Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order • Hacker News Board

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#101

Post by mixmastamyk » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 2:22 AM UTC

brightlancer wrote: post #29

pmontra wrote: 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…

All the shows I grew up with (and should be free) beg to differ.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#102

Post by creer » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 2:25 AM UTC

somethingreen wrote: post #34

mdekkers wrote: post #27

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…

I used to be a free speech absolutist, but now I believe phylosophical principles exist in service of humanity, not the other way around. If you consider that the goal of russian propaganda is to help Russia succeed in genocide of a 40 million nation, I think it should be fairly easy to handle some censorship, at least until genocide is stopped.

Are you willing to change a philosophical principle - moral, ethical, fundamental, etc principle - because of ONE event.

"At least" has a name. It's called "the war on X".

It's easy to start and takes an extremely long time to correct - potentially indefinitely but at least longer than your life span.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#103

Post by AussieWog93 » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 2:26 AM UTC

ransackdev wrote: post #23

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…

I'm sure this will be an absolutely abhorrent take to the HN audience, but I've been recently wondering if perhaps a bit of censorship could be a good thing.

Not complete censorship, of course, but not complete freedom of communication either.

In the past 25 years or so we've gone from being only able to freely communicate our ideas with people we know directly to being able to share anything with anyone all over the world. And it hasn't made life better.

It hasn't improved our wellbeing, it hasn't improved our democracy, it hasn't improved our relationships... Empirically, it just hasn't worked and maybe it would be a good thing to attempt to put the genie back into the bottle.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#104

Post by pluto_modadic » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 2:32 AM UTC

stevefan1999 wrote: post #86

ShowalkKama wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then you initiate a rendezvous request in HSDir to request a contact with the hidden service. >The hidden service noticed the HSDir updated, then arranges a Tor circuit (of arbitrary length) and then write back to HSDir to tell the requesters to contact via that new circuit which this information will ultimately be signed with the hidden service's private key as a proof of identity so MITM is impossible (like bootle…

ah, looks like we got a Tor expert here. I realize I flipped the rendezvous relationship. Well, I got into Tor 5 years ago as a freshmen trying to replicate Tor in Rust, and I got to say my details are murky now.

https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/overview/

onion service picks nodes which will act as introduction points, signs them and uploads the descriptor to the DHT

client finds that record on the DHT, picks a random node (from all of Tor) and gives it a secret, then encrypts a message to the hidden service (via one of those introduction points) with the key

hidden service makes its own circuit to the random node the person picked, tells the node the passphrase, and then the client & service do some E2EE communication (though, at the rendezvous point it's just the single handshake / one layer of encryption... so being a rendezvous node is a big job, just like HSdirs or guards)

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#105

Post by bippihippi1 » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 2:41 AM UTC

Falkon1313 wrote: post #97

ransackdev wrote: post #23

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…

the analogy to compelled speech is a little weak, since google doesn't claim ownership of any speech they display, and since google search is an effective monopoly on information discovery. it's more like an isp choosing not to serve certain traffic. but yeah, google isn't a common carrier. There are things that I would also censor, but I wouldn't prevent someone from saying russian propoganda on my street, because I can walk away. If anything individuals should have more ability to censor their own google results, because that's like, someone speaking inside my home.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#106

Post by derefr » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

stevefan1999 wrote: post #14

derefr wrote: post #6

Question: why are torrent sites not generally run as a Tor hidden-site backend (that can therefore be accessed through any existing Tor public-web gateway, rather than needing to set up its own proxies) plus an IPFS-hosted SPA frontend (that can therefore rely on any IPFS web gateway, and can then point as many arbitrary human-readable DNSLink names at that IPFS CID as it wishes)? Is it just because the web piracy co…

Because it was veeeeeeeeery slow to me. As someone in East Asia, you are lucky if you can load a hidden service under 10 seconds. First we should briefly talk about how hidden services work. You have a very long address encoding the portions of a HS public key, which is stored in a special directory (HSDir), and due to the P2P nature of Tor, that basically becomes a DHT/Torrent Tracker which draws parallel to a DNS s…

> Adding insults to injury, the vast majority of Tor relays are dominantly located in US and EU, and there are barely any Asian Tor operators like me, let alone exit node operators.

Why does this matter? Wouldn't it just mean that you have one slow initial hop (AS client → EU/US exit node), and then a bunch of internal EU/US → EU/US hops that are fast?

> That is why I think SPA and PWA, both client-side oriented application on such a low rate network like Tor hidden service, and abstracting server interaction as low overhead APIs such as gRPC and ttrpc, would be very useful as I was experimenting it before, but most people uses Tor Browser, they would likely be disabling JS with NoScript for...security reasons.

Right, this is why I said "Tor with a public web gateway, plus an IPFS-hosted SPA." The site backend is hosted on Tor, but the user never realizes they're using Tor. And the site frontend doesn't need anonymity (it's just app code, there's nothing directly IP-infringing there, so nobody's going to actively purge/block the JS for it from their own IPFS node's cache) so it can and will end up widely p2p-cached.

IPFS also means you get DNSLink, which means you can take any DDNS provider CNAME it to any IPFS gateway and end up with a memorable domain name to visit, where the inevitable whack-a-mole occurs only on the DNS level, not on the level of needing to run actual HTTP proxies.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#107

Post by lvturner » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 2:53 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #103

ransackdev wrote: post #23

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…

I'm sure this will be an absolutely abhorrent take to the HN audience, but I've been recently wondering if perhaps a bit of censorship could be a good thing. Not complete censorship, of course, but not complete freedom of communication either. In the past 25 years or so we've gone from being only able to freely communicate our ideas with people we know directly to being able to share anything with anyone all over the…

There are a couple of countries, one very notable, that we can use as a case study.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#108

Post by jonhohle » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 2:59 AM UTC

Falkon1313 wrote: post #97

ransackdev wrote: post #23

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…

When does that freedom (which I agree they have) run afoul of Title II responsibilities that Google currently enjoys? When Google suppresses results for things that don’t align with their political or cultural perspective, are they still a common carrier?

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#109

Post by Aerroon » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 3:34 AM UTC

thejazzman wrote: post #45

mdekkers wrote: post #27

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?

It's a limitation on the non-bad actors though. It only hurts the bad actor insofar that it's a little harder to willingly get access to them for innocent people.

Re: Pirate site not impressed by Global DNS blocking order

#110

Post by ravenstine » Sun, Aug 06, 2023, 3:36 AM UTC

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #89

robertlagrant wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is Microsoft has leverage in other areas. I understand Sony's nervousness.

Microsoft is the only company allowing piracy and it has done nothing but good for them ever since they implemented that strategy in 1995. They compute how much the piracy costs them and then turn around and bill it to the big clients such as the Fortune 500 companies which are forced to get original licenses for Windows and Office.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but they knew the importance of getting their products into as many people's hands as possible, even if it meant accepting that some of them were going to steal it. On the other hand, Sony's appeal to consumers has greatly diminished because they focused more on protectionism than making their products a household name. Sure, they have the Playstation, but come on. Maybe they should go back to making movies that were actually good.