81–90 of 231 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
It is times like this that I recommend technically inclined people to try setting up your own dns resolver and see how minimal impact a few/handful of milliseconds on first access has on the internet experience. Practically all popular domains also uses some form of anycast network, so the benefit of a single large shared resolver that caches the dns answers has steadily decreased each year. Just make sure its not co…
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.
This level of deep packet inspection and injection is not what ISPs commonly do in my experience. At this point, it is much easier to just block the service's IP addresses than deep-inspect DNS traffic and match the query identifier and stuff to inject a false response. Why spend that engineering time when people will just fix the DNS server and can access the site directly? Might as well force people to set up a full tunnel (such as a VPN) to bypass the block, if your ISP or court order shows this level of motivation anyway.
Insofar as I've experienced these things: fetching the mapping yourself, from a server not operated by your ISP, will circumvent DNS blocks your ISP was ordered to put in place.
Currently I've got live access to one such blocking mechanism:
$ dig +short thepiratebay.org
195.121.82.125
$ dig +short +trace thepiratebay.org | tail -1
A 162.159.137.6 from server 172.64.35.164 in 5 ms.
The first IP address is a block page (accessible from outside the network, if anyone wants to take a look), the second one of the real IP addresses
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.
The entire ad revenue market (desktop + mobile + social + ....) in France, in 2023, was 5.8 billion dollars (The spread in public sources data seems to be 5.0billion-6.2 billion, so i just took the high side)
1. Google made over $240 billion in ad revenue in 2023, so even if it had 100% of all ads revenue in France, France would only account for 2.5% of Google's revenue.
2. However, Google's share in France is nowhere close to 100%. Search + Display overall is currently sitting at 20-25% of the french ad revenue above (same sources). Let's assume Google has 100% market share in France in those areas.
Then France would account for about 1.25 billion dollars of revenue for google, or about 0.5 percent of Google's revenue. Which is not a lot.
But it's still something. Or it would be, except:
3. France has fined Google 224 million so far in 2024.
Google's margins are around 25%. So that 1.25 billion of revenue produces around 312.5 million of profit. Maybe less
Of which they've been fined 224 million :)
If Google gets fined in France again this year, it would probably be operating at a loss.
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.
> your ISP will just hijack the recursive queries it makes This level of deep packet inspection and injection is not what ISPs commonly do in my experience. At this point, it is much easier to just block the service's IP addresses than deep-inspect DNS traffic and match the query identifier and stuff to inject a false response. Why spend that engineering time when people will just fix the DNS server and can access th…
Because IP addresses can change frequently, and also because if a site is behind a CDN, that would cause a lot of collateral damage.
> The first IP address is a block page (accessible from outside the network, if anyone wants to take a look), the second one of the real IP addresses
Okay, so your ISP's particular blocking mechanism doesn't hijack recursive queries. But others do.
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.
It is times like this that I recommend technically inclined people to try setting up your own dns resolver and see how minimal impact a few/handful of milliseconds on first access has on the internet experience. Practically all popular domains also uses some form of anycast network, so the benefit of a single large shared resolver that caches the dns answers has steadily decreased each year. Just make sure its not co…
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.