61–70 of 231 posts
I’ve always been curious why dns is a go-to for oppressing unwanted websites. Is it truly difficult to block at an IP level? There would be collateral damage in doing so, but it wouldn’t take long for most VPS providers to dump piracy sites if the alternate is their entire network block being dropped.
The title on the website is “Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention”. Curious why Cloudflare has been singled out in the submission title?
Heavily biased article.
Remember that dns/ip systems are decentralized at the national precisely so that countries have sovereignity.
The editorial line would have us believe that france is committing a free speech crime or overturning internet infrastructure, while in actuality they are exherting their national rights.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Setting up your own recursive DNS resolver to circumvent ISP blocks is pointless unless you do so on a VPS or something, because otherwise, your ISP will just hijack the recursive queries it makes. And DNSSEC doesn't help if the ISP just wants to block you from learning the real IP.
I’ve heard this before. Is there a way to reliably detect if this is occurring or case studies of where this has occurred? Edit: I assume dns over https prevents this also, right?
Over a decade ago, a ton of tech companies (including Google) coordinated a “blackout the Internet” day of protest against U.S. legislation that would have required them to alter DNS to fight piracy. Interesting that now that France actually does it, they say they will comply. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...
In the last decade Tech has become part of the establishment. They are one of the dominant controlling forces. The blackout was _not_ about preserving free speech, or any other moral high road. It was purely about control. Tech hadn’t yet cemented their position as a dominant player and didn’t want to cede the control they had. Now that they’ve embedded themselves in the ruling class they don’t care as much because t…
Tech is under corp in the chain or command, which in turn is under national law.
Gross lack of extra-technical nuance here.
French courts order American DNS providers to block unlicensed sports streaming websites.
Most if not all of these domains probably use Cloudflare as their authoritative DNS servers because they are using Cloudflare CDN. Why not just ask Cloudflare to "poison" those RRs. No need to issue orders to a selection of cache operators.
Is there some decentralized anti-censorship technology that can prevent this type of action, where ISPs and DNS providers and other points of centralization are forced to implement things on behalf of other parties (like Canal+ or a government)?
No. No matter how decentralized something is, ultimately you need to have a server and cables connecting it to the internet located somewhere. That somewhere will be within some legal entity or sovereign's jurisdiction which you must answer to and comply with.
If whatever technology that is being used is so intertwined into the base of all use cases (including totally legal) and legal vs. illegal is practically indistinguishable at scale, then decentralization cannot be blocked without physically blocking all the legal use cases too: sure they can "cut cables" but it will have much more greater consequences as they have just cut cables connecting all the legal activity too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we not want this when the law is bad? The government should face pushback from all sides when attempting something odious.
One answers is that this case isn't actually a bad law. This appears to be blatant organized piracy. What's odious about copyright laws? This also appears to be pretty much the gold standard of due process. It's not like somebody submitting automated DMCA requests on videos with silent audio tracks or something. It's a court order for these specific domains, which would have been carefully curated and has been quite…
It's censoring DNS. That's a bad precedent. The technical capacity to do it shouldn't exist because otherwise it will be used for every other form of censorship, and deprive democratic countries of any moral or technical authority to object when authoritarian countries want to do it.
It will also be ineffective, leading for calls to make it effective, but the only way to do that is totalitarianism. There is no good that comes from setting out on that road.
> The other answer is that you really don't want big corporations to be ignoring laws they don't like, because odds are pretty good that your list of bad laws doesn't match theirs.
Ignoring the law doesn't get them out of paying the penalty, but penalties are meant to be sane, not some Hollywood accounting nonsense where one person watching one illicit stream of a sporting event causes the event organizers six billion dollars in damages. Then if Cloudflare wants to say "yeah, we're not doing that" and just pay the $100,000 dollar fine, it's clear that they're standing on principle -- they're paying $100,000 in exchange for ostensibly nothing -- and there is nothing wrong with that. The purpose of the penalty is to deter the underlying wrongdoing, not to deter civil disobedience. Anyone should be able to say "I am going to suffer the consequences of this because my principles are worth more than the fine" without having some authoritarians ratchet up the penalty to infinity.
> Countries have sovereignty.
Democratic countries have checks and balances. One of the checks and balances is that if you pass a law people don't respect, they don't respect it. Then you have to choose between punishing not the evildoers, but the principled idealists -- or repealing the law.
https://www.mic.com/articles/85987/turkish-protesters-are-sp... Repressive governments have a history of legal orders telling Google to block protestors from accessing twitter.com but Google always refuses to comply. So their new policy of complying isn't about legality. France is a big market. Perhaps it's about money.
Uh, there's nothing in your link about a government ordering Google to block Twitter? Since you say this is a common occurence, I'm guessing it'll be easy for you to find a source that actually supports your claim.