandex is supposed to be what people think DuckDuckGo is. Also DuckDuckGo sources from far more than just Bing and it does have its own crawler as well.
My understanding of Yandex was that it's just another user-information-is-primary-income search provider this time HQ'd in Russia, neither of which exactly appealing to the typical DDG crowd.
Though I'd throw Kagi out to anyone who puts a lot of weight on such things as being a more pure example than either.
When I was looking into it I only found a few high level things like https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so.... Nothing on how the sausage is made unfortunately. Same for Kagi which takes a similar layered approach (though anecdotally it seemed a bit more spread across backend sources).
>My understanding of Yandex was that it's just another user-information-is-primary-income search provider this time HQ'd in Russia, neither of which exactly appealing to the typical DDG crowd.
A Russian company having my data given the current state of relations between it and my government is less worrisome than Google having the same.
This response, though frequently used, is wrong. If my data is useless they wouldn’t collect it. They use this data to target ads specifically for me, increasing those ads value. So yes, individuals data is worth something.
That's not how ad targeting works. Your data is used in aggregate to target ads to your purported demographic, and that designation is usually obtained on-the-fly via your recent page visits. Storing your individual interests isn't worth the money it costs.
That said, this has nothing to do with ads. It's a matter of foreign intelligence.
Yandex is great for politically sensitive content too. Yandex tends to give less manipulated results when compared to Western search-engines which are often censored and politically biased.
Do any search for any US political content on Google. I (in Kansas City) get almost all Left-leaning to hard Left news sites as the first 10 results, while pre-Trump results I'd almost always get 2-3 lean/far-Right results in top 10.
Something I used Yandex for was research during the pandemic. Not sure if it's the same today but at one point it was humorously hard to find anything that suggested the COVID-19 vaccines were anything but 100% safe and effective on Google. This is especially true if it's video content because video sites which host vaccine sceptical content are heavily down ranked by Google - sites like Bitchute and Odysee. And obviously YouTube which ranks well in Google wasn't allowing that content at all - not sure if that's still the same today.
On politically sensitive content here's an example I've shown before of how a search for "Trump" might differ between Google and Yandex, https://imgur.com/oPXP0wh
If searching for controversial figures or organisations you'll find Google tends to return news articles from left-wing media outlets where as Yandex tends to just return links associated to the individual / organisation. You can see this difference for yourself if you search for individuals like "Alex Jones".
Other notable examples would be extremely controversial content that Google / YouTube hides from results or removes completely. So for example if you want to find various alt-right / extremist content you basically need to use Yandex at this point. I'd rather not share specific examples of this, but as someone who's interested in online extremism if you want to view source materials you'll quickly find you need to use alternative search engines like Yandex to find this. There are also examples I'd consider extremist-adjacent like discussions around race and IQ or immigration policy which tends to be fairly one sided in Google. You will find some diversity of opinion but because Google downranks a lot of the more controversial sites the conversation is certainly biased towards what's political acceptable. I'm not necessarily criticising Google for this by the way, I'm just saying it's something that Google does and you should be aware of if you're ever searching for things considered politically incorrect.
I'm also aware of examples where Google searches tend to be more "diversified". This isn't something I've noticed or am that concerned with personally, but I'm aware of people who feel Google biases search results for things like "white families" to show more interracial families while Yandex doesn't. And I think there are examples where you can search for things like "famous scientists" and get more women scientists in the results than you might expect. From what I've seen I think this can be explained in good faith and isn't necessarily evidence of Google tampering with the results, but I've seen people (mostly in alt-right circles) share cherry-picked examples (in my opinion anyway) of stuff like this.
Apparently a copyright holding company (“LSG - Wahrnehmung von Leistungsschutzrechten GesmbH”) managed to convince a court to block IP addresses. Something which in this form wasn’t done before.
However since those are Cloudflare addresses there is a ton of collateral damage.
Does the order force blocking of the IP bound to a DNS address? Could piracy sites change DNS A records to arbitrary IP addresses to deny service to other sites?
In the past the court hasn't specified how to block sites so they're usually blocked at dns level, just point the DNS record at one of the isp's ip addresses with a block message
If they really are having to block actual ips I would be surprised
I'd be somewhat surprised if a court ordered something vague like "block whatever IP that resolves to at any time in the future", they'll either say "block these IPs" or "stop resolving this domain", anything else would require constant monitoring and continuous involvement of the target of the order.
Seems that they just wanted to block some piracy sites like newalbumreleases.net if you compare the dates and check the IPs behind those domains. Wonder however if this actually enforced because I think there is no IP block and no reports from Austria about collateral damage (or am I wrong and Austria cannot complain because they are cut of from the internet)
> I think there is no IP block and no reports from Austria about collateral damage
There is definitely a good amount of collateral damage, not all ISPs rolled out the block already, but some did.
I myself noticed a lot of sites stopped working or fail to load scripts/external resources. On reddit r/austria there are also multiple complaints.
Most normal users probably just suspect their router/pc acting up. It took me a day too to get to the gist of this issue with sites not loading without tor.
Wow. Interesting. It seems that they finally became aware of the issue and corrected the block list linked in the OP.
Only media backlash and a shitstorm actually was able to correct this and it is unclear if all providers fixed this. Everyone is now blaming high court decision, local government and the EU. Wonder if anything will change.
Safe harbor provisions are for this exact scenario, we must depend on that not corp scale to maintain reasonable governing. Safe harbor has come under attack lately, unfairly so IMO.
The historical purpose of safe harbor was to allow AOL
to have a walled garden without become responsible for all the illegal content that snuck past.
IANAL, but DMCA safe harbor doesn’t really apply to a companies like CloudFlare, nor is it needed, because they are not moderating UGC on a publishing platform, they are a routing optimization utility.
Not sure where you saw that the DMCA safe harbor provisions apply to moderation policy; It has everything to do with Copyright and removal of copyrighted material; nothing to do with moderation of UGC. It is directly in the name "Digital Millenium Copyright Act".
Content moderation is covered by the CDA section 230; completely separate from the DMCA
And it 100% should apply to Cloudflare as well; if they're caching copyrighted material they need to respond to takedown requests or lose that safe harbor protection. Just as it applies to Google for indexing alleged copyright material; if you've ever seen that "links removed due to DMCA takedown notices" in search results, even when they are not hosting said content.
IANAL also, and I don't know how much DMCA stuff is handled cross borders (I do believe some DMCA provisions are applicable thru trade treaties and the like, but not sure); and I do think DMCA takedowns are rife with abuse; but content moderation really has nothing to do with it..
They've planned all along to mix bad hosting with good hosting to make any attempts to block them, legal or personal, cause plenty of collateral damage.
This is literally the business model. The owner of an IP address is responsible for the content delivered from that IP address. Cloudflare would like to have it both ways -- they get to multiplex sites behind their network infrastructure and accept money for the service, but not be responsible for the content that they deliver, because it originally came from somewhere else.
In case the use of "literally" wasn't enough of a clue, this is incorrect. For the same reason that the DNS service, the ISP, or the internet itself are not responsible for the content.
This happens in my country as well. When I first noticed random cloudflare IPs timing out, I didn't think too much about it and assumed it was some routing issue, but then it happened again and again so I did some searching and found some people on the same ISP as me mentioning that it conveniently happens when big football matches are on, and the dates did indeed line up. No, that is not a joke.
I live in a country that has also blocked piracy but at the DNS level (Australia, not Austria).
I suspect that most anti piracy groups are now moving to long game by increasing the difficulty in getting to piracy websites rather than blocking them. I remember significantly more seeds on popular torrents in 2014 compared to now. I think this is a mix of streaming services as well as complexity of piracy.
I do take solice in the fact that piracy will act as a disruptor in unruly markets. Advertisement breaks in streaming platforms, increased cost per service or service fragmentation and other user hostile activities will increase the rate of piracy, creating a balance between good and unscrupulous.
Isn't this a bit like taking the phone numbers out of the phone book? Sure, people can't easily look them up, but if you know the right numbers, you don't need that.
Several ISP have appliances that can inspect DNS traffic and redirect to a the ISP DNS.
Then, even if you change DNS servers, you will be not able to reach blocked sites.
The only way to bypass that, at the moment is to use DoH.
Source: I have been worked for an ISP and I was in charge of that.
My mother's cable provider, Optimum Cable, routes DNS traffic to their own DNS servers.
To make matters worse, they engage in gratuitous blocking; for example, they won't resolve addresses of private networks (192.168.x.y, 10.x.y.z, etc...). For example, 192.168.1.1.nip.io won't resolve on my mom's network, but will almost everywhere else.
The solution, as another poster pointed out, was to use DNS-over-TLS.
It's also good to know that many newer browsers aren't affected since they've started to enable DoH out of the box (at least that's what firefox has done).
Anyway, other programs on your system may be affected too so addressing the issue at the system level is also important.
Dns over TLS has been a life saver due to this shit. I’ve my modem exposing its own dns server but using a dns over tls upstream instead of my ISP. Works perfectly.
There was some real shit going on with some Indonesian ISPs downright blocking connections to known public DNS resolvers (8.8.8.8, 1.1.1.1, etc). Dangerously close to the China-level firewalls that block known VPNs as well.
> Then, even if you change DNS servers, you will be not able to reach blocked sites.
Is this done simply by intercepting UDP port 53 requests somehow? I've only ever had to intercept https as part of development, but have no idea how this would work for UDP. Any details you can share?
Yep that’s exactly how it works. Not all ISPs actively intercept and reply to your queries, but the rest still monitor all port 53 traffic and log your queries.
It’s 100% not true that all ISPs monitor DNS packets.
I’ve worked for several who didn’t. Of course all have the ability to do just that so as a user you can’t tell. If you’re in the EU they can’t sell that data at least.
We just prefer the small local ISP monitoring our queries to Google and Cloudflare doing so, as the ISP does not learn a lot more than already at hand - they know the IPs I connect to anyway.
Simply direct all outbound DNS traffic to your own DNS server. You could do the same for your LAN by adding a port forward rule in your router (for LAN, not for WAN like you usually would to get incoming traffic around NAT)
That usually won't work. If a site uses SNI and has many sites behind a single IP (like cloudflare, for example), the server won't know which host's content to respond with.
If it isn't a shared IP, your own browser will block it because of a cert mismatch.
The best way to do this is to update your own /etc/hosts file to point the domain at the correct IP.
Dns blocking is exactly like that. I don't live australia, but if I go to the piratebay for example with my isp dns I get a message it's blocked. If I change to google or cloudflare dns it works just fine
Yeah no one really cares that it's not super effective in Australia though.
the courts order blocks, the ISPs block it at dns because it's cheap and easy and pirates are either scared off by the warning message or just use Google dns
The people who didn't know about these site before probably didn't practice piracy at all anyway, so having this list of blocked websites won't help them now anyway as they can't access them easily now anyway.
So IMHO these blocks mainly work at stopping Average Joes from accessing low-friction, low hanging fruit piracy and annoying them enough that they'd rather give Netflix 12 Euros than learn how to bypass these annoying restrictions.
You are probably right, it’s just funny that there’s a public list saying „don’t go there“ which kinda acts like a „forbidden books“ list making it more interesting.
For broke kids with more free time than money, yeah learning to access forbidden pirate sites is cool and interesting, but since Austria is a relatively high income country, most people I know here don't bother with piracy at all and just pay for content anyway.
So blocks like these will definitely discourage more Average Joes from low hanging fruit piracy and keep them as law-abiding paying customers rather than turning them into "hackers".
Austrian checking in, the problem with the "high income" logic is that most stuff offered over here is just pretty crappy.
The libraries of streaming services are tiny compared to international offerings and some don't even offer anything in Austria at all because it's a small market.
Pirating is still alive and well, not necessarily because people can't/don't want to afford the alternatives, but because they just aren't as convenient.
But as an Austrian myself, piracy was alive and well when I was in the age group where that usually happens and many "regular" people used free streaming sites when kino.to and others were still popular.
It does actually work really great. With old sites going down from time to time and DMCA requests making it difficult to find new piracy sites via search engines, having a list is very convenient.
People who need to use that list of blocked websites usually have no idea of VPNs. And vide versa. People used to VPNs already know the pirate sites and don't need that list.
I think you are underestimating the popularity of VPNs these days, just watching a YouTube video for "regular" people will have NordVPN, ExpressVPN ads on them advertising them as good for "privacy" or watching Netflix while you are on vacation. It's not a technology only accessible to nerds for a long time.
Thats the misconception i was talking about. Unless you are traveling the high seas regularly, you will sooner or later get into the situation, that you come back and all your links are dead.
On the up side. Its only fair that Austria be put at an economic and scientific disadvantage for once. Well, whoever signed this off must have thought so anyway.
They're way ahead of you on that. Much like its bigger cousin Germany, Austria is in general a dinosaur, technologically, culturally and politically.
Low tech wages and archaic working practices, stuffy bureaucracy, cash and physical paperwork needed for many things, poorly developed, expensive and slow internet infrastructure, corrupt and idiot politicians who don't understand the modern technology sector, litigious politically connected companies who sue anyone they don't like and lobby for anti-consumer laws that only benefit their cartel, privacy regulations taken to the extreme which mainly protect the crooked and unlawful people and businesses from being known to the public, etc.
This news isn't surprising to anyone familiar with Austria and these intelectual property bullies from the list of companies that got the Austrian court to block those IPs is just the tip of a huge shitty iceberg in Austrian tech & politics.
GDP per capita isn't the be-all and end-al of statistics for defining a country's success. Just ask the residents of the Republic of Ireland, the country with the second highest GDP/capita in the EU, how they feel about this position.
Sure, life is good here, if, you're not a tech worker, and that sector become more and more important in generating wealth, skilled jobs with a future, attracting skilled immigrants to pay taxes, and to project influence and soft power globally, that's why so many smart but not necessarily rich countries jumped to take advantage of this new sector (China most famously).
So a high GDP per capita might not save you in the long run if every ambitious tech graduate is leaving your country to Switzerland, London, Germany, Ireland, SV, etc. for a better environment where they can grow their career and earn better salaries, which leads to most tech products and web services used in your country all coming from abroad because your domestic tech industry is shit since your country got complacent and decided to sleep through the tech revolution with the idea that you'll "be fine since we're 8th GDP/capita in the world".
The IP addresses on the bottom of the list are blocked. For instance you can check a host which only has a single blocked IP on and you won't be able to navigate to it. For instance preis-zone.com or www.skodacommunity.de are fully unavailable right now since both the IPs on that domain are blocked (188.114.96.12 and 188.114.97.12) when resolved from Austria.
Some cloudflare worker page are also not loading correctly. A reply I got on twitter pointed out that you cannot load urbanarrow.com from Austria properly (for me it gets stuck after language selection).
Also you are more likely to see failures if you are only using IPv4 as some hosts also answer to IPv6.
The last time I was in Austria, all of the tourist shops had t-shirts with one of those Australian kangaroo crossing signs on it and the text "No kangaroos in Austria."
And now that we're already totally off topic...does "gamey" actually mean anything other "having flavour that we're not inured to or been watered down to lowest-common denominator tastes?"
Perhaps, but there are many methods to make meat less gamey, and I suspect most of them was invented before the current blandness set in, which suggests it wasn't welcome in the old days either.
But I'm baffled at the Oxford definition returned by Google: "having the strong flavour or smell of game, especially when it is high". There are very similar definitions that use "tainted" or even "spoiled" instead of "high". I think I'd rather my roo steak tasting of marijuana than of rotten flesh.
Malwarebytes won't let me near any of them. Take from that what you will (they are genuinely harmful, or someone wants them blocked, or a bit of both?)
So this is really interesting, when a fundamental fabric of the internet is run by a single company, and said government wants to target them, unilaterally or otherwise, some dark stuff can happen VERY fast.
it doesnt matter what the issue is behind this blocking, it matters that we have no safety nets for gov blocks on thought.
Did a check with the Austiran VPN server. The block must be on DNS level only. Using google servers as DNS, for example, will bypass all of these blocks. Or you can run your own DNS server like Unbound.
kiwifarms needs to go away, yesterday. but this seems unrelated. piracy is a much bigger deal to these folks than doxxing, organized harassment, swatting, etc
Individual freedom, restrictions on government power, freedom of speech… all these concepts are not prioritised by, and are somewhat foreign to, Europeans
But there is a lot of gradation between the USA and totalitarianism, and the EU is quite far from totalitarianism.
Their vaccines were not only used by emergency approval.
Maybe we should ask Assange about freedom of speech.
They used to do DNS blocking for years which you could easily bypass by using a different DNS provider. Today they added IP addresses (see bottom of the list).
Austria, Australia;
Sweden, Switzerland;
and worst of all Colombia, The District of Columbia (which isn't a district but a state), British Columbia (which isn't in Britain), also a small Australian Columbia (which is actually in Australia).
I feel we need to get someone on clearing up this mess of confusingly named localities.
Made the same mistake at first (using old glasses prescription is my excuse...). Felt like an Aussie government kinda thing to do as well, so it made sense. On second thoughts they probably wouldn't need the court order ha ha.
https://yandex.com/search/?msid=1661717771857485-52510224241...