DNS Providers as Piracy Fighters?
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds.
Con, of course, is that this is not going to be enough, and the next target is going to be the routers themselves. Your ISP will need to do deep packet inspection like what occurs in India and other countries.
Then that won't be enough, and you'll have to give a root of trust to your ISP, so they can read and censor your encrypted streams.
And all the while, trusted computing will be spreading in the background, stamping out anything not aligned with corporate and government interests.
Hasn’t the main trend of the past few decades been that, despite limiting our freedoms, everything gets more and more centralized, mainly because it’s more reliable / convenient / cheaper ?
I’m doubtful in DNS ever being replaced with an even more decentralized version. It’s already one of the most decentralized protocols widely in use right now, and the trend has clearly been more centralization of DNS, not less.
And as a consequence the user population on average becomes more ignorant, less likely to care, and less technically capable. It's one thing to crush internet freedom when half your users are programmers. It's entirely different when half your users don't know what a "file extension" is.
Regardless, failure to remove the names from the applicable registries will mean the names can still be looked up, using nonrecursive queries.
It is for this reason I suspect that rights holders targets ISPs. Supporting a block list is in comparison free and ISP has yet to start to take a yearly fee each time they add a new domain to the list.
Here's a p2p network layer: https://reticulum.network/
Here's a p2p dns layer: https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/#mutability-in-ipfs
Here's a p2p http layer: https://ipfs.io/
If every American could access everything for $15/month, they would have to forego the $185/month some Americans are willing to pay. Corporations hate this.
Because the economy of it doesn't scale?
When Spotify was new, I was amazed by it. A simple monthly fee and I could instantly access all the music(tm)? Who wouldn't sign up for that?
As time went by I definitely wanted a similar service for video. Basically, the same recipe: A reasonable monthly fee, and I'd like to watch all the video(tm) please.
But that's not what we got, because they are different markets, offering different goods, which has a different cost and which is used differently.
It probably costs more to make a single episode of a popular TV-show than it costs to make 100 albums of music. And unlike music, where people typically have favourites, which they will listen to again and again, most TV-series are watch-once, be-done type of entertainment.
That means that I'll keep my music streaming service forever because I want to be able to keep listening to the music I love, but I will cancel a video-streaming service the instant I've seen the series I signed up for.
So what is a reasonable fee? I agree it's annoying to have to deal with multiple video-streaming providers, but if they were to follow the music-stream model (all providers have all the content), then the price you would have to pay per provider with probably be 10x what it is now. And nobody is going to pay that.
Isn't it more reasonable to pay for what you use, when you use it, and then pay nothing when you're not using it (something which really isn't a realistic option for music-streaming)?
But the company providing the stream need to recoup the cost of making that episode, not just the cost of streaming it.
That means that the costs of making that episode has to be baked into the cost of the streaming-fee you are paying.
> My logic is that if you could get enough subscribers 30-50$ a month could be good business.
You won't, and it's still too low.
At this point, just having 3 regular streaming-services will cost you this much and it still gets you less than half the content out there.
Having it all would be $100+, and I can assure you that at such a price, most people would say "Why can't I just pay for the things I want to watch instead"? You know, before streaming, like people did with cable.
There is also the fact that file sharing is just better than buying. If I torrent a movie, I get the best version, with no region locking, no drm, which I can copy to any device. If the service goes away, or the Internet is down, I can still watch my movie just fine. For practical purposes, I actually own files I download, but don't own files I pay for.
And while I'd like to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it's currently not available at all in Germany, not even if I wanted to pay money. Paramount removed most Star Trek content from other streaming services, but their own service does not launch in Germany until 2023, and even then only as part of a very expensive bundle with Sky's football and other properties.
Additionally, when watching TV via DVB-T, only public broadcasters can be watched, as none of the private channels broadcast via DVB-T anymore.
Except: if the library offers more choice in physical media then... just use that.
Because your definition of "reasonable fee" isn't.
There exist ISPs who currently MitM attack any DNS requests to block them / replace them with ads if it doesn't exist.
3rd party DNS over UDP doesn't help, but over HTTPS does.
However, a major problem with most of these decentralized "internet alternatives" (including Handshake) is that they aren't designed to be compatible with the existing internet, which creates a chicken-egg problem where site operators don't want to bother supporting your system because it has no users, and users don't want to bother using your system because it has no (or few) sites.
If someone really wants to replace DNS with a decentralized system, what they need to do is:
1. Develop a well designed decentralized naming system (many have already done this)
2. Buy a TLD on the existing DNS and point it at a proxy server that allows incompatible clients access to your decentralized network through a centralized proxy
3. Work to get support for accessing that TLD through the decentralized protocol baked into browsers, first through extensions and eventually natively supported.
The government and people interested in stopping this sort of thing realize there's no legal easy-button they can press to make it all go away. Firearms won't go away, neither will piracy. But, they can do the next best thing. Inundate the companies in the middle with lawsuits, mostly frivolous in nature, in order to tie up and burn capital and (they hope) bring the demise the companies allegedly "involved" in the "crime". This doubles as something that has a tremendous chilling effect on other related services. It starts with DNS, goes to VPNs, etc. It's so effective the government does not even need to enforce laws to make it happen. All it takes is a little encouragement of the right groups of people and the lawsuits take care of the rest. It is de-facto illegal to do something because the alternative is to be mired in billions of dollars worth of lawsuits for any perceived mistake.
This is why it's so important to support all forms of freedom. The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well. In this case, they're now coming after information. Use your imagination to figure out what is next.
Nice conversation derailer, though.
Example: California recently enacted a law to "create a powerful incentive for the firearm industry" by allowing citizens to sue them for "failured to implement 'reasonable' controls", by using a similar mechanism as Texas' bill that enables people to sue doctors who perform abortions.
Senator Portantino: "If Texas can outrageously use this type of law to attack a woman’s reproductive freedom, we can do the same thing in California to hold gun dealers accountable for their actions."
OP said:
> The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well.
Which seems to be exactly what was done in California with its lawsuit legislation that was modeled after Texas'.
I can't help but agree with OP that this is a similar tactic of using lawsuits to bully people into compliance by draining their resources. It's an old tactic, but it's still unjust, regardless of the particular legal issue.
Well funded by people for selfless political reasons, not by large corporations: as the parent comment says, the situation with USA gun control is the exact opposite of MPAA-related entities suing citizens.
Meanwhile most firearm manufacturers are not super viable and the NRA gets almost all of it's money from donations below $1,000.
I think parent-poster's point is that there's a fundamental funding asymmetry between (A) a political-action group directly sustained by a current money-making industry and its future growth opportunities (B) a political-action group which is not and relies on ideological/altruistic donations.
In the case of media/DRM/piracy, the profit/politics nexus mainly lies with the big media companies and the RIAA/MPAA etc.
In the case of US-gun-stuff, the profit/politics nexus predominantly lies with the gun-manufacturers and NRA etc.
Firearms are not freedom of speech. Guns kill. Just like vehicles kill and are therefore subject to regulation (or outright prohibition in many spaces) above individual freedom.
I'm talking about whether it's justified to bully your adversaries with lawsuits in order to drain their resources. The particular legal issue doesn't matter--it's subverting and abusing the justice system.
Society has done a really good job of allowing people to pretend reality doesn't exist and not die for it.
See, in the past, you had to believe bears were not to be poked or you risked dying from poking a bear. At some point someone had to learn this lesson. Probably Bold Billy poked a bear, his buddy Timid Terry watched the bear eat him, then decided poking bears wasn't a good idea. Timid Terry then went back to the village and described what happened to Bold Billy, showed everyone Bold Billy's remains, and thus was their respect for reality both reaffirmed and their survival increased.
So then the village started teaching its children to be careful around caves and not to poke bears. Jackass Jerry grew up hearing stories by Timid Terry about the time Bold Billy helped a bear make it through winter by allowing said bear to partake of his flesh. Only Jackass Jerry never believed it, so one day, he decided to go poke the bear. Well, Jackass Jerry turned into Jambalaya Jerry and thus the bear once again get assisted in it's preparations for the winter.
And thus was the lesson taught by Bold Billy reinforced years later by Jambalaya Jerry, who wanted to make sure the rest of the village was kept safe by their understanding of reality.
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Society in general has become so good at protecting its members that many of those members can survive despite believing things that are patently untrue. Today, Jackass Jerry may never have turned into Jambalaya Jerry despite the mistaken belief that poking a bear isn't dangerous. That's just how good the guard rails are.
The point is that your reasoning here is _PATENTLY_ untrue, but you've been allowed to rationalize your way into whatever feels right because the guardrails of society don't force a respect of reality on you.
In this case, the reasons for regulation are many and varied. Something NOT outright killing someone is not, nor has it ever been, a justification for letting it remain unregulated.
You disagree with the poster you responded to. And that's great, it's certainly within your rights to do so. But your rationalization of that disagreement is patently untrue and makes me wonder if we're looking at what would have happened if Jackass Jerry had never met a bear.
Imagine if someone argued theft should be unregulated because no one died.
If you wanna own a gun, great, but the regulations should be extreme - just like anything else hazardous, like motorized vehicles. I can't speed in urban areas just because "it's muh freedom of movement" and I haven't run anybody over (yet). Statistics are statistics and guns increase crime, violence, and death.
Also the current limits on arms are all unconstitutional. There's no question about it. But there is a whole host of things that are unconstitutional that don't seem to matter anyway, like social security and minimum wage.
They should have made the second amendment the first. Then I think you'd get it.
Pro-gun does fit the comparison much better, because there are obvious industry profits behind the lobbies - at the cost of violence and death.
edit: tired of this. i own lots of guns and have never killed anybody. i had this same argument with somebody else yesterday over financial KYC: we do not fight crime by stripping law-abiding Americans of their freedoms and subjecting them to increased state control.
Sometimes I'm glad I live in the UK (not often, mind)
Edit: seems to be the latter
https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2020/october...
If you compare to Canada which, compared to all Western countries besides the US, has comparatively lax gun laws and high firearms ownership rates and a similar overall culture:
* US sees 12.21 firearms deaths per capita per year to Canada's 1.94.
* US sees 4.46 homicides via firearm per capita per year to Canada's 0.52.
This pattern holds over basically all numbers relating to rates of violence at every level of division.
According to these statistics USA has only almost 4 times as many guns as Canada, suggesting that to a large extent "people kill people".
Also, the type of firearms owned are different. In Canada, firearms are mostly for hunting whereas in the United States, they are mostly for protection.
In Canada, less than 12% of firearm-owning households have hand guns whereas it is at 72% in the U.S. In Canada, 95% of firearm-owning households own long guns. Long guns are more inconvenient for committing crimes or murders than handguns.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/america...
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-d...
regardless when will y'all understand citing death statistics will not convince us to ban guns? we oppose it because we believe it's wrong to restrict a basic freedom not because death figures are under some magic threshold where we'd support it if the number went over.
By this metric, the US is better off that much of South and Central America. I bet if the stats were normalized by deaths/100K guns instead the US would look pretty good. (~17% drop for US, as we have more guns than people, but every other country has significant increases)
I don't like this; I grew up with guns, but even I find the rabid fetishization of guns to be a sad reflection on our society, but I have precisely zero allusions of any change, any time soon.
This is specialists work and there are a finite number of specialists in even large society. I propose that daylight rules, disclosure of funding and declaration of activity, would do quite a bit to take the threatening nature of this kind of thing away. Let groups work toward their political goals, yes. But in the open.
That has nothing to-do with each other.
It's like saying i would happily trade the idea of country's to prevent wars.
For the simpletons it makes sense, for everyone else not.
Cute that you tried to call me simple, I guess.
Gun-Violence have other root's, the constant fear of being threatened, the media and the country who is the only one with a declining lifespan[1] (exceptions are country's with war). The Gun's are not the problem, the state of mind of this country is.
Howto change the US mindset to a positive future instead of a "near in the future zombie apocalypse's and jeff bezose's at the helm of it" i don't know.
But i know that having constant fear to have a "safe" life is not a good way of living, and maybe have look at you...your fear of schools shooting's...that would never come to my mind (for example in Switzerland...with full automatic military riffles in nearly every 20-35yo men closet).
It's the Culture (Dog eat Dog?), Media and Mind plus the politicians and the "military complex" because they LOVE IT!
[1] The US is between Ecuador and Malaysia year 2020 so without real Corona impact:
So you agree we should stop people from having free and easy access to guns?
Because I'm all about the freedom to send my children to school without worrying they're going to get shot.
Your children already are covered by laws against murder. Banning guns may decrease the rate of school shootings, but it won't guarantee they cease. You'll never live in a world worry-free of gun violence, especially now that anyone can 3d print them at home.
You can't then say "aha but the UK has more knife crime", because again, per capita, the UK has a tiny fraction as much knife crime as the US.
people have wanted to take our guns for a long time and this is just the latest cause to hang it on. ronald reagan tried it with racism. roosevelt and company tried it with mob violence. this is just the latest excuse.