Live data from Hacker News

French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

torrentfreak.com

101–110 of 231 posts

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#101
post #76

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?

Fixed now, although leaving out the court order is also misleading. If anyone wants to suggest an accurate, neutral title that gets it all under the 80 char limit, we can change it again.

Asked ChatGPT, it came up with this

Court Orders Google, Cloudflare & Cisco to Poison DNS to Stop Piracy

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#103
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the nuance that while SOPA/PIPA were bills being legislated for potential passage, France is citing laws already in effect. For better or worse, if you do business in you follow 's laws or GTFO.

> For better or worse, if you do business in you follow 's laws or GTFO. That does rather imply that the laws are worthless. Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything. Regardless of that, I would challenge your premise. You can violate an unjust law and risk the consequences. And if you get the PR right, there may not even be…

> Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.

and so when the rights holders notice enough people pirating using dns resolvers they can't force to do anything via the french courts, they'll probably just take it up with the french ISPs and ask for IP blocks of these resolvers. And I'd guess they may already be trying to IP block various piracy sites.

Will be interesting to see them play whack-a-mole. I wonder if at some point France will just start maintaining national blocklists, that if you want to run an ISP or reply to DNS queries from France, you are legally obligated to follow (or get blocked yourself); from the article, it sounds like the current law is significantly short of that so the whack-a-mole will continue.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#104
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main point is that it's trivial for people to circumvent the DNS level block by simply finding new DNS servers (in this case something other than local ISPs, Google, CF etc... still many out there) by asking others or simple googling here and there, and in extreme cases, at a physical level as in the article.

I don't understand where you got that "main point" from; nothing in the GP's comment is about that or anything tangential to that.

I think it's quite obvious but YMMV.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#106
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as the protocol is easy to detect and block. 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…

I mean, this is literally a case of killing off the general infrastructure to stop illegal activities.

DNS can be used for both legal and illegal purposes, and the French courts authorized dropping nukes on them to stop illegal activities with no damns given to the legal because the laws cited provided no such safeguards or reservations.

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 has always been part of the establishment, funded by capital trying to solve capital's problems. The only part of tech that really deviates from this is the free software community, which has always been hostile to capital. The blackout day emerged from people, not the industry, and people have changed.

> funded by capital trying to solve capital's problems

Is this parody?

Should we start against the trade unions and German barbarians next? (The latter to avenge Varus and recapture the Eagles.)

Re: French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy

#110
post #10

Hilarious how the article mentions the domain names at the end. It's like Google showing links of DMCA-striken lists, so you can easily find out the actual places to pirate.

But these names aren't resolvable (through compliant resolvers), while the transparency links would be.

only in France
Post reply on HN