Internet blacklist bill COICA one step closer to becoming law | Hacker News Reader

Internet blacklist bill COICA one step closer to becoming law

news.cnet.com

77 pointsstarkness30 comments

I emailed Dick Durbin and he told me that this legislation was "vitally important to America", and that he would be voting for it. I told him that I wouldn't be voting for him.

> vitally important to America

It is vitally important to America if by "America" he means a couple of media companies, their lobbyists and handful of senators who are on their payroll.

Also I like how instead of you telling him what is important for America he lectures you what is important.

How much does it take to bribe a senator? What are they paying him I wonder?

Might be relevant to your interests: http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N0000...

I did basically the same with Schumer, and even though I live in NY, Leahy, just because his name is at the top of the bill. But both Franken and Feingold, who are probably two of the best people in the senate, are supporting this. This is just a case of the government hating its people. We have to stop giving money to these "content" producers.

Once again Americans are or should be embarrassed by their legislators. This puts us in the same boat as China in that we are attempting to block bad knowledge by fiat rather than with education.

How can we decry repressive censorship regimes in other countries when we reserve the right to blackhole sites that we disapprove of on whatever grounds?

No, not really. Unlike China, our government is too dumb to even do it correctly.

I run my own DNS resolver. Guess what the config will be when this law passes? Step 1, try real DNS. Step 2, try open DNS. Anyone behind my firewall will have no idea that this law even exists.

Also, how does DNS affect bittorrent? I'll tell you how -- not at all.

You can't censor the Internet. Any attempt to try is just hilarious. (Remember when drugs were illegal and nobody could use them? Oh wait...)

No, not really. Unlike China, our government is too dumb to even do it correctly.

You can easily bypass the Great Chinese Firewall with iptables:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/ignoring_the_g...

tl;dr: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP

It's easy, it's similar to how they decry human rights abuses while abusing human rights at Gitmo.

You just need one guy committing the abuses, another guy talking down to other nations about doing the same thing, and a lawyer to invent complicated explanations as to why whatever you're doing is slightly different than whatever their doing, or how it's not torture until it feels like organ failure. And if the abuse gets too egregious just find some low ranking grunt and blame her for the whole thing, and now it won't happen again. wink wink nudge nudge

Oh, and it helps if you get to appoint the people who will be judging you, like maybe one of the lawyers who helped you out of a sticky hypocritical situation 20 years ago. It's kind of like explaining the differences between mob protection money and income tax. Most people are on board with the gov't reasoning on that one, and the rest don't matter.

What if bit.ly and other shorteners supplant DNS for affected sites, e.g. http://bit.ly/xAwIp redirects to thepiratebay.org's address, 194.71.107.15.

Will bit.ly have to start breaking every previously shortened URL that redirects to the IP address of an offending site? Or more likely, any shortened URL that redirects to an IP address directly at all?

What if there was a new service that simply takes the blacklist and "fixes" the DNS. You could type something like http://blacklis.tr/piratebay.org and get forwarded to the correct IP. They could monitise the same way OpenDNS does by providing a DNS service as well.

A service specifically designed to circumvent the blacklist would likely be blacklisted as well. I think the best (most robust) option is peer-to-peer distribution of a regularly-updated hosts file. Irritating yes, but impossible to stop without moving to an IP blacklist.

There are any number of ways to get around the blacklist, but none of them matter if they don't apply to everyone. It's about the public, not a dedicated tech-person getting around it.

Normally I would agree with you, but you are talking about a technical measure standing between an irresistible force - male teens looking for free porn and the object of their desire.

In addition, these programs need only be written once, then they can be distributed forever.

Run your own local caching dns server or use one located in europe.

The law requires ISPs to filter their DNS servers, not DNS traffic on their network. If they eventually add the latter to the law, then we can start talking about using Tor to tunnel DNS traffic past the firewall.

The irony at that point will be that Tor was initially developed on a research grant from the US Navy :P

Just give the circumvention service an easy-to-remember IP, like the famous DNS servers 4.2.2.1 and 8.8.8.8.

Even better would be if Google started supplying links to the IP address directly. Most of the populace uses Google to browse the internet anyway. Remember the chaos that resulted from when that news article reached the first result for a facebook search query?

Name-based virtual hosting would break this. But I'll bet DNS "alternatives" will spring up, quickly.

Or write a tool that auto updates from a hosted blacklist and updates your local hosts file.

Interesting:

"After a flurry of last-minute lobbying from representatives of content providers including the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)..."

Well, I am glad they listened to so many diverse groups. I mean, the MPAA and the RIAA? That ensures the legislators heard every possible viewpoint on this issue.

Once again, the government fails to understand how the Internet works.

One thing I was wondering was whether or not, for instance, Google would be prohibited from returning a direct IP address link to (say) the Pirate Bay in response to a search for "pirate bay".

The text in the bill says:

`(i) a service provider, as that term is defined in section 512(k)(1) of title 17, United States Code, or other operator of a domain name system server shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's Internet protocol address;

...and the definition of "service provider" as referenced is:

(1) Service provider. — (A) As used in subsection (a), the term “service provider” means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.

(B) As used in this section, other than subsection (a), the term “service provider” means a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefor, and includes an entity described in subparagraph (A).

It looks like Google would probably fall under (B) there, so if they received a court order, they couldn't specifically do DNS routing; it's probably questionable whether returning a link as the first result to the IP address that the domain name would resolve to if it wasn't blocked counts as resolving a domain name, I'd imagine the government would make an argument that it does.

But there's still a gaping loophole here: the bill says that a service provider must "prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's Internet protocol address", so fine, maybe Google couldn't return a link to 194.71.107.15 in response to "thepiratebay.org", but there's absolutely nothing in the bill that says they couldn't return a link to 194.71.107.15 in response to "Pirate Bay", "piratebay", "thepiratebay", etc. There's also nothing in the bill that prohibits them from responding to a "thepiratebay.org" query with a message telling the user that the link they were looking for was filtered out, and suggesting that they strip the suffix off of the search term to get around the domain name resolution restriction.

I realize this doesn't solve the problems of broken links on the net or anything like that, but it's an indication of the fact that this bill, horrible as it is, will likely just be routed around like many other problems on the Internet, with a lot of effort wasted in order to do so.

I suppose this mean anybody interesting in piracy will just run their own dns servers.

Dead easy and I suppose somebody will put out a simple copy of bind for windows that you can run locally.

A simple hosts file will work for windows

Illicit material will always exist, it may just be less visible to the average joe/public (who, honestly, are dumb enough anyway that it's a pointless battle to educate them) and the legislators are simply making it more difficult to track people by forcing them to use innovative and private measures. VPN? Check. Self hosted DNS? Check. GNUnet/Freenet? Check.

Dinosaur politicians and corporate lobbying will always be behind the times, nothing we can do about that except do what we do best: hack. Do the "illicit" stuff under the radar and keep your shit to yourself.

(posted this in related thread)

Contact your senators and tell them to just say no to S. 3804:

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

http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_se...

No good can come of the gov't trying to control what domains can be accessed, and it won't stop those that wish to do us harm or take advantage of us, because they'll just use another domain.

That's the wrong response though. It distinguishes between this bill and other internet-monitoring-and-censoring bills, when in reality none exists: all of them are equally silly due to technological reasons. Instead of saying that nothing good can come from the government controlling what domains are accessed (which is true), point out that it's technically impossible and makes us look like idiots.

What I wrote them was a little more in depth and more general, but I think it is important to mention the specific bill each time in addition to the overall sentiment, so the secretary reading the mail puts an X mark in the tally next to the bill number on her notepad. :)

Basically, I pointed out that things have been just fine with the free uncensored net we've had so far, that this would limit that freedom by attempting to restrict what we could visit, and that those with malicious intent could easily thwart such attempts.

I think that part of the reason they are doing this is to attempt to have access to block off our country's network in case of "cyberwar", etc., so it is probably a defensive measure, rather than what they claim it to be. They probably can't just do this type of blocking at the periphery, since satellite, etc. connections within the U.S. could just as easily be a danger, not just the big trunks coming out of the ocean.

I don't want our country to be at risk, but I think that a simple blacklist is not the way to do it. Now, if they installed devices at each ISP that all traffic had to run through- then you might have a greater defense. But, basically, in cyberwar, we're all screwed. Things like this are chump change compared to EMPs, viruses, state-controlled botnets, etc. Cyberwar would be almost purely offensive, similar to nuclear war.

So if this gets passed there will be a numerous ways of circumventing this as people will organise around it. Also once this starts happening it will provide huge promotion for the sites that are inflicted with this legislation.

Can we volunteer to go first? I'm sure I can find a snippet of a Disney movie to post under the grounds of fair use.

Okay. So what's the best .com alternative domain name extension; one that will not be subject to this tyrannical law?

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