Live data from Hacker News

Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

torrentfreak.com

91–100 of 151 posts

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you cut to the core of it: genocide. Governments are entrusted with great power. Enough power to decide an entire class of people no longer deserve to live. Without checks and balances that hold the people we put in government accountable, that power will be abused. “It should be easy to handle some censorship” is where your point went off the rails. When you trust your government with the power to control th…

You are talking about hypotethicals and I'm talking about reality of today. If you let actual real innocent people die for your principles - you are not virtuous, the future you build and try to protect is not virtuous. It doesn't matter how correct your principles are.

I’m glad you can say I am only talking hypotheticals. I hope you don’t wait until your government is actively doing a genocide to decide that they shouldn’t have these powers. That’s something you should stop while it’s still a hypothetical.

It is not virtuous to hand the keys of tyranny to your leaders and then wash your hands of the consequences.

It doesn’t matter how correct my principles are. And it doesn’t matter which of the two of us walk away from this thread “feeling virtuous,” “correct,” or “right.” The downstream consequences of my beliefs are mine to bear, and yours are yours.

If my belief system permits the rise of atrocities in this world, history will remember it for that. Not for the principles. Not for the realities I was grappling with. You’ll be judged by future generations no differently.

I don’t disagree there are ongoing atrocities on this planet. I don’t disagree that it’s a moral imperative to try and stop them. But I do disagree with trying to solve these atrocities by eroding the protections that were put in place to prevent our governments from committing those very same atrocities.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#92
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you cut to the core of it: genocide. Governments are entrusted with great power. Enough power to decide an entire class of people no longer deserve to live. Without checks and balances that hold the people we put in government accountable, that power will be abused. “It should be easy to handle some censorship” is where your point went off the rails. When you trust your government with the power to control th…

>When you trust your government with the power to control the flow of information, you trust them with the power to hide their own actions from you I think this is as false dilemma - no one's advocating that any institution or system that can regulate the flow of known bad information can operate without any constraints, oversight, etc. If we assume any exercise of power will ALWAYS be misused under any circumstance,…

> that can regulate the flow of known bad information

> prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda

This is a Motte and Bailey.

Your introduction advocates for: regulating the spread of known bad information.

In your second to last paragraph you substitute it with: prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda

I’ll engage with your second point only if you yield that the _only_ form of information that is acceptable for a government to censor is speech that is directly and explicitly calling for genocide.

Otherwise we are talking about the “known bad information” from your first paragraph.

Does “bad” mean false? Or just malicious? Who decides it’s bad? How does it become “known.”

As a citizen, are you allowed to challenge the classification of “bad” or does challenging the classification of “bad” itself count as “bad information?”

What protections are there for keeping inconvenient truths about our government from being classified as “bad information?”

> no one's advocating that any institution or system that can regulate the flow of known bad information can operate without any constraints, oversight, etc.

I’m suggesting that’s exactly what people are advocating for. They may not know it. They may mean well.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?

>Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected? Not GP, but the short answer is 'yes'. Because it is a slippery slope. I'm not in the EU and I can still reach rt…

The trouble is that at scale, in a world where people's attention spans are already stretched to the breaking point and any kind of bullshit can be amplified to tens or hundreds of millions of eyeballs in minutes, the bullshit asymmetry principle comes into play.

I don't know what the answer is, because it's a genuinely new environment for the human brain.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#94

I don’t know this case or the site, I’m only commenting on this because, shouldn’t we be very concerned that anything can be silenced, globally, online? Where does it stop if we do it? Who gets the say? Who watches them? You see what I’m getting at? Google started self censoring “Russian propaganda” and everyone was so distracted with the war itself that nobody seemed to take notice of what gears that type of thing s…

This Quad9 case proves that all open resolvers are not necessarily "equal" in terms of the DNS data they will provide. From what I have seen most folks using third party DNS either do not choose a provider, i.e., accept the ISP default, or choose a provider based on "which one is the fastest", "which one is the most 'private'", "which one has family filters, blocks ads", or some other marketing. How many folks consider "which one offers the DNS data I want".

What stops Google from "self-censoring" DNS data so that the answers users get from 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are optimised for advertising. It makes business sense.

Fortunately nothing in DNS protocol mandates using remote recursive DNS and caches shared with untrusted parties (including the so-called "tech" companies operating them). It is possible to query without the RD bit set and still get the DNS data from authoritative DNS servers instead of resolvers.

it does not even look like Quad9 has removed this domain from their cache. I just checked and it's still there, returning an IP address in Lithuania.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google started self censoring “Russian propaganda” and everyone was so distracted with the war itself that nobody seemed to take notice of what gears that type of thing set in motion. I recently found out that all of Russia Today is banned and blocked throughout the EU, and whilst I appreciate it’s pure propaganda, I don’t appreciate being told what I can and cannot read/watch/hear. It’s entirely against everything…

Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?

I am reading my news by going to CNN, then RT and getting a sense of what the real news are in the empty space between them. Understanding the mentality, argumentation and dynamics of a bad actor are important. And I would assume decision makers in read their opponents propaganda. Blocking it gives the impression that whoever is blocking is not trusting our own maturity to filter and understand and make value and ethical judgements for ourselves. In that sense they are not punishing the blocked party but “protecting “ their people and I am not sure I need that protection.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that people should have the skill of critically assessing the information they see, not trusting it by default, and knowing how to verify it. Like, check for conflicts of interest, historical precedents, correlate independent sources, etc. This skill only develops if people have to deal with lies on a daily basis. If we delegate the function of telling what's a truth and what's a lie to a 3rd party, it qu…

> people should have the skill of critically assessing the information they see, not trusting it by default, and knowing how to verify it Unfortunately, in America and I imagine abroad, those skills have been actively eroded so as to favor of consumerism. Moreover, the tools to pull one over on your fellow man have gotten more and more sophisticated such that you cannot trust recorded voices to be real, you cannot tr…

It’s further compounded by accelerating the atrophy. What you are describing is a vicious circle that ends with no freedom.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#97

I don’t know this case or the site, I’m only commenting on this because, shouldn’t we be very concerned that anything can be silenced, globally, online? Where does it stop if we do it? Who gets the say? Who watches them? You see what I’m getting at? Google started self censoring “Russian propaganda” and everyone was so distracted with the war itself that nobody seemed to take notice of what gears that type of thing s…

On the contrary. Those sites are still free to say what they want. Google is not censoring their freedom of speech.

But freedom of speech also means you can't compel someone to say something they don't want to say. That's not censorship, that's freedom. You can't force Google to rebroadcast that message.

And if you think that's the first or only thing they choose not to show, you must be very new. Otherwise you'd've noticed by now that your search results aren't all full of child porn and other garbage. Google isn't forced to show that to you.

If you want to see things that Google doesn't show, you're free to find it by other means.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#98

I don’t know this case or the site, I’m only commenting on this because, shouldn’t we be very concerned that anything can be silenced, globally, online? Where does it stop if we do it? Who gets the say? Who watches them? You see what I’m getting at? Google started self censoring “Russian propaganda” and everyone was so distracted with the war itself that nobody seemed to take notice of what gears that type of thing s…

This Quad9 case proves that all open resolvers are not necessarily "equal" in terms of the DNS data they will provide. From what I have seen most folks using third party DNS either do not choose a provider, i.e., accept the ISP default, or choose a provider based on "which one is the fastest", "which one is the most 'private'", "which one has family filters, blocks ads", or some other marketing. How many folks consid…

Small correction - I believe it’s 8.8.4.4 and not 4.4.4.4 for google dns. Mentioning this since I’m pretty sure I got this wrong myself in the past when setting up dns and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#99
post #19

Isn't everything on YouTube for free? Then downloading is as simple as any software that extracts audio tracks from a YT video.

Youtube serves the audio and video separately; yt-dlp (the successor to youtube-dl) can download only the audio part, so there isn't any extraction necessary. Honestly, I don't understand "piracy" much anymore -- almost everything folks want is legally available on a streaming service for cheap or no-charge. If something has been censored or banned (or the owner refuses to sell it anymore), then that's a different st…

I pay for a whole long list of streaming services. Very often I want to watch something that isn't on any of them.

They don't carry old TV miniseries. They don't carry many older classic shows. They don't carry many old classic movies and especially not more obscure ones. They don't carry many artistic/indie movies. They don't carry many foreign movies. Sometimes when they do carry something it's edited all weirdly, unlike the original (perhaps because they didn't get the rights to use the music or other stuff in streaming).

I still like the streaming services for what they do carry and especially for the serendipity of browsing around and finding something I didn't even know existed and would've never thought to look for. But that's about all they're good for. When I'm actually looking for something, they're usually a failure. 9/10 it's available on a pirate site though.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#100
post #58

I don’t know this case or the site, I’m only commenting on this because, shouldn’t we be very concerned that anything can be silenced, globally, online? Where does it stop if we do it? Who gets the say? Who watches them? You see what I’m getting at? Google started self censoring “Russian propaganda” and everyone was so distracted with the war itself that nobody seemed to take notice of what gears that type of thing s…

Vodafone have blocked RT in several EU countries, try it yourself: https://www.rt.com/africa/580875-france-niger-military-agree...

Good.
Post reply on HN