Stop the Internet Blacklist | Hacker News Reader

Stop the Internet Blacklist

demandprogress.org

83 pointschibea20 comments

First the President wants to be able to wiretap any digital communication (encrypted or not) and now Congress wants us to censor without due process. When did freedom start being such a bad thing?

The internet and rising computer saturation in the population empowered the people in comparison to the government. People have easy access to independent news and education, they can talk to like-minds (there is a word I just can't find), things being said are stored and questioned. All that makes the internet a scary place for politicians, but I guess it is more subconscious. I believe they really want to fight the bad and do good for the people, but they overshoot because they are so very scared and don't realise the good it does for the individual.

This is quite tinfoilhatish, but I believe so.

Not to mention he claims the right to kill U.S. citizens with no court oversight whatsoever: http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/09/25/al.awlaki.lawsuit/ind...

July 5th, 1776.

> July 5th, 1776.

Nope. The current constitution is part of the trend - America was more free under the Articles of Confederation (which has nothing to do with the confederacy).

Relevant sections:

DOMESTIC DOMAINS- ... Upon receipt of such order, the domain name registrar or domain name registry shall suspend operation of, and lock, the domain name.

NONDOMESTIC DOMAINS- ... a service provider ... shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name’s Internet protocol address

a financial transaction provider ... shall take reasonable measures, as expeditiously as practical, to prevent ... its service from processing transactions for customers located within the United States based on purchases associated with the domain name its trademarks from being authorized for use on Internet sites associated with such domain name

a service that serves contextual or display advertisements to Internet sites shall take reasonable measures... to prevent its network from serving advertisements to an Internet site accessed through such domain name.

Source: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-3804

Full text of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act at the link.

http://news.opencongress.org/bill/111-s3804/text?version=is

Looks like it's pretty much an anti-PirateBay bill. I wonder who exactly paid for it?

But unlike an IP address based blacklist, this should be relatively easy to bypass, right? A BitTorrent like infrastructure, run purely by people for the people. Or a HTTP based DNS resolution, as long as it can be bootstrapped.

https://www.torproject.org/

The thing is that running ToR requires much more bandwidth than running a DNS server. So, people may not mind running a DNS server on their computer, as replies fit within a single packet (it was designed that way).

Not really. If the exit Tor node is within the US you won't be able to reach the blocked domain.

On the other hand, a free DNS from overseas should work.

You can configure Tor to exit from a specific set of countries, or to exclude a specific set of countries from the exit list.

You are right. Maybe Tor should be configured by default to work that way.

Do you have a .torrc that makes Tor to exit from non-censorship countries? I would like to use it.

Alternatively, do you have a list of non-censorship countries?

NB: If you run a Tor hidden service remove it from your torrc before posting it.

I don't have such a list no. However, the configuration option is quite simple. If you wanted to block China, Russia and the US, you'd simply add this to your torrc:

ExcludeNodes {cn},{ru},{us}

Thanks.

I'd like to know more about the details of the bill, but as presented in this article I think it's a very bad idea indeed.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.3804:

Someday, the same bureaucrat at the FCC who enforces net-neutrality could also be checking ISP compliance with the blacklist!

If you have faith in our copyright system, it's probably not worth worrying about.

Fulltext of the bill: http://bit.ly/aGMT4L

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