Live data from Hacker News

Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

torrentfreak.com

81–90 of 126 posts

Re: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

#81
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Icelanders do not want to join the EU. The two political parties with the current greatest following which will probably be elected for a new government next Saturday also oppose joining the EU.

And seeing as how well the EU has been to the PIIGS, i would say that most Icelanders are being rational.

Didn't the EU give billions of Euros in handouts to the PIIGS?

They have unsustainable economies due to excessive public welfare programs and unfavorable demographics. Being outside the EU wouldn't magically solve those problems, though it would let them monetize some debt.

Re: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

#82
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing about this but given that DNS is quite low volume, distributed peer-to-peer DNS services sound really promising. It would definitely be interesting to hear someone with knowledge in this to chime in. TPB could (inadvertently) change the structure of the internet.

Hosting DNS is already mostly distributed; that's not the hard part. The difficulty is setting up a distributed system that can allocate domains and prevent others from tampering with the records (e.g., what if I reply to a query for gmail.com with my own IP, pointing to a phishing site?) One possible solution is namecoin[1], which is based on bitcoin's proof-of-work protocol. But TPB's influence is not so inadverten…

Namecoin is a very interesting project, but I prefer PPC coin's proof-of-stake algorithm to bitcoin's proof-of-work for long-term stability and robustness.

Re: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

#83
post #76
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard this argument before, but you are making a rather big claim when doing so. If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property. That mean you don't own that car. Its the government car that they have given to you under a granted permission to use it. Same goes for your house. All they need to render the third amendme…

> If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property. Your trouble stems from a boot-strapping problem. Property ownership doesn't exist in the statute of nature. Thus, the government doesn't need to "own" property in order to grant rights to it. What exists in the state of nature is control of territory (or anything) by virtue…

Since a government's power is drawn from its populous, I would argue with your conclusion as to who is granting whom control. (A state divided cannot stand.)

Re: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

#84
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property. Your trouble stems from a boot-strapping problem. Property ownership doesn't exist in the statute of nature. Thus, the government doesn't need to "own" property in order to grant rights to it. What exists in the state of nature is control of territory (or anything) by virtue…

Since a government's power is drawn from its populous, I would argue with your conclusion as to who is granting whom control. (A state divided cannot stand.)

The people, acting through government, grants specific people, monopolies over particular property. That's all that property rights are--my community, acting through government, agreeing to come to my aid if I'm dispossessed of my property outside the framework of rules we have collectively established. That agreement is what distinguishes property rights from mere posession.

Re: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And seeing as how well the EU has been to the PIIGS, i would say that most Icelanders are being rational.

Didn't the EU give billions of Euros in handouts to the PIIGS? They have unsustainable economies due to excessive public welfare programs and unfavorable demographics. Being outside the EU wouldn't magically solve those problems, though it would let them monetize some debt.

"though it would let them monetize some debt"

And there you have it.

Yes the problems won't magically go away. "They have unsustainable economies due to excessive public welfare programs and unfavorable demographics" can be said about most countries.

But of course GDP growth y/y is sustainable ad infinitum.

Here in the USA, when we run out of money we can print some more and pass the cost to nations who use the USD in foreign exchange (Kudos for China and Australia for trying to get out of this hole). But in the EU, they have to appease the troika before they run some database queries. (And as we have seen with cyprus, now you also have to sell an arm and a leg, what's next?)

In the world where central banks are openly buying stock with their freshly minted database queries…what could go wrong?

Re: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

#86
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since a government's power is drawn from its populous, I would argue with your conclusion as to who is granting whom control. (A state divided cannot stand.)

The people, acting through government, grants specific people, monopolies over particular property. That's all that property rights are--my community, acting through government, agreeing to come to my aid if I'm dispossessed of my property outside the framework of rules we have collectively established. That agreement is what distinguishes property rights from mere posession.

Gotcha - I grant myself my property, which I already had, by way of possession. :)

I see the subtlety of the point you are making - that property is defined collectively (otherwise it is mere possession) - but I am making an equally subtle point about the underlying meaning of that definition: that collective responsibility is just a statistic on a population of individuals, not a statistic about an entity.

There, I've tilted at my windmill for the day.

Re: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

#87
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS is probably the wrong word. You want some new method of name resolution, not DNS. The thing with DNS is that it actually works pretty well as a distributed system. There are a bunch of different people responsible for different TLDs. If the operator of one TLD is censoring you, you can use a different one. There are really two primary concerns with DNS. The first is that even if you have a domain using a TLD whos…

Could something like Namecoin address these concerns? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Namecoin

Most definitely. You are talking about the dot-bit DNS project in particular. See here for more details: http://dot-bit.org

Re: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

#88

What I wonder about, is they should be the "creators" and steering committee for the worlds own PnP DNS servers... I would gladly host a small portion of DNS spaces on my machines running at home...

DNS is probably the wrong word. You want some new method of name resolution, not DNS. The thing with DNS is that it actually works pretty well as a distributed system. There are a bunch of different people responsible for different TLDs. If the operator of one TLD is censoring you, you can use a different one. There are really two primary concerns with DNS. The first is that even if you have a domain using a TLD whos…

re: "The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment."

.bit domains do expire approximately every 9 months I believe, unless you spend more namecoins to re-register them using your private key in which case you re-register said domain for 9 more months.

Abandonment happens if you no longer own the private key used to register the domain and/or you no longer make payments into the network.

Post reply on HN